VHS is Fifty

Part Two: ‘I’ve Got the Knobs on My Side’.

By the time our household acquired its first video recorder, I already owned a couple of VHS tapes, onto which a fellow enthusiast had copied rare recordings of Thunderbirds episodes. The quality was somewhat lacking, the tapes having been copied from three-year-old recordings on the U-Matic format, but that hardly mattered: for the first time ever, I had taken control of the television set. 

The very first off-air recording I made myself was an episode of Steptoe and Son, shown on Friday 14 November on BBC2. Divided We Stand was classic Steptoe – it’s the episode where Harold divides up the Steptoe residence into ‘two self contained apartments’. Who can forget the moment where the pair argue over the television set? Harold: ‘I have the law of contract on my side’. Albert: ‘I’ve got the knobs on my side’. Having taped the episode at 9pm, I played it again two hours later for the benefit of my brother, who had been out earlier. Nobody used the expression back then, but we’d just experienced the phenomenon of ‘time shifting’. Like Albert Steptoe, we now, metaphorically, had ‘the knobs on our side’.

What I most looked forward to with VHS was being able to record vintage series from the 1960s, most notably anything from the ITC stable and all the Gerry Anderson titles. Unfortunately, ITV’s repeat rights to the ITC shows had come to an end, and would not be renewed for another four years. Gerry Anderson’s puppet adventures weren’t subject to the same restrictions, but none of them was currently being repeated. Now that I had the means to capture them on tape, there weren’t any of those old shows out there to record…

It was, therefore, bitterly ironic that, on Saturday 15 November, a mere three days after I’d taken delivery of the VHS machine, our local ITV station chose to show an episode of Stingray – unscheduled! The episode had been pulled off the shelf at ATV in Birmingham as a partial replacement for that morning’s edition of Tiswas, which had been affected by industrial action. But in the end, VHS came to the rescue, as I learned from a fellow collector that a mutual friend had managed to record the unscheduled episode.

Press ad for the Ferguson Videostar and portable camcorder, circa 1979

One thing I was determined not to do was to record every episode of every series I watched; although I decided it was fair enough to retain odd examples of individual series. On Sunday 16 November, I taped that night’s episode of Shoestring as it went out (the recording still exists), and a month later, at the request of a friend, I set the timer to record the Christmas episode, accidentally recording most of the BBC’s Christmas 1980 trailer at the same time. Such serendipitous recordings are now of greater value than the programmes themselves: YouTube is full of vintage ‘continuity’ caught on old video tapes.

I was soon amassing VHS tapes at a prodigious rate, filling them with Laurel and Hardy shorts (being shown regularly on BBC2), odd episodes of Bilko, and any random repeats of vintage sitcoms that happened to turn up. Finally, in late summer of 1981, came a repeat run of Thunderbirds, which began broadcasting in the Midlands area on Sunday 30 August at 1.00pm. This was the first of a run of Gerry Anderson repeats that would extend over the next few years, affording the opportunity for fans with VCRs to finally own their own copies of the series.

In the summer of 1982, as an alternative to the ongoing World Cup coverage, ITV dusted off a handful of classic old series, including several from the ITC stable, affording my first ever opportunity to commit episodes to tape. On Saturday 26 June, The Persuaders! episode Greensleeves was shown in a prime time slot of 7.10pm. Sunday saw the first ever colour episode of The Saint, The Queen’s Ransom; then finally, on Friday 2 July, at 11.55pm came The Prisoner, represented by the atypical episode The Girl Who Was Death. The episodes were all shown with their original 1960s end of part captions. Alongside all these, viewers were also treated (if that’s the right word) to episodes of venerable sitcoms including On the Buses, Doctor in Charge and Oh No, It’s Selwyn Froggitt.

By now, my collection of VHS tapes had reached one hundred and was still climbing, meaning that I’d spent close on a thousand pounds on tapes in the space of two years (equivalent to over £4,000 at 2026 prices). Still more repeats were on the way, which would put a severe dent in my wallet over the coming years. In 1983, the Prisoner Appreciation Society Six of One was finally rewarded with a repeat run of all seventeen episodes on Channel 4, the first time the series had been nationally networked in the UK. 

