Listening to the Television

Open reels and Mini-Albums: the pre-video era

Some of the Thunderbirds soundtrack EPs, advertised in the pages of TV Century 21, 1967

There are by now whole generations to whom the idea of not being able to watch their favourite film or TV series whenever the fancy takes them would be inconceivable, generations who grew up in the era of VHS and latterly, DVD (to say nothing of copyright-pirates YouTube – so we won’t). Imagine not being able to Google-search any given TV series or film and either buy it via Amazon or watch an illegally-uploaded copy on your phone. Did such a state of affairs ever exist? It most certainly did.

Home taping was once seen as the scourge of the music industry, with cassette copies depriving poor, starving artists like Elton John or the Rolling Stones of a few quid in royalties. There was rather less consternation when the means arrived to make private copies of anything shown on the television. One or two spurious stories circulated in the media, alerting the unwary to the fact that taping last night’s Terry and June was technically illegal, but only if you invited your friends round to watch it and charged them an admission fee (and you’d soon run out of friends if you did). Nobody paid any attention to such alarmist tosh, and in the fullness of time, the entertainment industry was forced to acknowledge that people would keep copies of their favourite shows and films and there was nothing that could be done to prevent it. In some cases, those copies would go on to take the place of official archives when the original tapes (or live transmissions) were not preserved for posterity...

By the mid 1980s, video cassette recorders were finding their way into the homes and hearts of the nation. Never again would we have to miss programmes that were shown during the daytime when we were at work, or at school. And for the first time since the invention of the medium, viewers could watch complete, colour copies of anything broadcast on the television, at a time to suit them. VHS (and its less successful rivals) provided liberation from the tyranny of the programme schedules, and a means to repeat your favourite shows ad infinitum (or until the tape wore out, which in the case of the Scotch brand’s advertising claims, would never happen anyway...)

But before this happy state of affairs was reached, what was the average viewer to do if they fancied reliving some treasured televisual moment? Those in possession of sufficient funds could equip themselves with cine projectors, in which format a small number of television titles were made available during the 1960s and 70s. The minefield of copyright clearance ensured that only a very few television series made it onto the home movie format of 8mm film, and of those that did, the majority were heavily edited, or available only in black and white, or as silent movies with subtitles... For the really well-off, domestic video tape recorders started to become available in the mid 1960s. One of the first such machines was the VKR 500, a device which used huge spools of tape (cassettes, even of the audio variety not yet having been invented). Two of these devices, remarkable for their time, were given away as prizes in a TVTimes competition in 1964, although their operation would most likely have been beyond the capabilities of the average reader.

For those not in possession of such equipment, there was still hope. It was only relatively recently that television had supplanted the radio in popularity, and shows like Hancock’s Half Hour had started life in sound. Many TV scripts were still essentially wordy, and could be followed easily enough without the accompanying images. Thus, some of television’s earliest hits began to find their way onto vinyl, in the format of LPs and EPs. Hancock episodes were available to buy on LP from as early as 1960 when two examples from the radio series made it onto disc. A further two stories from the television series followed in 1961, including the episode by which Hancock is still best remembered: The Blood Donor. The LP release almost certainly explains why this episode became so firmly embedded in the national psyche (it was far from being Hancock’s best performance, being marred by his obvious use of the teleprompter).

LPs like this Hancock example represented some of the first commercial releases of television soundtracks

Galton and Simpson’s Steptoe and Son soon followed Hancock onto the LP format, but aside from these two examples, there seems to have been little appetite amongst television producers to exploit series in this fashion, and aside from occasional releases of favourite TV themes, the ‘TV show on a record’ format remained for the most part an undeveloped idea. One of the least likely contenders for record release – given that its titular character was never heard to speak – was Harry Corbett's Sooty. Yet several Sooty records were released, in EP format, each presenting a couple of typical storylines that most likely originated as episodes of the BBC television series. Suffice to say, the experience of listening to Harry Corbett talking to an inaudible Sooty is somewhat surreal, and the one example I've heard consists mostly of Harry's reactions to the numerous indignities heaped upon him by the mischevious bear: ‘look at my suit, in rags and tatters!’ All of which was somewhat perverse, to say the least...

The most significant contribution to the development of TV soundtracks as commercially available home entertainment came from Gerry Anderson’s Century 21 merchandising division which, in 1965, launched a small series of so-called ‘Mini-Albums.’ These 7” EPs played at 33rpm, giving a running time across both sides equal to approximately a single side of a 12” record. ‘21 Minutes of Adventure’, promised the sleeves. With the running time of a typical Gerry Anderson episode coming in at around the 25-minute mark, it would have been a fairly simple task to edit the soundtracks of selected episodes into a format suitable for vinyl, but for these first releases, the company largely used all-new audio, with adventures written specially for the format, recorded by such of the original voice artistes as were available. A Trip to Marineville and Marina Speaks were brand-new stories, written to avoid the kind of visual excitement for which the series itself was known. Accordingly, they made for fairly dull listening. The companion EP, Into Action With Troy Tempest adopted what we’d nowaways call an interactive approach, with listeners invited, by the growly tones of Commander Shore, to supply their own imitations of Troy Tempest and Phones, in dialogue sequences lifted directly from the master tapes of various episode soundtracks. 

Listening to these records, one was struck almost at once by the subtle difference in quality of the characters’ voices: with less dynamic range and more compression applied to the television soundtracks, the voices acquired a certain sharp, snappy quality. On vinyl, a more nuanced performance could be appreciated, with smoother, more textured tones than could be perceived through the average TV speaker. The new format also allowed listeners a sneak preview of the brand new Anderson series, in the form of the EP Introducing Thunderbirds. I had this item bought for me almost as soon as it became available, although I’m fairly certain that this did not pre-date the series actually airing on television, and the characters and settings were already familiar by the time I got to hear it.

