The Tape Traders: The More Things Change....

Last week, I wrote an article about a hobby of mine called video tape trading and it can be found here. I was prompted to write about a US perspective of the subject matter in the 2010 documentary Cheques, Lies and Videotape found on the Doctor Who DVD Revenge of the Cybermen. I started this hobby in 1988 and the previous article only covered a few years. Now I finish this up by recounting the 1990s and how I was able to get some really incredible items with the people I met in the US and the UK. I apologize now if this article starts to sound smug or as if I am being a show-off. This is a hobby I enjoy and shows how much passion I have for BBC and other British television programs. Enjoy!

In the 1990s there was this thing called the Internet. Because I am one-minded I didn’t see this as way to socialize but as a way to get better quality copies of Doctor Who episodes. The episodic versions that Mike made for me back in the late 1980s and early 1990s were great but they were down a couple of tape generations down from the broadcast and I was always striving for better copies. To be honest, I am never happy. As a side note about Mike’s copies, I eventually got copies of all of his episodic stories. He was very kind to do this for me. They were originally taped for him in Pittsburgh. The station was WQEX. Before the episode of Doctor Who would air, an on-air personality would introduce us to the episode we were about to see. The announcers never knew what they were talking about and would often mispronounce names and words that were Doctor Who centric. One of the guys who would introduce the episodes was Joe Negri. He may be better known to some as Handyman Negri from the classic children’s program Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. WQEX was the studio this landmark children series originated from. It’s pretty cool!

Anyway through my time on that awesome service called America Online, I found someone in San Diego who recorded all the Jon Pertwee stories for me episodically off-air. I cannot tell you how big of a deal this was. It meant that someone was not making a copy for me from another tape; they were recording something off-air onto a tape which was directly sent to me. It was even cooler because the Pertwee syndication package they were running was the first one in the US to feature both Planet of the Daleks Episode 3 and Invasion of the Dinosaurs Part One (both in black & white). Previously, these episodes were poor quality multi-generational copies. In the early 1990s, my PBS station KTCA finally showed something episodically which were the Tom Baker episodes. This was a big chunk of episodes that I could get as off-air copies. Though there were just a couple of problems. First, even though they showed most of the Tom Baker episodes episodically, they skipped showing Season 17 this way so they could show them all as movie versions for a marathon and then showed all of Season 18 bar The Leisure Hive as movie versions. That was intolerable to say the least. Then there was my family who would be kind enough to make sure everything was taping properly. I think everyone who was seriously into recording any TV series fully understands what I am about to say. I remember specifically an issue with recording The Invasion of Time off of KTCA. KTCA decided to air all 6 episodes one Sunday afternoon. The problem was that the convention PolarisCon 2 was going on at that time with Peter Davison being the guest of honour. Anyway, tape one of my recording of The Invasion of Time had the first 20 minutes of Part One recorded at EP instead of SP which then suddenly switches to SP once my mom realized it was wrong  and then when it came time to switch the tape, I was missing all the opening title sequence for Part Four. I know I sound ungrateful but it’s these little quirks with the taping which makes me remember this time of my life so fondly. I remember actually at PolarisCon 2 sitting in the volunteer’s green room where we have that KTCA Doctor Who Marathon playing on a TV in there and in walks Peter Davison. He walks in the room looks at the TV to see Doctor Who playing and then looks at all of us with a look on his face of “Jesus, are you kidding me? Even in here you have to watch Doctor Who!” My friend across the room must have seen the same look because he yells across the room at Peter, “It’s actually on TV right now otherwise we wouldn’t be watching it in here!” He didn’t believe us. One sympathizes.

