YOU HAD YOUR TIME, YOU HAD THE POWER [389]

On the afternoon of Saturday 8th August 2015, I sent nine rubbish bags to my local recycling centre in what was, at the time, a very lucid and easy decision.

The bags contained over two hundred and fifty Video Home System (VHS) cassettes of off-air TV recordings I had amassed from 1997, none of which were able to be recycled at the time due to the black plastic used in their composition. I had intended to digitise their contents for future use, but after realising the size of the task, and that all I had recorded on them, from obscure films that helped with my degree studies to whole series of the BBC comedy quiz "Never Mind the Buzzcocks", will continue to be available online or from archives.

My habits with recording programmes to VHS also meant you were unlikely to find anything special. I recorded in Long Play mode, reducing the maximum 240 lines of picture quality to 230, something that made very little difference when recording episodes of “The Simpsons”. I also eliminated continuity announcements and advert breaks as much as I could, their comparatively ephemeral nature now making recordings of them more highly prized. Safe in the knowledge that nothing was going to be lost from the loss of my collection, it was easy to let it go.

The big regret I still have was getting rid of the VHS recorder as well, perceiving there to be no more use for it. The random analogue glitches of an authentic VHS recording are more acceptable than the hazy VHS-like filter that can be applied to a digital video file to produce a degraded or nostalgic effect, and because making videos was not a consideration I had at the time, I saw no reason to hold the recorder back. Not readily having the ability to recreate that prized look with authentic equipment was an oversight on my part.

Changing rituals from “time-shifting” by recording programmes to watch later, to streaming everything at any time, makes it easy to forget that VHS was once the only way most people owned moving pictures, other video tape and disc formats notwithstanding. This was mainly the result of the Japanese government attempting to force manufacturers to adopt a single consumer tape format, and by JVC providing their VHS format as an open standard others could use without licence, something Sony was not willing to do with their technically superior Betamax format, its smaller cassette size also limiting their available recording time.

While we have not lost the right to make home video recordings for personal use, the ability to do so has mostly been lost. There is no open ability to download and keep programmes from streaming websites, and neither would they accept that, and while my television can record off-air video to a USB stick, it will only play back on that one television. Very occasionally, a TV station may also show a programme that has been out of circulation for decades – I am still waiting for the BBC to show John Berger’s original 1972 series “Ways of Seeing”, never issued on home video to my knowledge, instead of relying on the tie-in book.

Attaching some sort of video capture device to my television is starting to sound like good proposition, especially now the bulk of VHS cassette storage can be avoided.

THROW OUT THE HARDWARE [371]

Considering how often I have written here about the virtues of home media, and owning copies of films, music and TV and radio shows, I should have had much to say about the abrupt removal of shows and films from the HBO Max streaming service, plus the cancellation of upcoming projects. The reason I had not done so, apart from HBO Max not being available in the UK, was because I had already covered similar ground back in 2018 [link], when Netflix took down the 1978 film version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” - this led me to buy a Blu-ray copy, which has a higher-quality picture than the variable bit-rate of online streaming often delivers.

What has changed since then is that online streaming has slowly become the norm. HBO Max, Discovery+, Apple TV+, Paramount + and Peacock are among the services that launched since 2018, and Tesco and Sainsbury’s are among the supermarkets that have stopped selling DVDs.

Worse for me, films I have watched at the cinema have not yet become available on a physical home video release in the UK, namely Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch”, originally released in October 2021, and the Daniels’ “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, from April 2022. I have been so used to a 13-16 week between a cinema and home video release that I am seriously considering buying the German issue of “Everything Everywhere All At Once” over having to buy a download of it from Amazon Prime, which is subjected to digital rights management avoided by having a physical copy to use as you wish. Meanwhile, I could watch “The French Dispatch” by subscribing to Disney+, but I have already once chosen to buy a box set of a Disney TV show over subscribing to Disney+ - that show was “Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers”.

I have no answer to these problems, except that if physical home video is to become a niche pursuit, available for purchase through specialist stores or online, that having the ability to buy a physical release must become as easy as possible. The Warner Archive Collection has been a North American success I wish they would replicate in the UK, being an operation that produces DVD and Blu-ray copies of films on demand. If it means they need to have the money upfront before making a DVD of, for example, the 1931 pre-Hollywood Code release of “The Maltese Falcon”, it guarantees the availability of films for which there is less viability in producing a wider commercial release.

