I have always watched television for as long as I can remember. From my childhood days of Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, Watch With Mother, Bill And Ben, Andy Pandy, The Clangers, Trumpton - I could go on - to what I watch now, it has always been a way of taking me away from real life: to be transported to some Alien planet or historical setting, participate in a contemporary murder investigation, be haunted by ghosts, or just to get the bad guys.
I just love the escapism of a well made play or series. So, when I was able, I started to buy or record off-air and keep television programmes. This is my story.
Before having a VCR, the only way to experience a programme when it was not on air was via the audio medium, such as BBC Records and Tapes' (mainly comedy) releases of things like The Two Ronnies, Morecombe And Wise, Not The Nine O Clock News and Monty Python.
There wasn't much in the way of audio drama at this time but there were a few Doctor Who audio releases: the Pescatons LP (Decca 1976), the Genesis Of The Daleks LP (BBC 1979) and the State Of Decay talking book (Pickwick 1981).
For off-air recording, the only option available to those without VCRs was to record soundtracks onto audio cassette tapes. This would consist of placing a microphone near the television's speaker, pressing record, staying very quiet and hoping that the parents would keep quiet too.
With regards to seeing vintage television re-broadcast, out of date repeats (i.e. programmes over two years old) were extremely rare on UK television and wouldn't become common until the early 90s.
However, for me, access to vintage television was about to change...
My very first VHS tape purchase was in 1984: the BBC Video release of Doctor Who Revenge Of The Cybermen (scan of my copy, left).
This came out at a time when, for the average Doctor Who fan, there were no other (legal) Doctor Who videos available, no websites, fandom updates were via a postal monthly newsletter and the only source of archive information was the then Doctor Who Monthly magazine.
There had been some out of date repeats - The Five Faces Of Doctor Who (1981) and Doctor Who And The Monsters (1982) - but these were, for us fans, major events and this was still before I could afford a Video Recorder as I was still at school.
BBC Video releases started in the early eighties, along with the increasing uptake in video players (VHS, Betamax and Laserdisc) but the releases were non-drama because no agreement had been made with the actors' union Equity. But, at last, there was a Doctor Who release in 1983.
Amazingly, the first version’s cover of Revenge Of The Cybermen featured the wrong style of Cyberman (see left) and at the massive price of £40 (around £100 in 2009 value*) was beyond most teenagers, like me, who were at college.
However, it was re-released in 1984, with the correct Cybermen on the cover, a smaller box and a cheaper price tag of £20 (2009 = £40*).
It was at this point I joined the video generation as I duly stomped into WHSmith in Kensington High Street and bought my copy. All I could do at that time was to look longingly at the cover because – and you've guessed it – I didn’t have a VCR. They were still expensive and a much wished-for item.
But at long last I scrimped and saved and eventually had enough money for a Fisher top loader VCR and brought it home. But wait; I couldn’t play my tape just yet. The Fisher was put in the family living room (I didn’t have my own colour television until 1986) and my Dad, who controlled the television viewing, always wanted to watch something else.
I didn't have to wait that long as late one Saturday night/early Sunday morning, my parents had gone to bed and I had the television and VCR all to myself. I placed an armchair directly in front of the television and I put in my Revenge Of The Cybermen video and pressed play.
Don’t forget that having a VCR was a huge novelty, but this was TV heaven; it really didn’t matter which story this would have been or that the episodes had been edited together to make one long film. As far as I was concerned it was one of Hinchliffe's classics and I could watch this when I wanted to. It was vintage Doctor Who that I owned.
From the moment the original BBC Video logo played at the beginning, to the moment that it played at the end I was enthraled. It was early Tom Baker, it was Sarah Jane, it was Harry Sullivan, it was a Hinchliffe, it was the Cybermen, it was mine to keep. It was wonderful!
Revenge Of The Cybermen was released on DVD in Summer 2010 following in the wake of many other Doctor Who DVD releases. It was packaged in a box-set with Silver Nemesis which gave the impression that Revenge wasn't considered a strong enough release on its own.
However, Revenge Of The Cybermen has always been a bit special for me; this was the first television programme in a now quite sizeable television video collection.
There is a lovely little extra on this DVD called "Cheques, Lies and Videotape" where Doctor Who fans of my generation give a similar account of the longing to see vintage Doctor Who in the days before commerical releases.
With access to so much vintage television these days, we are all so blasé about it now…
I didn't start recording much off air television at first and if I did, it would usually be recorded over by something else.