Through working on conventions and being a part of The Whoniversity while meeting people at other conventions across the country, I was able to meet “higher up” fans who had a nice collection and I was able to get some stuff from them. In 1991 or 1992 The Whoniversity was planning on doing another convention called Pseudo Con II. The year before we did a modest one called Pseudo Con where we brought in John Levene. That next year I travelled with some other folks to WhoosierCon in Indianapolis. All of the UNIT family was there minus Nicholas Courtney but there  I met Doctor Who “historian”  Eric Hoffman. He really wanted to be a guest at Pseudo Con II. We didn’t really have a place for him but he was adamant.  He knew I was very interested in tape trading. In tape trading circles he was known for having the off-air copy of The Dæmons. I got that and also The Tenth Planet from him at one point. The Tenth Planet came from Gerry Davis who was good friends with Eric and the quality was great. I think I wept. It was also said that Eric believed he had an off-air colour copy of The Mind of Evil at one point too but he had amassed so much stuff he wouldn’t be able to find it. It’s a moot point now anyway. The Tenth Planet was always the one story I would continually get from other traders as it was my barometer to see what their collection looked like. People laugh at me but The Tenth Planet is one of my favourite stories.

One of my favourite video stories goes back to Visions in 1993. This doesn’t benefit me at all but I still chuckle at it. It is the 30^th anniversary of Doctor Who with Visions being held in November. It was going to run in the UK over the weekend but JN-T brought with him a PAL VHS tape copy of Dimensions in Time. This included Part Two that had 2 different resolutions to the Part One cliffhanger. The big Ron one and I think the Mandy version. This was impressive because they included slates and they were directly from the master tape. It was going to be shown in the main ballroom and I worked as an AV guy in there over the weekend. This area we worked handled all the presentations in the room including if any videos were shown in that room at any time. They were charging $5 a head to let people in to see these episodes. The only reason JN-T even let the tape out of his sight was because we had a PAL VCR back there so we could show the episodes. What he didn’t know was that there were 2 PAL VCRs back there. So the person once known as Dave was checking through the episodes and playing them yet I noticed something interesting. While one VCR was playing, another one had a red record light on recording something else. I looked at Dave and said, “um….what are you recording?” He looked at me and said, “It’s about time you mind your own business!” Sadly, I did.

In 1996 I was particularly lucky when the TV Movie was being made. I was able to get my hands on a rough cut of the film back in early April of 1996. I remember showing highlights of it at a fan function giving people plenty of warning about what they are about to see and maybe they don’t want to watch it. I remember a few people walk outside so they wouldn’t be spoiled. But, I was watching the people who were shocked by what they saw. They were shocked by the footage of the 7^th Doctor being gunned down outside the TARDIS and his eventual death on the operating room table. It was fun to see their reaction and that I was able to provide a little snippet of this highly anticipated story to them. I think a lot more people had this rough cut than I thought (but not in MN) but I got incredibly lucky just prior to the TV Movie running on FOX. During this time I worked for a FOX affiliate (FOX 29) and by chance about 4 days prior to the TV Movie airing, someone in Master Control, the room where all broadcasts originate from, called me down to tell me that some satellite feed was coming through regarding Doctor Who. I thought it may have been more trailers like was sent over before. About 4 weeks before, we had a satellite feed come through which was the Electronic Press Kit and trailers for the film. We recorded them for me on VHS and included some stuff that didn’t appear on the DVD set. Never the less, we got a Beta SP tape and started to record the feed. It turned out to be the entire TV Movie uncut, commercial free with complete end credits. I got this days before the broadcast! I had in my hands a brand new Doctor Who in broadcast quality!  I remember going to a friend’s house and telling them my good fortune when someone else chimed in out of nowhere and offered to pay me $100 for a VHS copy of the film at that moment. I decided not to take up the offer.

Speaking of the TV Movie, when the original DVD of the film was being prepared for the BBC, I was able to use my contacts in the industry to get the original Beta SP tape that holds all of the TV Movie EPK material from the FOX network. I asked FOX if I could have the tape and they said yes as it was going to be thrown out within the year. I still have the tape with my contact’s business card taped to the case. I also have a full set of trailers taped from the FOX feed but these are on VHS. I had the Beta SP tapes with the TV Movie transferred to DVD and I still prefer it to the official release. It also has slates. What is my deal with slates anyway?