Likewise, it has been customary for other distributors to licence TV shows and films to release themselves. In the UK, I have Network Distributing Ltd to thank for releasing brilliant sitcoms like “Whoops Apocalypse” and “Hot Metal” on DVD, shows that broadcaster ITV, who own the rights, have not released themselves, like they did with “Inspector Morse” or “A Touch of Frost”. 

“The Strange World of Gurney Slade”, a surreal 1961 sitcom starring Anthony Newley that plays with reality in ways next seen in “The Prisoner”, was released by Network in 2011, which I bought on the back of knowing it was a major influence on David Bowie, before realising he could only have seen it at age 12 on its original airing, or on its single repeat run in 1963. TV used to be ephemeral until the advent of home video, but the shift to online streaming puts all the power back in the hands of rights holder to display or withdraw content as they wish – you can no longer grab a copy out of the air in the way that a VHS or DVD recorder provided to you.

If I return to this subject in another four years from now, I can only expect that the situation will have become worse – “home video” as a concept may be dead by then, and even The Criterion Collection may be online-only. Keep your DVDs.

HEY MR D.J., PUT A RECORD ON [51]

Was there ever a time when hearing music on the radio was considered rare? Whole services are built around non-stop music these days, but there was a time when playing out a recording of a song, the same sort you would buy to listen in your own time, was restricted. This wasn’t considered a bad thing at the time, until people’s tastes changed.

Put simply, there used to be a system in place named “needletime,” literally how long records could be played on the radio. This was a protective measure, as the two groups in charge of it were the Musicians’ Union, who wanted to preserve opportunities for their members to play live, and Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL), which represented record companies and music licensees.  PPL had been formed after a 1934 court case, when a coffee shop in Bristol was successfully sued for playing records for its customers, creating the notion recordings cannot be played in public without receiving the permission of the copyright holders.

In 1935, the BBC signed its first contract with the Musicians’ Union and PPL, giving them all of twenty hours per week of needletime to play with. This didn’t matter much, as the BBC were engaging bands to record sessions for them, and would start forming their own, with names like the BBC Concert Orchestra, the BBC Northern Dance Orchestra, and the BBC Midland Light Orchestra.

[The BBC Midland Light Orchestra]

However, by the 1960s, radio had been relegated to background listening by the advent of television, and younger audiences were listening to the pirate radio stations moored in the waters around the UK, and to Radio Luxembourg in the evening. These stations were outside any agreements that could be made, and could play as much music as they could get away with. 

Once the pirates were made illegal in 1967, the BBC was obliged to fill the gap with a legal version that used some of the DJs – Radio 1 – and needed the ability to play more records. How many extra hours did they get? Two per day – on Radio 1’s launch day in 1967, only 5 hours and 35 minutes of the day was not shared with the lighter sounding Radio 2, a situation that wouldn’t be broken for the next fifteen years, with only nudges in allowances in the meantime. No wonder Kenny Everett and John Peel complained, although Peel’s famous sessions helped to bridge the gap, but when people were able to listen to their favourite artists freely before, hearing them try to sound the same live or, even worse, have a cover band do a close approximation of it, wasn’t quite going to cut it anymore.

[Kenny Everett]

However, there were ways to get around the rules, if you were prepared to make the effort. Record review programmes, or shows talking about new releases, were exempt from needletime, so long as they mentioned the catalogue number you needed to order your own copy; foreign records were exempt, so coming back from a holiday to the Netherlands with compilations of hits heard at home was very helpful; and, if you really wanted, you can license songs directly from the record company, like the BBC did with Motown and other labels, make your own records, for personal use only, and play them as much as you wanted.

In 1988, what had become a game finally ended, and radio stations now pay for music by the minute, or song, or by a percentage of their revenue. Music is too personal to put restrictions around it, and the situation now in place means that, in the absence of live music, bands will continue to get paid for their work – until MP3s and streaming started cutting that down.

[Reverse of Blondie album made and used internally by the BBC]