Playing VHS With Death...

In 1980, the first domestic video recorder arrived in our household. It was one of the early, top-loading models with huge metal switches and no remote control, provided by our local branch of Radio Rentals. I was not earning a living at this point, but I funded the monthly rental payments (scandalously, you may think, from my student grant). After all, it was I who would be making the most use of this new toy, and had I needed to justify it to myself, I could have argued that it would provide a handy research tool for my Communication Studies degree. The degree itself was a worthless endeavour, curated by bored lecturers across a range of barely-related disciplines, but it did touch on textual analysis of television programmes (principally, and inexplicably, Nationwide), in which capacity the ability to keep copies of said programmes, and endlessly rewind and replay content was, of course, invaluable.

I think the first thing I recorded was either a Laurel & Hardy film or an episode of Steptoe & Son. So much for those academic credentials…

In those early days – this was the latter part of 1980 – blank video tapes did not come cheap. A three-hour E-180 for under a tenner was considered something of a bargain, with £12 or more being the typical going rate. Clearly, there could be no prospect of compiling an archive of taped programmes. I decided that I would keep ‘selected examples’ of certain series (for example, the current run of the BBC’s Shoestring), but complete series were out of the question. This didn’t stop me from taping (and keeping) every episode of Steptoe and Son that the BBC repeated during a brief run that autumn.

The policy had gone out of the window by the time Thunderbirds returned the following year, and I already had getting on for a hundred tapes of recorded material, all of which I intended to keep for future reference. The VHS machine was, of course, used for the practical purpose of recording programmes that I was unable to watch on transmission, the idea being to catch up with them during the next few days. But days all too easily turned into months… and, in their turn, years. I still have VHS recordings that I have yet to catch up with – in some cases, dating back to the 1980s. It’s rare for me to actually pull out and watch a VHS tape these days, but on an evening last week, that’s exactly what I did.

In July 1993, BBC2 offered a late-night screening of Ingmar Bergman’s iconic classic The Seventh Seal. I was interested to see it, having recently discovered Scott Walker’s song of the same name, the lyrics of which are a loose reading of the plot – a knight returns from the crusades, discovers his homeland ravaged by plague, and plays chess with the hooded figure of death in the hope of winning salvation. Trouble is, this black and white classic had been tucked away in the late-night graveyard in which such items could once be found: the Sgt Bilko Hour, if you will (Bilkos being a staple of the round-midnight BBC schedules during this era). With a start time of five past midnight and an end time of God knows what unearthly hour, the obvious solution was to record it on the timer. In fact, what I actually did was to start the recording manually, and set the machine to turn itself off two hours later – a facility that certain VHS recorders had evolved by this time.

At the end of the recording, a complete 'end-of-programmes-for-tonight' piece of continuity is preserved, quite basic in presentation, comprising the BBC2 clock on a shaded background. Yet ironically, this continuity is now of considerably greater interest than the recording of the film itself (an old, rather worn print that the BBC had owned since 1967). More such items follow on the tape, which was next put to use on February 23^rd, 1994, to record an episode from the documentary series The Underworld, a look at London’s gangland of the 50s and 60s. Thus is preserved the national weather forecast, presented by Suzanne Charlton (daughter of Bobby), which showed a band of snow across the midlands and the north… no mention at all of plague...

The tape probably hadn’t been played since 1994, but last week, having listened again to Scott Walker’s fourth solo album (which begins with the song The Seventh Seal), I decided it was time at last to expose myself to Bergman’s classic. It is, of course, available on blu-ray and has no doubt been restored to the standard one might expect of a movie once hailed as one of the greatest achievements in cinema. But why waste time and money, when there was a VHS copy awaiting me in the garage? 

Seeing The Seventh Seal for the first time was an interesting experience in itself. Such a film comes carrying a huge portmanteau of expectation… it's a classic, iconic imagery, masterpiece, etc. Most of this hyperbole stems from a few breathless reviews by American critics around the time of the film's release in 1957, and not even Bergman himself considered it his best work. In fact, the whole enterprise has very much the appearance of those old Richard Green Robin Hood capers, crossed with scenes that recall nothing less than Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The history is all over the place, with crusaders, witch-trials and medieval peasants sharing the same time and place. The famous chess-game-with-death motif is probably the film's best-known element, much parodied by the likes of Bill and Ted and, of course, Monty Python. Having finally watched it, I can kind of understand why it took so long for me to get around to it – you have to be in the mood for a film like this, even though it is nowhere near as dark and gothic as its reputation suggests. But The Seventh Seal's meditations on mortality seemed somehow fitting. When I taped the film in 1993, I can hardly have imagined it would take nearly 24 years before I got round to watching it. That’s the same amount of time as had elapsed between Scott Walker’s song and the BBC2 broadcast. Or, to look at it from the other direction, another 24 years on from today will make me eighty... assuming death doesn’t checkmate me before then.

Collections are a constant reminder of mortality. Videotapes and photographs, with their snapshots of moments in time, even more so. For any collector, the constant nagging question is ‘when will I ever find time to look at/watch/read all this stuff again?’ I’m well aware that there is insufficient time left for me to revist every single one of the VHS recordings I kept for ‘posterity’, unless I committed to doing that and nothing else for the forseeable future. Of course, I know that's not going to happen. What of the books, DVDs and LPs? What of actually having a life outside of being a curator of old recordings?

Logic dictates that I should ditch those old tapes and live for the moment, but I know I’ll hang onto them, just in case, as happened last week, I feel the need to unearth an item from thirty years ago. It may have taken almost a quarter century for me to get round to The Seventh Seal, but I have older recordings as yet unviewed. I may never get to see them.

 I am, indeed, playing VHS with death…