BBC Four Children's Night

[Inspector Sands]

As you suggest, it's nice to see these old shows again but the novelty does wear off quite quickly and for most people one or two episodes is more than enough. In some shows just the theme tune is enough. I know Pops is an exception, but that obviously has different things on it every week and it works as a piece of entertainment. Seeing Blue Peter talk about exhibitions you can't visit and competitions you can't enter is going to pall after a bit.

It used to be the case that Blue Peter was repeated on BBC Prime, but a few weeks after it went out here. They would cut out any references to things that weren't relevant any more and competitions, and I think they cut any music out too. Some episodes were just ditched and replaced by a standby as there was nothing left to broadcast

[Loydy]

As alluded to above, Biddy Baxter insisted on it, and I believe most episodes from 1964 onwards exist because of that insistence. Otherwise they'd have either not been recorded in the first place or fell into a wiping machine somewhere down the line. They might only be telerecordings, but something is better than nothing.

Yes, that's right - Richard Marson's Inside The Archive book details all the episodes of Blue Peter that still exist in the archive, which is the vast, vast majority from the mid-sixties. As you say, Biddy insisted they were kept so it's one of the most complete archives of any programme from the sixties and seventies. There are a couple still missing, Christopher Trace's last show is one of them, and there were a couple which fell foul to recording errors, but not many. In fact as Marson writes in his Blue Peter Diaries book, they did a feature in 2004 about restoring an episode from 1980 which only existed on VHS. Marson was fascinated by the whole thing, although he says that after rehearsals, Uncle Matt Baker turned him and said "This is f***ing boring, Rich."

That's also one of the reasons why Newsround is well-represented in the archives from the seventies, compared to other children's programmes, in that they left the tape running after Blue Peter. Although in 1977 it moved from after Blue Peter to before it, so it's less well-represented after that.

As mentioned on its Wiki page, Richard Marson did suggest a while ago on The Mausoleum Club that most of Swap Shop existed in the archives for a while, because the editor Rosemary Gill was previously on Blue Peter and was one of Biddy's proteges, so she also requested it, and they were there until the mid-90s until all the tapes were sold to Australian TV who were still using the format and had run out, and asked the Beeb if they had any they could reuse. However I have seen one episode of Swap Shop from 1980 when a couple of people write in to ask if they can see again something that happened the other week, and Noel says they can't because it wasn't recorded. So I dunno.

Of course UK Gold, as was, did a run of repeats from the mid-seventies in the mid-nineties (of course, the equivalent of repeating shows with Konnie, Simon, Matt and Liz now), I remember someone writing into the Radio Times to say how much they enjoyed them, and especially how much they enjoyed UK Gold's disclaimer that the competitions had now closed.

As you suggest, it's nice to see these old shows again but the novelty does wear off quite quickly and for most people one or two episodes is more than enough. In some shows just the theme tune is enough. I know Pops is an exception, but that obviously has different things on it every week and it works as a piece of entertainment. Seeing Blue Peter talk about exhibitions you can't visit and competitions you can't enter is going to pall after a bit.

And that feature is on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbkzwCjGtW8

Very much enjoy that the tape Matt holds up at the end which he claims to be the new master tape for the restored episode (LCN F9536Y) brings up an episode that TXd on 21 February 2003 - if you pause the moment he holds it up you can just about make out that date on the case!

[iloveTV1]

The entire series of Bagpuss will come to iPlayer for a month following the four episodes airing on BBC4.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2021/bagpuss-iplayer

[IndigoTucker]

If I recall, the archive restoration actually didn’t actually use the process in the show, they just cleaned up the VHS giving better results than combining the two. So it as well as Matt Baker saying it was boring, it was also a fib.