Lost television broadcast
[2] Wiping and junking are colloquial terms for actions taken by radio and television production and broadcasting companies to erase, reuse, or destroy old audiotapes, videotapes, and kines (telerecordings).
Although Australia introduced television later (1956) than other nations like the United States, the use of videotape did not become widespread in the Australian industry until the early 1960's, so only a small number of episodes from the earliest period have survived.
Subsequently, the collector occasionally rented some of the films out to schools for a small fee, but the daughter of one of the actors involved (Owen Weingott) recognized her father from a Shakespeare production and told him about it.
Another factor, common to all countries, was that before domestic video technology was introduced in the 1970's, there was generally no economic motive for Australian television to make or keep recordings of most TV shows, except in the case of pre-produced mainstream documentaries, comedies or drama programs that could be sold to other stations in Australia or to broadcasters overseas (e.g., Skippy the Bush Kangaroo).
The majority of ABC-TV's mainstream original content (including comedy, drama, variety, news, and current affairs) was produced in-house; consequently, these programs all suffered considerable losses due to the corporation's policy of reusing videotape – a practice further exacerbated by budget cuts in the 1970's.
Crawford is now unique in Australian TV history because it still owns and markets a comprehensive archive of all its significant productions from the 1960's and beyond, including Homicide, Division 4, Matlock Police and The Sullivans.
[12][13] Record also lost much footage from the 1960's due to wiping, fires, and deterioration; most of the MPB music festivals no longer exist, and the sitcom Família Trapo (pt) has only one surviving episode, featuring the late Pelé.
(see § United Kingdom, below) Yugoslav Radio Television (JRT) practiced wiping until the 1970's when it gained access to newer and cheaper methods of recording, which allowed it to regularly archive programming.
When the industry finally realized in the early 1990's that transfer to digital video was imminent, the equipment needed to play back the old spools was no longer in working condition and replacement parts were almost non-existent.
Videotape was not initially thought to be a permanent archivable medium – its high cost and the potential reuse of the tapes led to the transfer of programme material to film, via telerecording, whenever sales of overseas screening rights were possible or preservation deemed worthwhile.
Some examples of programs recovered for the archives are Doctor Who, Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part, Dad's Army, Letter from America,[56] The Likely Lads, and Play for Today.
Another relatively recent ITV show for which archival copies are unavailable is the international co-production Fraggle Rock (1983), which featured host segments recorded in Britain, France, and Germany.
[citation needed] Two Series 1 episodes of The Avengers (an ABC Weekend TV production) which were thought to be missing were recovered from the UCLA Film & Television Archive in the United States.
It emerged in September 2010 that more than 60 recordings of BBC and ITV drama productions originally sent for broadcast in the United States by the PBS station WNET (which serves New York City and New Jersey) had been found at the Library of Congress.
Off-air home audio recordings of television programs have also been recovered, at least preserving the soundtracks to otherwise missing shows, and some of these (particularly from Doctor Who) have been released on CD by the BBC following restoration and the addition of narration to describe purely visual elements.
One example of an early home video recording being the only surviving footage of an event is a clip of John Lennon visiting the announcers' booth during a 1974 Monday Night Football broadcast.
The success of cable television networks devoted to reruns of genres perceived as being of low value and thus discarded eventually suggested this was false, as the large number of episodes required for a daily program made even a short-run game show a candidate for syndication.
One hosting sequence from that era, one Eddie Albert made for the 1965 CBS telecast of The Nutcracker, starring Edward Villella, Patricia McBride, and Melissa Hayden, was included on the DVD release of the program and has survived.
[citation needed] The joint Japanese and English masters for the original 1960's version of Tetsuwan Atom/Astro Boy were destroyed in 1975 by NBC after the syndication of the series ended and Tezuka Productions, which was undergoing bankruptcy at the time refused them for lack of funds to receive them.
Guests included William Safire, then a campaign official for presidential candidate Richard Nixon, and the five members of the San Francisco-based rock group Big Brother and the Holding Company.
Eleven months later, when the band’s singer Janis Joplin was publicized as a solo artist, she became Cavett’s guest on his new prime-time series, and he made sure that video was preserved, including color moving images.
Many between 1941 and 1980 had such short runs (some measured in a span of weeks or even days) that networks felt it unnecessary to retain them; recycling the tapes would be more profitable and less of an effort than attempting to sell the series in reruns, especially in an era before cable television.
[81] The first daytime version of Wheel of Fortune (NBC, 1975–1989) is nearly destroyed through at least 1979, with a King World representative stating in August 2006 that creator Merv Griffin's production company continued reusing tapes into 1985.
NBC neglected to preserve daily editions of the live two-hour morning program Today until the late 1970's; as a result, only scattered kines and video segments chronicle the first quarter-century of the show's news coverage.
Exceptions are his coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and the November 1963 events in Dallas, Texas: the JFK assassination, the shootings of police officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Oswald, and all three funerals, as well as his introduction of the Beatles and his criticism of the Vietnam War.
When her sudden death in a car accident, three weeks after the live telecast, made people curious about her appearance in the segment, it was discovered that an employee of an unknown NBC-affiliated station had saved it without knowing its value.
The original slow-scan television footage of the first human moon landing in 1969, believed to be of significantly higher quality than the standards-converted version broadcast on TV, is missing from NASA's archives.
Agnes Nixon initially produced her series One Life to Live and All My Children through her own production company, Creative Horizons, Inc., and kept a complete archive of monochrome kine films until ABC bought them from her in 1975.
Super Bowl II was aired exclusively by CBS and was long believed to have been erased, but it was later found that the entire telecast fully exists and rests in the vaults of NFL Films.
Very little broadcast-quality footage survives; fragments of the World Bowl and playoffs have been saved, as have a few regular season games, including the league's inaugural national telecast (which as of 2000 existed only on a fourth-generation copy of a VHS tape).
