Christmas tape

Last updated

Michael Crawford and Kenneth Kendall hosting White Powder Christmas, the unofficial BBC Christmas tape from 1978 White powder christmas.jpg
Michael Crawford and Kenneth Kendall hosting White Powder Christmas, the unofficial BBC Christmas tape from 1978

In relation to the television industry, Christmas tapes are unendorsed videotapes compiled by technical staff for their personal amusement and peers' enjoyment. The name originates from the 1950s, when the material was filmed at the staff's Christmas parties where impromptu sketches were carried out. As time progressed, other types of material (such as outtakes and deliberate misbehaviour) were included on the videos. [1] [2]

As videotape gradually overtook film as the dominant medium for television recording, the proliferation of Christmas tapes grew. Early Christmas tapes were plundered for outtake shows like LWT's It'll be Alright on the Night , presented by Denis Norden, which started life as an occasional treat in the schedules and eventually grew to become a genre in their own right. Copies of the tapes were shared over internal playout systems or networked playback, and some then leaked outside, appearing on the private collector's circuit, a phenomenon which led to an incident in 1978 when a mocked-up sequence featuring Princess Anne in that year's BBC Christmas tape, "White Powder Christmas", came to the attention of the Sunday People newspaper. Several references to the previous year's Christmas tape were made in the 1979 BBC Christmas tape, "Good King Memorex".

Some of the most notable examples of the Christmas tape genre were made in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before the digital television era, when VT engineers started recording errors and out-takes to disk – for some viewers who saw these, it was surprising to hear television stars making mistakes and swearing onscreen.

Since then greater control of production facilities along with the deregulation of ITV has all but killed off the Christmas tape phenomenon.

Some examples of the genre include the 1978 Christmas tape from staff at Thames Television which included an especially contrived innuendo-laden edition of the children's show Rainbow and a 1979 Christmas tape from employees of Yorkshire Television which included a send-up of the popular ITV quiz 3-2-1 , an adaptation of a popular television commercial of the time from the Italian car manufacturer Fiat and comments about YTV management following the strike which had put the network off the air a few months previously.

The BBC VT inhouse team made Christmas tapes yearly – the ones produced between 1977 and 1997 were commonly watched at Christmas parties. Due to distribution via GPO tower and UK playout, many were recorded off air and are now available. Many pioneering VT effects and now-common standards were trialled in these experimental outputs.

Christmas tapes were also produced by some television stations in Australia and the United States. [3]

Related Research Articles

<i>Till Death Us Do Part</i> British television sitcom (1965–1975)

Till Death Us Do Part is a British television sitcom that aired on BBC1 from 1965 to 1975. The show was first broadcast in 1965 as a Comedy Playhouse pilot, then as seven series between 1966 and 1975. In 1981, ITV continued the sitcom for six episodes, calling it Till Death.... The BBC produced a sequel from 1985 until 1992, In Sickness and in Health.

<i>Adam Adamant Lives!</i> British television series

Adam Adamant Lives! is a British adventure television series that ran from 1966 to 1967 on BBC 1, starring Gerald Harper in the title role. The series was created and produced by several alumni from Doctor Who. The titular character was an adventurer born in 1867, who had been revived from hibernation in 1966, thus offering a satirical look at life in the 1960s through the eyes of an Edwardian. In 2020, Big Finish Productions reimagined the series as an audio drama.

<i>Out of the Unknown</i> Television series

Out of the Unknown is a British television science fiction and horror anthology drama series, produced by the BBC and broadcast on BBC2 in four series between 1965 and 1971.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kinescope</span> Early recording process for live television

Kinescope, shortened to kine, also known as telerecording in Britain, is a recording of a television programme on motion picture film, directly through a lens focused on the screen of a video monitor. The process was pioneered during the 1940s for the preservation, re-broadcasting and sale of television programmes before the introduction of quadruplex videotape, which from 1956 eventually superseded the use of kinescopes for all of these purposes. Kinescopes were the only practical way to preserve live television broadcasts prior to videotape.

The Beatles' bootleg recordings are recordings of performances by the Beatles that have attained some level of public circulation without being available as a legal release. The term most often refers to audio recordings, but also includes video performances. Starting with vinyl releases in the 1970s, through CD issues in the late 1980s, and continuing with digital downloads starting in the mid 1990s, the Beatles have been, and continue to be, among the most bootlegged artists.

<i>All Gas and Gaiters</i> British television ecclesiastical sitcom

All Gas and Gaiters is a British television ecclesiastical sitcom which aired on BBC1 from 1966 to 1971. It was written by Pauline Devaney and Edwin Apps, a husband-and-wife team who used the pseudonym of John Wraith when writing the pilot. All Gas and Gaiters was also broadcast on BBC Radio from 1971 to 1972.