Slates, or in the UK known as VT clocks or VT countdown clocks, are the bits prior to an episode starting with a clock that counts down to 3 before going to black and the episode starts up. This was able to give the stations running the programs a countdown so the episode would start on air smoothly. I do not know why but I love them! I wish the DVDs were released with an option to see the VT clocks before each episode. This is something that Network DVD used to do with their releases so you could get the first couple of Series of Upstairs Downstairs and watch them with slates if you so desire. I have a quite a few Doctor Who episodes that have slates. I would love to have them all like that. It would be great for losers like me to see a disc released with nothing but slates. If anyone has good quality copies of Doctor Who episodes with slates (even from VHS) let me know.

I started to make more friends at the Visions convention in Chicago. I met a person by the name of Robert in November of 1996. He was working on this new way of presenting missing Doctor Who episodes called a Telesnap Reconstruction along with other people. Sure, these have been around since the 1980s but some interesting things were happening in fandom and Doctor Who at this time. First off, the mantle of fandom was changing in the mid-1990s. The Peter Haining’s of the Doctor Who factual world were making way for the Howe/Walker/Stammers as they were doing more professional writing. On the amateur level (at the time) were people like Richard Bignell and Robert Franks who were taking research to whole new levels and didn’t hold any of it back when producing amazing pieces of work such as Nothing at the End of the Lane. A few years earlier, telesnaps for many missing episodes were found in amazing quality at the BBC Written Archives Center. Then Graham Strong burst on the scene with what we called “Crystal Clear” audios of missing episodes.

For years, if you wanted to listen to missing episodes, you would get a tape and the quality would be horrible. Very garbled and muddy. I remember winning the audio for The Web of Fear back in the late 1980s. The episodes were essentially movie versions but they were recorded on really good tapes. That helped nothing. The quality was horrible. I couldn’t make out what was going on so I really never collected the audios after that. Marco Polo was bad too. Suddenly, these “Crystal Clear” audios showed up and they were important because it covered the majority of the missing episodes and from The Daleks Masterplan Episode 8 through to The Wheel in Space Episode 5, the mic was directly plugged into the TV set giving the audio unbelievable quality. All the other recordings were basically audio camera copies. These were mics set up next to a TV speaker and you could pick up not only the audio of the episode but the audio of anything else that was going on in the room at the time of recording!  What made this even better was that for the first time dub sites were set up around the world through the Internet that would distribute these audios to fans for free. All they needed to do was provide the blank tapes and postage. So by the time I got it, it wasn’t 60^th generation copy audio but maybe 3^rd generation or so. They did this with the reconstructions too. Not only was all of this going on but we had an unofficial team working for the BBC who were remastering episodes of Doctor Who for the VHS releases. They were doing stuff that we never thought would be possible such as official colour releases of a lot of the black & white Pertwee episodes. For me it was a renaissance of knowledge and fun when it came to Doctor Who.
Robert and I shared our passion for Doctor Who tape trading and would share with each other the new things we would get in from other people. He had some really nice friends in the UK who would send him some of the orphaned episodes in spectacular quality which he would share with me. It filled in some of those gaps. These would also be used for the telesnap reconstructions so fans would get the best quality copies of the whole story. That group really worked hard to give people some really nice quality that was not available anywhere else. I remember when Robert showed me his new copy of The Underwater Menace Episode 3. It was perfect. It seemed like it was directly from the film print. It had a slight green tint to it.

Robert and his friends were getting stuff from the UK and Australia on a regular basis. After a while, I ended up following trends that my friends were setting to be able to get the best quality they could at the time. To start with, I moved from VHS to SVHS in 1997. It was cool to get high quality recordings from other people in the US. This is a bit naughty but I would borrow some of my friend’s pre-recorded NTSC video tapes and copy them onto SVHS for myself. I would add homemade electronic slates to the start of the episodes. What’s the point? None but I still had fun doing it. One of my favorite moments was on a day I got 2 teeth pulled. I went home to rest and a package was waiting for me. Opening it up Robert had sent me a tape that had The Tenth Planet on it. It was the best quality I had ever seen of the story up to that point. It was so good that it was the first time I noticed the cellophane tape holding the jugs to the Cyber-helmet to the actual helmet. I also noticed the human eyes in the stocking cap for the first time. It really was fun to watch but I wasn’t happy with just SVHS especially as I had friends in the US getting into PAL. That was the big step!



