Wiping

For other uses, see Wipe (disambiguation).

Wiping or junking is a colloquial term for action taken by radio and television production and broadcasting companies, in which old audiotapes, videotapes, and telerecordings (kinescopes), are erased, reused, or destroyed after several uses. The practice was prevalent during the 1960s and 1970s, although it is now less common since associated storage costs have decreased, and especially since the advent of domestic audiovisual playback technology (e.g. videocassette and DVD), with broadcasters and production houses realizing both the economic and cultural value of keeping archived material for both rebroadcast and potential profits through release on home video.

Australia

Australian broadcasters did not gain access to videotape-recording technology until the early 1960s, and as a result nearly all programs prior to that were broadcast live-to-air. Very little programming survives from the earliest years of Australian TV (1956–1960) as kinescope recording to film was expensive, and most of what was recorded in this way has since been lost or destroyed.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) erased much of their early output. Much of the videotaped ABC program material from the 1960s and early 1970s was erased as part of an economy policy instituted in the late 1970s, in which old program tapes were surrendered for bulk erasure and reuse. This policy particularly targeted older programs recorded in black-and-white, leading to the loss of many recordings made before 1975, when Australian television converted to color. The ABC continued erasing older television output into the early 1980s.

Programs known to have been lost include most studio segments from the 1960s current affairs shows This Day Tonight and Monday Conference, hundreds of episodes of the long-running rural serial Bellbird, all but a handful of episodes of the early-1970s drama series Certain Women, an early-1970s miniseries of dramatizations based on Norman Lindsay's novels, and nearly all of the first 18 months of the weekly pop-music show Countdown.

Many episodes of popular Australian commercial TV series are also lost. In the 1970s, Network Ten had an official policy to reuse tapes; hence, many tapes of Young Talent Time and Number 96 were wiped. To this day, Network Ten still only keeps some of its programming. Other notable casualties from the Ten archive include hundreds of episodes of the Melbourne-based pop music shows commissioned and broadcast by ATV-0 Melbourne in the 1960s and early 1970s – The Go!! Show (1964–1967), Kommotion (1964–1967), Uptight (1968–70), and the Happening 70s series (1970–1972).

The Nine Network discarded copies of some of their programs, including the popular GTV-9 series In Melbourne Tonight hosted by Graham Kennedy. Though it ran five nights a week from 1957–1970, fewer than 100 episodes are known to survive, and many of the surviving episodes are edited prints made for rebroadcast across Australia. Early episodes of Hey Hey It's Saturday do not exist because the program was broadcast live and did not begin videotape recordings until a number of years later.

Brazil

From 1968-1969, TV Tupi produced new episodes of the soap opera Beto Rockfeller by recording over previous episodes; as a result, few episodes survive.

Rede Record also lost much footage from the 1960s due to wiping, fires, and deterioration; most of the MPB music festivals no longer exist, and the sitcom Família Trapo has only one surviving episode, featuring Pelé.

Rede Globo lost the first 35 broadcasts of both Fantástico and Jornal Nacional, in addition to many segments of their other soap operas, as a result of wiping.

Canada

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation never practiced wiping, and maintained a complete archive of all programming that was recorded.

The CTV Television Network has admitted to wiping many programs during the 1970s. Because of Canadian content requirements, the need for Canadian-produced programming led to more preservation of the shows they produced, and even extremely poorly received programs (such as the infamous The Trouble with Tracy) were saved and rerun for several years after their cancellation. Furthermore, Canadian rebroadcasts have been a source of some broadcasts that are otherwise lost in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Japan

Several Japanese broadcasters, including NHK and TBS, practiced wiping.

United Kingdom

BBC

The BBC, the United Kingdom's first public service broadcaster, had no archival policy in place until 1978. Much of the Corporation's output between the 1930s and 1980s has been lost. Rationales behind this policy include:

Technological

The BBC's television service dates back to 1936 and was originally a live medium. The hours of transmission were very limited and the bulk of the programming was transmitted either live from the studio, or from outside broadcast (OB) units; pre-recorded film was a minor contributor to the output. When the first television broadcasts were made, there were two competing systems in use. The EMI electronic system (using 405 lines) competed with the Baird 240-line mechanical television system. Baird adopted an intermediate film technique where the live material was filmed using a standard film camera mounted on a large cabinet which contained a rapid processing unit and an early flying spot scanner to produce the video output for transmission. The pioneer broadcasts were not, however, preserved on this intermediate film as the nitrate (celluloid) stock was scanned while still wet from the fixer bath and never washed to remove the fixer chemicals. Consequently, the film decomposed very soon after transmission; none are known to have survived. No studio or OB programmes from 1936–1939 or 1946-1947 have survived because there was no means of preserving them. Historical 'firsts' from this era, the world's earliest television crime drama Telecrime (1938–39 and 1946) or Pinwright's Progress (1946–47, the world's first regular situation comedy), only remain visually as a handful of still photographs.

