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...
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