Maurice

Films, documentaries and television series not available on DVD - and not repeated on TV - despite requests from enthusiasts:

1. Roads to Freedom (1970) BBC 13 episodes

2. Glittering Prizes (1976) BBC 6 episodes

3. Classic documentaries on BBC2:
"Pleasure Palace" (Arlington Baths Club, Glasgow)
"Lido" (Brockwell Park) 1996

4. BBC2 10x10 series including
"The Steam" (Docklands Vapour & Sauna Baths)
"Lido" (1994)

5. Ron Peck:
The Empire State (1987), Fighters (1992) and Real Money (1996)

6. The Life and Death of Philip Knight (1993)

7. Prospero's Books (1991) dir. Peter Greenaway

8. The Nature of the Beast (Channel 4, 1988)

9. Classic documentaries on Channel 4
which has neglected the need for updates:
Experiment of the Cross (1996) - inside boys' prison camp in Kazakhstan
Innocents Lost (1997) - marking Human Rights Day

10. Diana Dors Double-Bill:
Deep End (1971) and Steaming (1985)

11. Michael Williams Double-Bill:
Angel Voices (Screen Two 1989)
Quest of Eagles (Tyne Tees 1979, 7 x 30 mins episodes)

12. Death in Venice (Opera, 1972, with Peter Pears)
The Magic Flute (1975), dir. Ingmar Bergman,
is also overlooked by DVD and television.

lupinpooter

Ingmar Bergman's Magic Flute is definitely available on DVD - I think it's available on Criterion

ican

Glittering Prizes has just been given a Region 1 release.

dpgmel

Would love to see Roads to Freedom get a release.

cally

Ron Peck's 'Empire State' was a CH4 production so I doubt that'll emerge officially on DVD.

sippog

See here
My copy is on its way (I hope)

CaptainWaggett

Prospero's Books is available on video

brrrrrett

All 13 episodes of 'Roads to Freedom' is still safe and sound in the BBC archive. As for the other BBC programmes, anything post-1980 should be pretty safe.

AdrianTurner

Many thanks for that Ican. This has been at the top of my list for ages and I hadn't even bothered to search for it for months. I've got it on order today. Let's hope Raphael's Nothing But The Best gets a release as well. I have such great memories of that.

Donnyjohn

I have noted that Roads to Freedom is held by the BBC in their archives as stated by Brrrrrett.
Anyone know how I could get hold of a copy from them. Would love to see this again after so long. Fantastic series and haunting tune by Georgia Brown. Tune also not available.
Please help if you can.

AdrianTurner

I've now seen all The Glittering Prizes and it wasn't quite as I remembered it from 30 years ago. At the time, I thought it was utterly brilliant, provocative, amazingly well acted, huge production values, on a par with (but in a different way) to I, Claudius. Today, it seems so much more intellectually earnest than anything made today, and thus more pretentious. Scenes go for for ever and ever, which isn't the way they do things today, and Raphael's obsession with Jewish guilt, as expressed by his principal character and alter ego, Adam Morris, frankly gets a bit tiresome. There's a whole 80-minute episode in which Morris (Tom Conti) interviews a British Nazi/Mosley-like figure (Eric Portman) that vastly outstays its welcome, its arguments stretched to beyond endurance. Then Ep 4 is entirely dispensable, with characters we hardly know from previous episodes, set in a redbrick university with a nearby factory operating an apartheid regime. This episode infuriated me. As did the final Ep 6 which should have had some sort of reunion of the main characters but dwindled into nothingness. I ended up quite disappointed and angry with the thing. I also became impatient with Conti's mannersisms but admired Barbara Kellerman as his wife, adored Angela Down (her stillness is mesmerising) and pleased to see Nigel Havers having a ball as the only nancy boy in Cambridge.

julian_craster

There's a whole 80-minute episode in which Morris (Tom Conti) interviews a British Nazi/Mosley-like figure (Eric Portman) that vastly outstays its welcome,



Eric Portman as a British Nazi ?

Surely not......Eric Portman died in 1969, seven years before TGP was made !

penfold

T'was Eric Porter....

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

CaptainWaggett

Though coincidentally his last role was as a British Nazi (in Strange Report)

AdrianTurner

Sorry, silly mistake. I'd just booked a restaurant in Portman Square . . . !