The earliest recording method for television was telerecording, which involved recording the image from a special television monitor onto film with a modified film camera. Early examples made by this method include the first two episodes of The Quatermass Experiment (1953), transmitted live while simultaneously telerecorded. The visual quality of the second episode's recording was considered so poor (a fly entered the gap between the camera and monitor at one point) that the remainder of the series was not recorded.

Although Quadruplex videotape recording technology was utilised in the UK from 1958, this system was expensive and complex; recorded programmes were often erased after broadcast. The vast majority of live programmes were never recorded at all. Videotape was not thought to be a permanent archivable medium – its high cost and the potential reuse of the tapes led to the transfer of programme material to film via telerecording whenever preservation was believed worthwhile or sales of overseas screening rights were possible. The recycling of videotapes, coupled with savings made on the storage of the bulky 2" tapes, enabled the BBC to keep down costs.

Cultural

Drama and entertainment output was studio-based and followed the tradition of live theatre. Conventional filmmaking was only gradually introduced from the 1960s. The Sunday Night Play (a major event in the 1950s) was performed live in the studio. On Thursday, because telerecording was of insufficient broadcast quality, another live performance followed, the artists returning to perform the play again.

Today, most programmes are pre-recorded and it is relatively inexpensive to preserve programming for posterity; even so, the BBC Charter makes no mention of any obligation to retain all of them.

Rights

All television programmes have copyright and other rights issues associated with them. For some genres of programmes – such as drama and entertainment – the actors, writers, and musicians involved in a production all have underlying rights. In the past, these rights were defended rigorously – permission could even be denied by a contributor for the repeat or re-use of a programme. Talent unions were highly suspicious of the threat to new work if programmes were repeated; indeed, before 1955 Equity insisted that any telerecording made (of a repeat performance) could only "be viewed privately" on BBC premises and not transmitted.

If telerecordings were made of a work and that work was then acquired by another party, then the recording had to be destroyed – this happened in 1955 when 20th Century Fox acquired the rights to Anastasia and the 1953 BBC telerecording of the play had to be destroyed (although the lostshows.com website states that recordings of both performances still survive). At this same time, agents would demand that programmes be wiped so that they could never be repeated; currently, actors are almost invariably paid to sign away these rights to the producing company.

Colour television

The introduction of colour television in the United Kingdom from 1967 meant that broadcasters felt there was even less value in retaining monochrome recordings. Such tapes could not be re-used for colour production, so they were disposed of to create space for the new colour tapes in the (quickly becoming full) archives. The increased cost of colour 2 inch Quadruplex videotape (approximately £1,000 per tape at today's prices) meant that companies still often re-used the tapes for efficiency. Negative attitudes to a programme's value also persisted. For these reasons, many programmes survive only as monochrome film recordings, if at all.

Significant wiped programmes

High-profile examples of programme losses include many episodes of Doctor Who, The Wednesday Play, most of the seminal comedy series Not Only But Also, all of the 1950s televised Francis Durbridge serials (further, the first two serials were never recorded), the vast majority of the BBC's Apollo 11 Moon landing studio coverage, all but one of the 39 episodes of The First Lady, and all 147 episodes of the soap opera United!. There are many gaps in many long running BBC series (Doctor Who, Dixon of Dock Green, Hancock's Half Hour, Sykes, Out of the Unknown, and Z Cars).

The first acting appearance of musician Bob Dylan, in a 1963 play entitled The Madhouse on Castle Street, was erased in 1968.

There is lost material in all genres – as late as 1993, a large number of videotaped children's programmes from the 1970s and 1980s were irretrievably wiped by Adam Lee of the BBC archives on the assumption that they were of "no use"...without consulting the BBC children's department itself.

