can you imagine a world without Monty Python?

[low_delta]

Terry Jones:

The show started in limited access in America, on PBS, and before that the tapes were very nearly wiped. Howard Dell, who was our video editor suddenly rang me up one day and said, "next month they're going to wipe the first series," because in those days it was BBC policy to wipe tapes, especially comedy and light entertainment. You'd keep opera and concert performances and ballet and things like that, cultural things, but light entertainment got wiped so they could re-use the tapes. So I organized with Howard to get the tapes illegally transferred onto the only home system at the time, which was Phillips VCR, a strange system where you had two tapes one above each other in a cassette. So we got a cassette player, which was the first one out on the market, and we had all the Python shows transferred onto these cassettes - fifteen or thirty minutes was the most you could get. There was a period of a few months when I thought, "that's going to be the only record of Python, these Philips cassettes sitting in my cellar." But then what happened was that Ron Devillier, who was in charge of the Public Broadcasting System in Dallas, Texas, had heard about the shows and approached BBC Enterprises. He said he'd like to see these "Flying Circus" shows and BBC Enterprises, according to Ron Devillier, told him, "No, no, we don't think you'd like them, they're not a circus, we don't think yod'd be interested really. " Ron insisted and he got all three series sent over and he spent a weekend watching the shows and became conviced that he had to put these on. But he had to get eleven other stations to show them so that he could actually afford to buy the shows. So he persuaded some other stations to take them on and they started putting these shows out and that's how it really took off in the States, it started in Dallas of all places. Once the BBC found they had a sale over there, they decided not to wipe the things, and so we survived by the skin of our teeth, fortunately.

Apparently, this happened in 1975

Comments

[azhreia.livejournal.com]

as weird as it seems to us with our seemingly unlimited amounts of storage these days, that sort of thing did sadly happen back in the 70s.

there was a show here in Aus that was ahead of its time, in a sort of surrealist Monty-Pythonesque way, that was called The Aunty Jack show. About a transvestite biker with a moustache and wearing a long dress and a single boxing glove (the eponymous Aunty Jack) and a cohort of equally odd supplementary characters.

The show was very popular, much to the ABC's (Australian equivalent of the BBC) bewilderment. A single-length recording of the theme song did insanely well on the Australian music chart, in spite of the fact that it wasn't/couldn't be played on many radio stations because Aunty Jack promised to "jump through ya speakers and rip ya bloody arms off".

The tapes of the series were all wiped. AFAIK, it doesn't exist in any format, anywhere. And that's a damn shame.

[banana.livejournal.com]

Wiping tapes was quite common at the time. You often see elderly actors and comedians reminiscing about some old show, then the voice over explaining that they can't show you a clip because the tapes were wiped. BBC shows were transferred to film for overseas sale, and occasionally someone finds a canister in their garden shed and it gets shown. Sadly some programmes were better in your memory than when you watch them again.