Shelf 1 of 8 of British goodies.

PAL stands for Phase Alternating Line. This is the broadcast standard for SD broadcasting in the UK. When I first got into tape trading, I knew of people who actually received tapes from the UK in PAL. PAL had more lines of definition than NTSC and had truer colour to the Doctor Who episodes than NTSC ever did. To be able to enjoy PAL and you live in the US, you need to have a media player (DVD or VHS) and TV that would output PAL. A lot of people had a PAL VCR and converted tapes to view to NTSC. I wanted to view the material in PAL too. So, I ended up getting a Sony PAL VCR, PAL TV and also a Tenlab System converter so if I got PAL tapes and I needed to make copies for friends, I would be able to convert them to NTSC. I also got a second PAL VCR mainly because I had friends who traded in PAL and I wanted to provide them with PAL copies opposed to NTSC. I eventually got a Sima Color Corrector. I found when converting from PAL to NTSC that the colors became very weak and I needed something to not only boost the signal but also bring back in some of the color. It was tricky because one could easily overdue it when it came to the color correction and give it so much color that it would bleed and over saturate. The reds would become too red and overtake the picture. It was happy times because I was able to get copies of things that no one else had and was able to have it in PAL. My collection of Doctor Who grew from tapes from the UK. People were supplying me the orphaned episodes better than I ever had them before and stuff like Remembrance of the Daleks 71 Edit which looked better than the official release of the story. That one still looks good. I eventually decided to get all of the official releases of Doctor Who in PAL. I loved the covers and loved the plastic cases they came in. I ended up getting a complete set of all PAL released Doctor Who on VHS. Everything. The only one I was missing was The Tom Baker Years. Of course this backfired against me as the quality of the official releases was never great. I am not talking about the hard work that came into restoring the stories but the tape stock itself was always a bit suspect. I always had lots of drop outs on the tapes. Even today, my whole system can play PAL. My HD TV is multisystem, I have multiple DVD and Blu Ray players that play anything I throw at it and I even still have my VCRs.



My Tenlab PAL to NTSC converter

One of my favorite releases from the official range was The Ice Warriors set released in November of 1998. It was the first story (since The Invasion) to be released as an incomplete story. It was restored, plus included a mini reconstruction of Episodes 2 & 3, it had The Underwater Menace Episode 3, and it had the amazing documentary The Missing Years. It even had a CD of the audio of the missing episodes and a booklet. It doesn’t get any cooler than that! At that point, we were entering into some amazing territory as fans and how our favorite show was getting treated. Just the excitement around these releases is one of the happiest memories of my fan-life. In 1999, we were treated to The Curse of Fatal Death written by someone whose name I can’t remember. I remember that we had a friend in the UK record a copy off-air of the whole Comic Relief night and overnighted a tape to me in MN from London. The plan was that I would make copies for all of us who traded and send them off right away to different locations around the US and UK. The problem was that our friend sent us the wrong tapes. So he overnighted us rare (at that time) copies of the series Public Eye. So, he sent then sent over the right tapes and I had to make copies for everyone. This wasn’t as simple as making copies of the whole night but more of me running the tapes forwards and backwards multiple times to get to each part of The Curse of Fatal Death and create a coherent story. Unlike the VHS release, the original broadcast was spread out over 4 parts that ran throughout the evening! Even after all that work mistakes are made. One of my favourite things to do is show the stuff I get in whether it is at a video room at a convention or some kind of room party. I get a genuine thrill at watching people’s reaction to something I brought in. I feel like I made their day. When I get shows that are rare, I bring them to parties or viewing events to show other people, obviously I did not make the program but in the case of The Curse of Fatal Death, I did go through a great deal of trouble and expense to make the copies. That week, there was the first big party of a new up and coming convention called CONvergence which is now really big. I was going to bring a copy for every one to watch at their party at MiniCon. Previously I gave a copy to someone who I used to be better friends with only to find he showed The Curse of Fatal Death to everyone prior to me getting there. The copy came from me but that whole night he got kudos for bringing the newest Doctor Who that everyone wanted to see. I could have said something but I thought it would be better if I waited 13 years and write about it in an obscure blog. It may seem petty for me to bring it up here but when you go through the expense of overnighting tapes from the UK, making copies and arranging viewings there are the simple things like being the one to provide the copy for everyone that makes it fun. Granted, it was still fun when we showed it again. There were a lot of people who didn’t even know that it was made so when they are watching it, the room (full of nearly 50 people) cheered when Rowan Atkinson walked out of the TARDIS. They got more excited as the cliff hanger for one of the parts was the Daleks. With each regeneration at the end the cheering got louder and louder until the Doctor regenerated into Joana Lumley and the room exploded into an orgasm of disbelief! It was really, really fun and even writing about it gives me the chills. Wow!