The following year, ITV began a repeat run of The Champions, broadcasting the episodes at lunchtimes, which is where the VHS machine really came into its own. Further ITC repeats followed, with The Baron, Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) and Man in a Suitcase occupying the same timeslot over the coming years. Keeping copies of all these was costing me a lot in VHS tapes, not to mention storage space. In addition to these titles, I was also recording Star Trek (making its final appearance in the ‘BBC edits’ that had been in use since 1969) and The Avengers, which had been broadcasting on Channel 4 since its launch in November 1982. The dearth of vintage programming had turned into a deluge.

One might well ask why I kept all those recordings when surely it was enough to simply watch an episode and tape over it with next week’s? That was, of course, the logical thing to do, but I was by no means certain that any of those old programmes would be broadcast again. My earlier resolve to retain just 'representative episodes' went out of the window. As a collector, it was nice to have one’s own copies of such series available to watch again at any time, so I hung onto them. Only when DVD began to render those old copies obsolete did I begin, slowly, to discard the tapes, a process which sped up considerably when I realised that many of them were beginning to succumb to mould, after being stored in unsuitable environments. As it turned out, none of those old ITC recordings would prove to be of anything more than academic interest in the future.

The reign of VHS lasted just over a quarter of a century, and the format’s death knell was sounded by the arrival, in the late 90s, of DVD. Initially, one could not record on the new discs, so VHS was granted a temporary stay of execution. Betamax, meanwhile, had found its niche in professional video and audio studios, and with the capability of storing digital recordings, would stay around for a lot longer. As audiences grew accustomed to new formats, including mp4 files and the ability to watch material online, the market for VHS dwindled. A few manufacturers, including Panasonic, offered VCR/DVD combos which were an ideal way of archiving material from the older format onto the new – although the baffling range of different recordable discs was hard to navigate, and many such recordings have proved to be unreadable on later machines.

Japan’s Funai, selling its equipment under the Sanyo brand, was the last company to offer VHS playback capability, and finally ceased production of its machines in 2016, by which time the tapes themselves had become quite hard to find. At time of writing there is said to be a VHS revival under way, but it’s very much a niche market and is highly unlikely to gain the kind of popularity that the revived vinyl record format has enjoyed.

What is the legacy of VHS? Perhaps its most important achievement was in opening up a new market in home entertainment. Before the days of home video, if you wanted to watch a feature film at home, you had to own 16mm or 8mm film equipment, and the choice of titles was very limited. VHS showed content owners that there was a proven domestic market for movies and even vintage TV series like Doctor Who both as rental and ‘sell-through’ releases, so that by the time DVD arrived on the scene, there was a huge audience ready to make the upgrade. The early days of sell-through and rental VHS were an unregulated 'wild west', with no obligation on the industry to certify releases, meaning that even the most graphic content was on sale to anybody. The mass media hysteria that was whipped up regarding so called 'video nasties' ushered in the era of BBFC certification, adding a costly new level to the production process as every release had to be viewed and granted a certificate in the same way as any theatrical film release. No matter if the series you wanted to release was some harmless kids' cartoon – you still needed a BBFC certificate, and still do.

Another legacy from the VCR era is piracy. Today, the place to find illegal, unlicensed copies of television series and films is the internet, with YouTube users as the prime candidates for bootlegging. Back in the 1980s, one could get hold of pretty well everything from the latest Star Wars epic right down to obscure 1950s TV series that were still being shown on the other side of the world. Many of today's YouTube uploads have their origin in off-air video recordings – gifts to posterity courtesy of VHS and Betamax.

VHS and its rival formats may have gone the way of 8mm film, but during its era it was meat and drink to a generation of collectors, many of whom, like myself, had probably never dreamed that such a thing could ever exist. It paved the way for a whole industry exploiting content from film and television studios, and pointed towards a future where such material would be widely available and as easily accessible as turning on one's TV or computer.