The very first off air recording that I made was from the first series of 'Allo 'Allo (which I now have on DVD). It was so strange to be able to watch a television programme other than at the time it was meant to be on.
Presently, I had enough money to buy a second commercial VHS: the BBC Video release of Shoestring from the (now moved) HMV shop in Oxford Street. Priced at £25 (2009 = £60*), this came in a large white thin plastic/cardboard case (as were all the early BBC releases) and featured the episodes "Private Ear" (the first of the series) and "Find The Lady" (the ninth episode).
Over the years, this would be the singularly most watched video tape that I had (still got it to this day: the picture above is the scan of my copy).
Sadly, on one playback the tape got caught in the VCR's mechanism but thankfully it was in-between the two episodes. I was able to replace the tape when I found a copy of the WHSmith early 90s re-release.
The BBC release was my most treasured VHS for nearly thirty-years as it wasn't until 2011 that a highly un-expected but longed-for DVD release finally appeared.
Honestly, I don't know what the first recording that I took off-air to keep was, but many of my tapes from those days have simply disappeared. Whether they were taped over (probably used for episodes of Doctor Who) or just lost, I can't recall. I know I lost some in a house move, but others disappeared before that.
The earliest surviving off-air tapes I own are four stories from Colin Baker's first series as Doctor Who: Attack Of The Cybermen, Mark Of The Rani, Timelash and Revelation Of The Daleks. I did have the whole series but, in subsequent years, re-used the tapes of any stories that I had purchased the commercial VHS release of.
I bought my VCR just in the nick of time as, back in those days, I used to have to work every other Saturday and without a VCR I would have missed half the episodes of my favourite programme. Thus, I diligently recorded Doctor Who every week - one story per tape - and once completed, would lovingly type up labels for the VHS tape and its box's spine using a Brother electronic typewriter. This practice continued right up until I stopped saving programmes onto VHS.
Before the 1985 series of Doctor Who, there were a few programmes that I recorded but subsequently taped over; one I remember was an episode of Space 1999 where I also (having an artistic slant in those days) made a wrap-around cover for the tape's box. I had got the idea from a Doctor Who fanzine and the idea was like a wrap around cover for a hardback book: the video cassette, when in the box, would hold the cover in place. This was pretty much an experiment, but I also made two for a friend who used to record Top Of The Pops and M.A.S.H. These video tapes and covers still survive!
Pictured (above) is my homemade Top Of The Pops cover from 1984; no home computers with design software in those days. This was done by hand using coloured pencils, Radio Times clippings, transfer letters, clear sticky plastic covering, a ruler and some imagination!
Over subsequent years, I recorded several series. However, looking back, not as many as I'd liked. Many programmes, from those times, never made it to a commercial release. But then blank VHS tapes weren't that cheap.
Moving to a new home, I began to record more and more television, but in many cases this would also include films and one US series of note, the first two series of The X-Files (films and US series don't feature in my collection at all now). The early to mid-90s was the time when I did most of my VHS captures.
The early nineties was also a time when out of date repeats started to appear on television more frequently (a run of A Ghost Story For Christmas, Hancock's Half Hour, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Louis Jordan as Dracula, to name four) plus the fact that the commercial releases of vintage television was stepping up a gear: Doomwatch, Adam Adamant, frequent Doctor Who releases, a complete run of Blake's Seven; expensive days indeed.
For some reason the late 90s became largely ignored by me (coinciding with another house move where some tapes were lost). Thinking back to those days, there didn't seem to be much that caught my imagination enough to want to keep it. Only the TV series Bugs and Crime Traveller used to get a regular VHS capture (but only so I didn't miss it as I still worked Saturdays!). Thankfully, DVD box-sets have appeared for both of theses series as I didn't keep the off-airs.
The only tapes that I purposefully recorded from this time that I still have are the 1997 drama Heat Of The Sun (three episodes) and BBC2's 1999 Doctor Who Night; both recorded in Long Play (oops!).
By 2000, my off-air to VHS collecting had almost ground to a halt. After buying my first DVD player in late-1999, I was buying pre-recorded DVDs rather than off-air capturing. Any off-air capturing I was doing was the record/watch/record-over variety. My first television DVD, like my first VHS, was another Doctor Who release: "The Five Doctors".
However, in March 2000 I bought what was eventually to restart my interest in my TV Archive: my first PC; a Parkard Bell Club 77 and after learning my way around it, started to convert many of my old audio cassette tapes and vinyl to CD. Subsequently (and coinciding with a PC upgrade), I started to look into doing a similar thing for my video tapes; in particular I wanted to be able to save my Shoestring tape that had been caught in the VCR's mechanism all those years before.