One of my PAL Doctor Who Pre-record VHS Shelves

Speaking of petty there is a couple of schools of thoughts regarding the conduct one has when they have copies of programs that other people want. I have been running video rooms and even viewing groups for many years. I have run video rooms at conventions around the US and helped out on others. In this article,  I have given examples on how people who are collectors can act. One example is Mike who would share with anyone; the other one is like our “friend” from last week’s article that would also provide copies but at a price. There is Gordon who was very particular who he provided copies for sharing. I like to think I fall between Gordon and Mike. There is a curse to running a video room and showing stuff that is not readily available. There are always people who come up and ask for copies. There are a couple of reasons why I cannot make copies of some of the stuff I show. The main reason is that I have been asked by the person who made me a copy to not to share it with anyone else. That doesn’t mean I can’t show it so other people have the opportunity to see it but I cannot copy it. I made a promise. There is also an area that I cannot tell people some of the stuff I have. The people who gave it to me have sworn me to secrecy that I even have it. Don’t worry, these are not missing episodes of Doctor Who but its stuff I am trusted with. It is by no means only Doctor Who; it’s a whole lot of other British television. They trust me and I will not break that trust. This isn’t stuff found on torrents. Has this gotten me into trouble? Yes. I had a good friend once tell me that I became what he despised most in people who tape trade. We eventually made up but this was one reason why I stopped running a local group called the Minnesota Doctor Who Viewing Society. I thought it would be OK to show rare stuff and give people a reason to come to see unique Doctor Who items. Unfortunately, I showed a really nice and rare piece of Doctor Who. A friend asked me for a copy of it and I had to decline because I promised the person who gave it to me not to copy it for anyone. He got frustrated with me and I decided it was no longer worth running the group and soon after stopped. It’s is an interesting question, just because you have something rare and show it are you obligated to share it? Would people be happier not to see it at all rather than having a chance to at least view it? Is it better to have love and lost then to never love at all?

As a side note about the orphaned episodes, I had a friend in the UK and US that provided copies to me from the master tapes. They were as close as I was going to get for high quality prior to an official release. In fact, later on I got most of these again in DVD quality. They are not restored but look great and will hold me over until the DVDs come out.

