Background
Before the days of “It’ll be Alright on the Night” and other clip shows of miss takes and mistakes, VT collected together the faux-pass and slips and made up a Christmas entertainment tape. Eventually the Christmas VT tapes became a production in their own right, so to speak …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLGm4Mfs6PQhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhtcKViGI3g
Pat Heigham
Is there a truth in the story I heard that the Christmas tapes got stamped on by authority, because they ended up as a filler to a porn video?
I believe they only came back, when Bill Cotton Jnr said, "Where’s my Christmas tape?"
The early versions were the outtakes – very amusing – and a similar event used to occur at ATV Birmingham, when a reel was run in the local pub, off 16mm. I stayed an extra night, on a week’s booking, at my expense, to be part of the celebrations!
VT was to be complimented on the expansion to filming their own input. And getting the artistes to play along!The input from all the remote film crews (“Try a taste of VT Tea!” – a spoof on an existing commercial is a case in point – let’s have a bit of fun!)
Jeff Booth
“White Powder Christmas” (WPC) contains the Anne/Coleman incident. I’m not aware of any tapes pre-WPC.
We (VT) had to rename them from ‘Christmas’ to ‘Training’ tapes to put management off the scent. The reason they were banned by the BBC was because although the ‘talent’ were happy for them to be used for ‘internal use only’, when some bright spark started selling VHSs of them on Tottenham Court Road, the talent got miffed and complained.
Other titles were:
Kevin’s new job
Man in a Raincoat
Revenge from outer Space
“White Powder Christmas”
Jeff Booth
Apart from the BBC’s VERA, the first type of VTR was a 2" (Quadruplex) format. There were 4 video heads on a drum which rotated across the tape, recording the video signal in stripes (hence the banding you see on old recordings).
Some tape manufacturers used a binder (the ‘glue’ that fixes the magnetic oxide to the tape) which, over time, absorbed moisture which caused a chemical change in the binder.
This presented itself as a white powder coating over the oxide which deposited itself on the mechanical surfaces of the machine causing the heads to clog (loss of video).
“Good King Memorex”
Dick Greening
Just a small bit of info – I shot the “Pans People” section in “Good King Memorex” down in VT.
Then within a few days was doing a camera (not sure which one) on TOTP when Suzi Quatro did the Sports PA section.
With the blessing of TOTP she did it in the dress run from idiot cards held up by someone from VT – 1 take!
Bernard Newnham
Grant Watkins made both “White Powder Christmas” (WPC) and “Good King Memorex” (GKM). He moved to New York and one night died during an editing session
Ian Norman
Following the Christmas tapes, Grant Watkins put together a series of clips of Pans People, Legs and Co. and his favourite comedy clips into a 90 minute tape to be played on the BBC stand at the Broadcast convention in Brighton that year (about 1981 I think).
Almost all the material had been transmitted, apart from a few celebrities praising his editing, saying things like "Grant Watkins is wonderful”.
It’s not a Christmas tape, but it does contain some interesting sketches, that have never been seen since.
I was given a copy for helping to transfer slides and photos of a VT skiing trip he turned into a video called “Another one bites the dust”. (Done one Sunday afternoon in Pres A).