A blooper is a short clip from a film or video production, usually a deleted scene, containing a mistake made by a member of the cast or crew. It also refers to an error made during a live radio or TV broadcast or news report, usually in terms of misspoken words or technical errors. The term blooper was popularized in the 1950s and 1960s in a series of record albums produced by Kermit Schafer entitled Pardon My Blooper, in which the definition of a blooper is thus given by the record series' narrator: "Unintended indiscretions before microphone and camera."

An outtake is a portion of a work that is removed in the editing process and not included in the work's final, publicly released version. In the digital era, significant outtakes have been appended to CD and DVD reissues of many albums and films as bonus tracks or features, in film often, but not always, for the sake of humor. In terms of photos, an outtake may also mean the ones which are not released in the original set of photos.

<i>Doctor Who</i> missing episodes Episodes of Doctor Who that are currently lost

Several portions of the long-running British science-fiction television programme Doctor Who are no longer held by the BBC. Between 1967 and 1978, the BBC routinely deleted archive programmes for various practical reasons—lack of space, scarcity of materials, and a lack of rebroadcast rights. As a result, 97 of 253 episodes from the programme's first six years are currently missing, primarily from seasons 3, 4 and 5, leaving 26 serials incomplete. Many more were considered lost until recovered from various sources, mostly overseas broadcasters.

<i>Nationwide</i> (TV programme) British news and current affairs programme

Nationwide is a BBC current affairs television programme which ran from 9 September 1969 until 5 August 1983. Originally broadcast on BBC 1 from Tuesday to Thursday, and then each weekday from 1972, it followed the early evening news, and included the regional opt-out news programmes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Fincham</span> British television producer

Peter Arthur Fincham is a British television producer and executive. From 2008 until 2016, he was the Director of Television for the ITV network. He was also formerly the Controller of BBC One, the primary television channel of the British Broadcasting Corporation, until his resignation on 5 October 2007, following criticism over the handling of the A Year with the Queen debacle.

<i>Itll Be Alright on the Night</i> British TV series or programme

It'll be Alright on the Night is a British television bloopers programme broadcast on ITV and produced by ITV Studios. It was one of the first series created with the specific purpose of showing behind the scenes bloopers from film and TV.

The Dad's Army missing episodes are lost episodes of the British warfare sitcom programme Dad's Army, plus some short sketches. The programme ran for nine series between 31 July 1968 and 13 November 1977. Three out of six episodes from Series 2 and two of the four Christmas sketches are missing as at that time, the BBC routinely reused videotape as a cost saving measure.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">British television Apollo 11 coverage</span> British TV series or programme

British television coverage of the Apollo 11 mission, humanity's first to land on the Moon, lasted from 16 to 24 July 1969. All three UK television channels, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV, provided extensive coverage. Most of the footage covering the event from a British perspective has now been wiped or lost.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andy Harries</span> British producer (born 1954)

Andrew Harries is chief executive and co-founder of Left Bank Pictures, a UK based production company formed in 2007. In a career spanning four decades he has produced television dramas including The Royle Family,Cold Feet, the revivals of Prime Suspect and Cracker, as well as the BAFTA-winning television play The Deal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lost television broadcast</span> History of missing television material

Lost television broadcasts are mostly those early television programs which cannot be accounted for in studio archives usually because of deliberate destruction or neglect.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BBC Archives</span> British archive of the BBC

BBC Archives are collections documenting the BBC's broadcasting history, including copies of television and radio broadcasts, internal documents, photographs, online content, sheet music, commercially available music, BBC products, press cuttings, artifacts and historic equipment. The original contents of the collections are permanently retained but are in the process of being digitised. Some collections are being uploaded to the BBC Archives section of the BBC Online website for visitors to view. The archive is one of the largest broadcast archives in the world, with over 15 million items.

Blue Pear Records was a semi-fictitious record label based in Longwood, Florida, which is best known for re-issuing rare cast recordings of obscure Broadway and off-Broadway musicals in the mid-1980s. The lack of production credits and other helpful identifying information on the LP sleeves has generally led to the assumption that they are bootleg recordings.

Rhodesia Television (RTV) was a live-broadcast, television station operating in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as a private company. It was established on the 14th of November, 1960, first in Salisbury (now Harare), with transmissions in Bulawayo beginning seven months later. It was only the fourth TV service in Africa after Algeria, Nigeria and Egypt, and the first such service in southern Africa, since South Africa did not introduce television until 1976.

References

  1. Sweet, Matthew (23 December 2018). "When Judi turned the air blue and Hitler shot the weatherman: the story behind the BBC's X-rated blooper tapes". The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group Limited. Retrieved 17 May 2020.
  2. Lawson, Mark (2 July 2019). "Poopers and bloopers: the greatest TV fails". The Guardian. Guardian News & Media Limited. Retrieved 17 May 2020.
  3. Knox, David (24 July 2020). "Friday Flashback: Christmas blooper tape | TV Tonight". tvtonight.com.au/.