My first outing in to the Video conversion route was a Dazzle VCD Maker (pictured below); this item would convert video tape to Video CD compliant mpeg files. My earliest results could only be classed as fair efforts, but I didn't understand about things like bitrates and compression then, so much of my end product's picture quality left a lot to be desired. Over-compressed picture or not, the novelty in watching a VCD that I had created was quite good fun. Still, I didn't let it put me off and around this time I discovered sites like videohelp that had guides and free software to help me on my way.
The Dazzle VCD Maker wasn't particularly stable and would only work with Windows 98, so when I up-graded to XP, the Dazzle became redundant. However, through advice on the videohelp website, I decided to buy myself a Canopus ADVC-50 (see the Video Hardware Set-Up page). The results I got from the captures were infinitely better than with the Dazzle but the end product were still destined to VCD.
Rather like the days of my first video cassette covers, I experimented with CD labels. A few of my creations are shown below:
This was not something that I did for long for two reasons: Firstly, they were quite time consuming and costly to do. Secondly, and most importantly, while watching one of these VCDs, the paper label peeled itself off the VCD when the disc got warm in the DVD player. No damage was done to the player, thankfully, but no-more labels were made after that!
Presently, I got my first DVD burner and moved over from creating VCDs to creating DVDs and in many cases re-doing previously converted tapes because of the increased quality.
Now the collecting bug was well and truly back. Initially, I would record a programme to VHS and re-record it to my PC, but eventually I connected up a digital receiver to the Canopus and started to capture off air digital recordings straight to my PC.
For the next two years I would regularly capture off-air to my PC, the only downside being the amount of time that an encode (from PC captue to a DVD compliant file) would take (as well as the VHS conversions) as my PC, back then, was not as powerful as the one I have now. I also started to look on ebay at what VHS tapes were available and became unable to walk past an open Charity Shop without checking the video shelf. I have also plundered a couple of friends' off-air video tapes too. This approach has netted me some very nice additions to my collection.
I also invested in better equipment; namely searching for and finding the JVC HR-S7965 S-VHS video recorder, so that I could get better picture reproduction from my VHS tapes and upgrading to a more powerful PC.
Then the inevitable happened; in March 2005 I bought a DVD Recorder and my fate was sealed. My collection was still largely made up from converted [to DVD-/+R] commercially released VHS tapes but now, thanks to the DVD Recorder, I was adding off-air captures at a growing rate.
Only things of interest, of course, but then there are the commercially released DVDs on top of that...
2010 was the year that I started to purchase Television releases in my third format since my collection started in 1984: Blu-Ray.
This time, however, Doctor Who wasn't the first to be purchased in that format. That honour goes to Wallace And Gromit's A Matter Of Loaf And Death; although Doctor Who purchases weren't that far away.
I have the means to watch Blu-Ray and High-Definition broadcasts but as yet, not the ability to archive off-air in Hi-Def quality, although I have had some encouraging results with my PC/Nanostick TV Dongle.
I still use a DVD Recorder for my off-air captures (now on my third model) but my PC and laptop, using TV receiver Dongles, are able to capture off-air broadcasts too, especially the longer programmes. Although that hasn't been without issue.
That first DVD recorder, from 2005, is now used for any remaining VHS conversions. It was relegated to this task as it doesn't have a digital receiver.
I still keep my collection on DVD+/-Rs, and am begining to back them up to an external hard drive, but there are now so many different video types out there that one has to wonder if I am doing the right thing. Of course, it is all down to personal taste and having the means to watch them.
Recording off-air Hi-Def is my next goal and the PC, again, looks to be the most likely source.
Looking back, I now wished that I had recorded more, especially in those early years, but I suppose my tastes have changed from then to now and, as I previously mentioned, the price of blank tapes wasn't that cheap back then.
VHS tapes also took up a lot of shelf space. In comparison, my DVD-Rs sit very nicely in an a couple of Ikea CD storeage boxes. Having said that, it is nice that I have been there for the home recording revolution and look forward to the next level (when affordable).
Another reason for wishing that I had kept more of the off-air recordings from those early VHS years has been the non-availability of some of these programmes now. A drama broadcast today can quite likely receive a DVD release tomorrow but there are series from those early years that have never seen the light of day on DVD or Commercial VHS.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
* Inflation calculations have been done via The Bank Of England inflation calculator and 2009 figures have been rounded up to nearest £5.