Listening to a record was, of course, never going to be a proper subsitute for actually watching an episode on television, but if you wanted a fix of Stingray or Thunderbirds at anything other than the scheduled date and time, then these EPs were for you. They didn’t quite capture the atmosphere of the original series, being largely devoid of Barry Gray’s music (probably on copyright grounds), but better efforts were on the way.

In the wake of Thunderbirds’ success on television, a raft of EP adaptations of episodes was launched, beginning in early 1967 and running well into the following year. In total, 17 Thunderbirds Mini-Albums were made available, all but two of them adapted from television soundtracks. The format for these releases involved a linking narration delivered by one of the series characters, to which end, voice artistes Shane Rimmer, Christine Finn, David Graham and Sylvia Anderson recorded specially-written material. These releases were far superior to the early Stingray EPs, and even the specially-written material such as the ‘Abominable Snowman’ story featured on the Lady Penelope EP was of superior quality than had been heard before.

When Captain Scarlet came to television in 1967, he was accompanied by five new mini-albums, released together in the autumn of the same year. With one exception, these new EPs abandoned the successful Thunderbirds formula of adapting episodes, and instead featured newly-written stories, performed by members of the original voice cast. The scripts, by Angus P. Allen and Richard O’Neill (neither of whom had contributed to the series) were of variable quality, with only Allen’s efforts coming close to the spirit of the television episodes. Richard O’Neill turned in two decidedly eccentric offerings of which the worst was Captain Scarlet Versus Captain Black, an endeavour which, with its guest cast of Cornish-accented characters, sounded like nothing less than Captain Scarlet meets the Pogles, and was woefully at odds with the dark, harder-edged vibe of the series. To make matters worse, a technical error at the pressing stage caused the audio to slow down progressively towards the end of the EP’s second side, an error which has been explained away (on the basis of pure conjecture rather than actual evidence) as an attempt to push the story’s short running time up to the required 21 minutes (even though none of the Captain Scarlet eps ever claimed to run to this length).

Magical Mysteron Tour? The notorious (and frankly awful) Captain Scarlet Versus Captain Black EP, released November 1967

I’d missed most of the Thunderbirds releases, and frankly, 17 records was more than the entire stock of vinyl in our household at that time, but my brother and myself were duly bought all five of the Captain Scarlet records. Apart from the first, Introducing Captain Scarlet, which employed soundtrack clips from the first episode, I didn’t think very much of them. There wasn’t enough music, sound effects were either missing or wrong, or hopelessly overdone, and the vocal performances sounded slightly different from what we’d come to expect on TV. A couple of them were so poor they seldom got played, and overall, they were a pretty poor substitute for the original programmes.

Outside of the commercial arena, viewers were keeping their own audio copies of programmes from both radio and television, a practise which seems to have been well-established by the end of the 1950s, and which would preserve many otherwise lost artefacts for posterity. We did it ourselves, on a few occasions, adopting the technique of placing a microphone in front of the television speaker (direct audio outputs not being a feature of the average television set until much later). In this manner, a partial Thunderbirds soundtrack was preserved from an original 1966 broadcast, as was a later episode of Captain Scarlet (complete with commercial break). During the 1970s, a Basil Brush Show (possibly now missing from the BBC archive) and an episode from the Dr. Who serial The Time Monster were recorded, along with numerous episodes of Stingray. As I got to know other like-minded individuals, I realised the extent to which this practise was going on. One TV fan played me some audio clips from Danger Man episodes he’d recorded off-air during afternoon repeats in the early 70s, which had been completely ruined by the addition of his own audio descriptions of the action. This seems to have been an exception, and others tended to follow our own example of recording only the actual programme content.

During the 1970s, a few more TV soundtracks were commercially issued as gramophone records, with BBC Enterprises realising the potential of favourites like Porridge and Fawlty Towers, both of which saw LP release. But it was a case of too little, too late, and the writing was on the wall for these TV-as-LP endeavours even before they hit the shops. A new generation of domestic video recording was about to dawn, with early contenders like the bulky Philips U-Matic format soon supplanted by the more compact VHS and Betamax machines.

Our household acquired its first VHS machine in 1980, and from that moment onwards, the whole idea of listening to television soundtracks would slowly fade into obscurity, reserved for only rarities like Fireball XL5 and Supercar, both of which, would in time be released commercially on video tape and DVD. Unlike those whose audio efforts ended up preserving lost episodes of Dr. Who and others, we had no such treasures in our own archive, unless you counted a few toy commercials that had aired during Captain Scarlet. 

Primitve though it seems in an era of downloads and DVD, the idea of being able to revisit your favourite TV series in sound only was surprisingly popular for a good many years, and even today, it remains the only way for fans to experience dozens of missing Dr. Who episodes. The Thunderbirds Mini-Albums, some of which seem to have had only limited release, have now become valuable collectors’ items. And those of us who grew up capturing the soundtracks of television series on reel-to-reel tape would come to form a lucrative market when mass commercial release of television series finally became a reality on VHS and DVD. Some, indeed, would go on to become exploiters of that marketplace. Yet on reflection, the idea of the obsessive fan crouched in his bedroom over a portable tape recorder listening to the soundtrack of some televisual rarity seems as quaint an image today as Nipper the dog captivated by the sound of His Master’s Voice...