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Voice from the past
"They tell me you haven't been co-operating."
"No? What's the matter? Did I bleed on the wrong bit of floor?"
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Wow, my Blake's 7 tapes are playing back amazingly. Here's their history. My brother taped them off-air in 1980/1981. He looked after them meticulously, hardly ever watched them, treated them with great care and love, etc. etc.
I inherited them sometime in the late 80s, whereupon I watched them constantly, did that special fannish thing of rewatching over and over the SPECIAL MOMENTS, dragged them up and down the country, let people have the key to my room at college so that they could watch them and rewatch them constantly (doing the SPECIAL MOMENTS thing), then got the tapes (twice), then the DVDs, and left them to languish for a decade in a box under the stairs near a wall which barely kept out the elements. Then I dragged them out today and gaily shoved them in VCR which turned out to have absolutely filthy heads.
And they have repaid me tenderly, with LOYALTY AND LOVE beyond all call of duty. They are like Avon to my Anna. There is a bit of drop-out on 'Rumours of Death' but WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? That too, is a sign of the great love there has long been between us. Bless you, my beloved tapes. You, at least, are not going in the bin. Or, if you do, we'll be going hand-in-hand. Just don't shoot me.
MY GOD, though, you should hear the BBC announcers in 1981! They are unbelievably posh! And see the special Paul Darrow CEEFAX face! I want it on an icon!
"No? What's the matter? Did I bleed on the wrong bit of floor?"
***
Wow, my Blake's 7 tapes are playing back amazingly. Here's their history. My brother taped them off-air in 1980/1981. He looked after them meticulously, hardly ever watched them, treated them with great care and love, etc. etc.
I inherited them sometime in the late 80s, whereupon I watched them constantly, did that special fannish thing of rewatching over and over the SPECIAL MOMENTS, dragged them up and down the country, let people have the key to my room at college so that they could watch them and rewatch them constantly (doing the SPECIAL MOMENTS thing), then got the tapes (twice), then the DVDs, and left them to languish for a decade in a box under the stairs near a wall which barely kept out the elements. Then I dragged them out today and gaily shoved them in VCR which turned out to have absolutely filthy heads.
And they have repaid me tenderly, with LOYALTY AND LOVE beyond all call of duty. They are like Avon to my Anna. There is a bit of drop-out on 'Rumours of Death' but WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? That too, is a sign of the great love there has long been between us. Bless you, my beloved tapes. You, at least, are not going in the bin. Or, if you do, we'll be going hand-in-hand. Just don't shoot me.
MY GOD, though, you should hear the BBC announcers in 1981! They are unbelievably posh! And see the special Paul Darrow CEEFAX face! I want it on an icon!
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"...I..have..failed..you...I..am...sorry...."
before succumbing to an accumulation of green slime.
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And now I have Abba's SOS going round my brain again, which is not suprising since I went to see Mamma Mia last night, but this post called up "The love you gave me, nothing less can save me, SOS" but I think it is what the tapes are saying to you, and you are feeling the love again and it SAVED them. As love does.
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These tapes are my Super Troopers.
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I watched Sarcophagus last night on a BBC 1st gen release, the tape has deteriorated somewhat. The second copy i bought to replace the first is awful too, though the rest are fine. But i'm not parting with my B7 tapes either - the cover art is wonderful.
I'm glad the tapes are good, enjoy the nostalgia. What you need now is a 1970's-vintage tv set to watch them on...
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I'm torn about what to do with mine; I mean, I have the DVDs now (except for Season 4) but my BBC videos, some of them have autographs on the covers! What should I do with them?
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I have a full set I bought for heaps of freight when I became a fan a few years ago and that was all there was. I'm keeping them even though I have the DVDs. Because, you know, they're my friends!
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I recall the VHS/Beta/V2000 debate happening. I can't remember now why dad settled on VHS, perhaps it was cheaper.
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I know what you mean about not getting rid of them. I have a few opera recordings that I taped from the library or off the radio, before later getting the same recordings on CD. But I wouldn't get rid of those tapes, with their diligently transcribed labels, their familiar pops and crackles, and, of course, their unfortunate side breaks.
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Actually, it was labels I was saddest about, throwing out all these videos: all that heat handwriting carefully archiving what was on them. Oh well, that's what YouTube's for.
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That was exactly it, wasn't it? I remember being worried that, in the future, I might no longer know some of the details, and I wanted to make sure that they weren't lost forever.
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We do still have a VCR which we take on holiday with blank tapes to record stuff from TV. It's so slow and 20C though compared to DVD and the TiVo.
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That the home video market hardly existed in 1978, and was embryonic in 1981, was partially to blame for discontinuities. But sometimes they couldn't get the same actors to play the parts. And of course the BBC's budgets were awfully low for an SF TV show. The later seasons are definitely better in that respect, with more narrative planning etc.
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I was thinking more of clothes and hairstyles changing between one episode and the next when only a few minutes had elapsed, and people's outfits changing when they teleport--and that was in S4!
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Anyway, that's part of the fun; we know it's not perfect, laugh at the mistakes and still love the series. :-)
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We rented one (far too expensive to buy): the first one was a top-loader with huge levers. The second one had a remote control (gasp!) which had to be connected to the machine by a long cable.
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I can't remember when that was though--sometime after you, I'd think. Electronic goods were restricted and very expensive here till the late 80s, and people would go overseas to buy. I think B7 was first shown here in the 80s too, though I can't remember if we recorded it.
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When I went to college (1990), I bought one of those combined TV and video units second-hand: it was unusual to have a telly, never mind a video (hence all those people borrowing my key to watch videos). Being a combo unit, you couldn't watch one channel and tape another, and being second-hand it would occasionally start chewing up tapes (you could save them if you listened for the tell-tale sounds and moved quickly enough). But problems aside it was worth having.
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Great tale, well told.
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