Some of my Doctor Who DVDs

Like I mentioned above, my collection doesn’t stop at Doctor Who. When I was working at an ad agency in the late 1990s, they wanted to do a new campaign for a beer we had as a client. The creatives who worked on this account were not all from the US and they suggested for inspiration they look to a comedy series in the UK that was huge at the time called Men Behaving Badly. Fallon, which was the name of the agency, bought all the series on PAL VHS. Because they knew I was a fan of British television and because I had PAL equipment, I converted the tapes for them. I loved the series. I also loved that no one else had seen this here before. It was my own little treasure that I shared with my friends. Sure, we had series such as Blake’s 7, Black Adder or Are You Being Served? over here but this was different. It got me interested in seeing what else I could get. Then I started getting copies of other rarities such as Steptoe and Son, Hancock’s Half Hour, and Doomwatch. Series I only heard about and wanted to see were becoming available to me such as the Quatermass serials or Beasts. I started a group called the MN British Television Viewing Society where I would select series I knew people around here hadn’t seen and I would show it. Years later, I still have friends thank me for getting them into British television through this group. I became obsessed with collecting. When Series came out on DVD, I would snatch them up. I have thousands of DVDs in my house and most of them are British television and not all of them are pre-recorded. If you name 5 rare British series that actually exists, I bet I have some episodes of 2 to 3 of them in my collection if not all 5. Once again, I did not collect these by going to a Torrent site. This is all from contacts and friends. This is tape, oops, I mean DVD trading.

For some reason, you made it this far reading this article so I will continue to bore you. Over the past 12 years my pet project has been a Microsoft Access database that catalogs my collection. One of the things I love to do is catalog my collection. I made this database from scratch and I never even knew how to make one. I spent an entire day at my job at Best Buy building this thing instead of doing my work. It is very homemade but it has been a serious part of my collection. Maintaining it and adding records to it is actually relaxing to me. It is so easy to look up what I need to know. I know there are a lot of programs that I could download to do this too but this is tailor-made to exactly how I want to view my collection. I can sort by any number of ways which makes everything fun and it helps me pick what I watch for this blog. Unsorted and with duplicates of older versions of episodes, I currently have 8,758 entries. If I am just looking for unique entries, I have 6,788. There is a ton of stuff I haven’t even logged in yet. Currently there are hundreds of items I have not logged in my database yet. I am able to generate reports that I send to people for trades. Sometimes I will trade and sometimes I won’t. I can’t always give people what they want. I had someone in Australia recently who wanted copies of my Australian Are You Being Served? episodes and that’s one of the things I will only trade for more episodes of that series. We did settle on a trade which got me episodes of Dixon of Dock Green I didn’t have. My master list is currently 885 pages. I have an image below of how one page looks from that report. I have a separate report just for the Doctor Who episodes which is by story. I have these in a book so I can have it as a handy reference. As you can see, it is a much nicer layout. Both of the lists are completely generated from the database. It’s a really cool database! I am very proud of it.

One of the pages from my master Database list. Page 437 of 885.

A page from my Doctor Who list from my database that shows all versions I have of a story.

This is what the main form looks like that I use to enter the shows into my database.

If you read any of my articles, I have an extraordinary interest in British television. Collecting it is my main hobby. I get regular shipments from Amazon UK once a week to every 2 weeks and as you know I do reviews on many different series and receive products from BBC Home Entertainment and Acorn Media. Not only do I buy a lot of British television, I get friends in the UK who sends me discs of a lot of series that I have only heard of or even never heard of before I receive them. I do not have a wish list of series I would like to have in my collection anymore; I have everything I have always wanted to see.  One of the last things I really wanted was Out of the Unknown and I got all surviving episodes from the film prints. Now, I just need to find time to watch all of these series!

I know I am sounding like a show-off; I apologize. From the very start of this article I felt like I have been showing off or trying to be smug and it is truly not intentional. In fact a few times I thought I would stop writing this article all together. Finally, I figured if I was going to tell this story I would tell it my way. I am proud of what I have accomplished with this hobby. Thank you for reading a chapter of self-indulgence. That being said, did you used to trade tapes with people or buy copies? Let me know your story or send me your video list!

Next week: Christmas programming begins for this blog. For the next four weeks, everything chosen will have a Christmas theme to it. I start off next with something that is transitional and merry all at the same time. It is the Yes, Minister episode Party Games!

Have a great week!

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