Steptoes Son

Now that video recorders have been around for nearly 30 years, Just wondering what everyones earliest Tv recording is that they still have, a treasured video kept all theese years and not wiped over.

My earliest recording is from 1987 when I got my first recorder.

Wogan - with Paul McCartney.

batman

The first thing I can recall recording was C4s production of Accidental Death Of An Anarchist in 1984. I wish I still had it!

Bats.

I wish I had claws.

smudge

I have bits and bobs going back to 1985...

Smudge

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...

cletus awreetus

I used to have until recently some stuff taped in 1974

aphra

My first recorder, around 1976, was a part-shared Philips 1500 which recorded on square 'bricks' which you had to turn over after an hour for a second hour's recording. One hoped that the change-over would not happen at some desperately important part of the programme. I can still recall where the break came in DOUBLE INDEMNITY, one of my first film recordings. The bricks were enormously expensive, but one could buy second-hand ones for £18 each in Long Acre, London. Transfers from these bricks which I still have, include a report from Pebble Mill at One of the year's films (Christmas 1976) by Philip Jenkinson, a programme (c. 1978) with Joan Bakewell meeting Dame Edna, and a CAUGHT IN TIME programme (c.1977) about sea-planes and liners. For a long while my most treasured recording was the Stanley Baxter Christmas show in which he did a Jacques Cousteau spoof, a lavish Hollywood musical number, and a wonderful version of "Summertime", blacked-up, sitting on a balcony in New Orleans, shot from below showing him wearing a voluminous pair of directoire knickers. Happily this has now appeared on commercial DVD. I could not afford to do the whole show at the time and had to forgo taping Baxter's version of Phillip Marlow. The Philips 1500 was an infuriatingly unreliable machine and recordings were very hit or miss. After Philips discontinued the 1500 with its clunking piano keys and manually set clock, they brought out the 1600 (?, I think). It was totally incompatible with the 1500 and one was left high and dry with a pile of useless bricks. I have never bought another Philips product since.

I got a Panasonic VHS recorder around 1981 and one of my earliest recordings on that, which I still have, was Michael Blakemore's A PERSONAL HISTORY OF THE AUSTRALIAN SURF from Channel 4, a charming little autobiographical film. I have kept all my tapes in a pretty steady temperature of 69-70 deg F. and a very dry atmosphere. Some have got a little 'softer', but in the main they have survived very well.

julian_craster

I recall that pre-1985 VCRs were very expensive items (I paid £299 for a VHS model in 1985 (todays equivalent = ??) which was considered a bargain at the time !

Anybody who owned a VCR in the 1970s would have been pretty well off financially (I recall seeing an advert in SIGHT AND SOUND in about 1974 for one of the early PHILIPS models which used the square format tapes and it was about £800...then....).

UK television was so different at that time, so if anbody still has kept recordings from the 1970s and 1980s (especially from the early years of Channel Four) they are fortunate indeed !

As videotapes were relatively expensive in those days, there was a temptation to record over, rather than archive the material ......

orpheum

I also had the Phillips machine from 1973,my first recording being of a football match involving Newcastle.The tapes were less than perfect and tended to snag themselves up on the rewind.I believe the first 1 hour tapes were around 17 pounds.As the tapes only lasted an hour it meant that you could only record the last hour of a film.I bought my first VCR in 1978 and i have all the tapes from the first recording i made which is now causing me storage problems.

Welcome To Highbury The Home Of Football

penfold

My first recording was David Munrow's Early Musical Instruments series....carefully copied from Betamax to VHS to DVD....carefully keeping the tape too, of course; I've spent too much time around archivists....

Bit of a Bay Window, what??

aphra

Of course! I said in my earlier post that one turned the tape over mid-way, but the truth, I now remember, was that the tapes only lasted for an hour (there was no choice of speed) and if you wanted a whole film, you had to be there to put a fresh 'brick' in, costing £18. Yes, the machine cost about £800 or £900 originally, and that is why I 'shared' the original Philips 1500 with a friend. As you say, the tapes snagged endlessly as the spools were mounted one above the other.

I wonder whether any working models still exist. There used to be one on display at the Museum of the Moving Image.

The first Panasonic VHS machine I had around 1981 cost me closer to £400 than the £299 quoted by Julian Craster.

orpheum

I still have mine stored away but i do not know whether it still works.Compare it with the Toshiba 3 in 1 machine that i have just bought is like comparing the original mobile phones with the ones we have today!I have 207 hours of recording on the Hard Drive,so no need to bother about either tapes or discs.The other thing i just remembered about the phillips was that the recording heads only lasted about 150 hours so they had to be replaced at a cost of about 60 pounds!I recall the price of the machine at about 300 pounds,which was a lot of money in those days.Although i could barely afford it i was determined to have it.

Welcome To Highbury The Home Of Football

batman

I had use of a Betamax machine to record the Dario Fo play, it belonged to my flatmate at the time. I rented my own first video machine (VHS) from a long gone company called Fastview Video. It was about £6 a month including the TV. That would have been about 1986. They had stopped using Betamax machines at that point already.

Bats.

I wish I had claws.

Harbottle

Very interesting reading here! If memory serves the first recordings I made were from 1984 using a Sony Betamax machine. It was a massive device with no remote control of course, though you could buy an optional corded remote! I think I still have some Betamax tapes, but when the machine packed up no way of playing them as of course as VHS won the day!

Steptoes Son

Wow 1974, What's happenend to it?

Moor Larkin

I think the very first thing I video-taped was a football match. No idea what or when. I know that our first video-player had a 'repeat' feature, which meant I could make the replay replay five times in succession. The footie footage could then be looped so the guy scored a goal over and over again. It kept me amused for about ten minutes.

Probably video-taped dozens of kids progs to keep the sprog quiet. I recall Tom Thumb with Terry Thomas being watched a lot; also Bedknobs & Broomsticks. He-Man was regular too. The first progs I distinctly recall videoing for myself was when some channel or other kept showing the really old B&W Popeye cartoons. I had lots of them scattered all over the place at the ends of tapes. Sadly I lost track of them as the blank video generation exploded into incaluable piles of 240minute tapes, so have no idea what tapes they're on any more. I've noticed the inks I used on a lot of old labels have since vanished, apart from faint wispy traces!! I'd have to play them all again to figure out what's on them all now!

I had every episode of The Prisoner except one. When it was rebroadcast we were set to be on holiday, so I had to pre-set the video for the two weeks. One week worked okay but the second week the schedule got changed so I found something else on that part of the tape.... much to my disgust! I snagged a few Danger Man at the time too. I would guess this must have been the early Eighties because the small one who must be amused was born in 1980.

I've gathered that a lot of Popeye is censored now so I may have some valuable unexpurgated violence and sexism to enjoy in my old age!!

batman

We bought a DVD of old b/w Popeye cartoons and the violence wasn't any worse than in the later colour ones ..... however, they may have been censored due to some rather heavy-handed 'racial stereotyping'.

Bats.

I wish I had claws.