Other lost material

Virtually the entire runs of the Corporation's pre-1970s soap operas have been lost. In the 1950s and 1960s, the BBC soap operas The Appleyards, The Grove Family, Compact, The Newcomers, 199 Park Lane, and United! produced approximately 1,200 episodes altogether.

As of today, both United! and 199 Park Lane have no episodes in the archives while only one episode of The Appleyards, three episodes of The Grove Family, and four episodes each of Compact and The Newcomers are extant.

Also vulnerable to the Corporation's wiping policy were programmes that only lasted for one series. Abigail and Roger, The Airbase, As Good Cooks Go, the 1960 adaptation of The Citadel, the 1956 adaptation of David Copperfield, The Dark Island, The Gnomes of Dulwich, , Hurricane, For Richer...For Poorer, Hereward the Wake, The Naked Lady, Night Train To Surbiton, Outbreak of Murder, Where do I Sit?, and Witch Hunt have all been wiped with no footage surviving.

A copy of Hugh and I (Chinese Crackers), starring Hugh Lloyd, Terry Scott, John Le Mesurier and David Jason was located by Kaleidoscope Publishing in 2010 in the archives of UCLA, and bought to general public attention in February 2011.

Finding missing BBC programmes

Since the establishment of an archival policy for television in 1978, BBC archivists and others over the years have used various contacts in the UK and abroad to try to track down missing programmes. For example, all BBC Worldwide customers who had bought programmes from the Corporation in the past were contacted to see if they still had copies which could be dubbed for the archives; Doctor Who is a prime example of how this method recovered episodes that the Corporation did not hold themselves. The BBC has also established the BBC Archive Treasure Hunt, a public appeal campaign to recover lost productions.

The BBC also has close contacts with the National Film and Television Archive, which is part of the British Film Institute and their "Missing Believed Wiped" event which was first held in 1993 (at which time the Corporation was still wiping material – see Rentaghost) and is part of a campaign to locate lost gems of British Television. There is also a network of genuine collectors who, if they find any programmes missing from the BBC archives, will contact the Corporation with information – or sometimes even the actual episode(s). Some examples of programmes recovered for the archives are Doctor Who, Steptoe and Son, Dad's Army, Out of the Unknown, The Likely Lads, and Play for Today.

For many years the pilot episode of Are You Being Served? survived only in black and white, and it was never known if the original colour master was lost or wiped. It appears in black and white on the 2003 DVD release of the show. In 2009, a colour version was reconstructed when it was realised that the black and white film reel had actually recorded sufficient colour information as a dot crawl pattern to allow the colour to be recovered.

Early episodes of the pop music-chart show Top of the Pops were wiped or never recorded and only broadcast "live", the last edition that was wiped from the BBC archives dates from 8 September 1977. There are only four complete TOTP episodes surviving from the 1960s, while many otherwise-missing episodes survive only as fragments.

Most episodes of The Sandie Shaw Supplement (a music-variety show hosted by the singer) recorded in 1967 were promptly wiped after Sandie Shaw asked for the original films to be converted to video cassette. Only two episodes exist today, and occasionally appear on internet purchasing sites such as eBay.

ITV

The BBC was not alone in this practice – the commercial companies that formed its main rival ITV also wiped videotapes and destroyed telerecordings, leaving gaps in their archive holdings. The state of the archives varies greatly between the different companies; Granada Television holds a large number of its older black-and-white programmes, the company having an unofficial policy of retaining as much of its broadcast material (albeit by telerecording) as possible despite financial hardship in its early years. This includes the entirety of the soap opera Coronation Street which is now held at the Yorkshire Television archive, which itself possesses largely intact archives (although some early colour shows from the late 1960's and the early 1970s such as the entire output of the drama Castle Haven, the first two series of Sez Les and the children's variety show Junior Showtime are missing and believed wiped). The former ITV company Thames Television also has a significant library.

These cases tend to be the exception, however; the former nature of the ITV network, in which private independent companies were awarded licences to serve geographical areas for a set period of time, meant that when companies lost their licences their archives were often sold to third parties and became fragmented – and/or risked being destroyed (ownership and copyright remained with the production companies rather than with the network). The archive of networked programmes made by Southern Television, for example, is now owned by the Australian media company Southern Star Group (no connection) – but Southern's regional output is in the hands of ITV plc, whilst the few surviving tapes of Associated-Rediffusion belong to many different organisations (the majority of Associated-Rediffusion's tapes were recorded in monochrome and therefore deemed of no use upon the arrival of colour broadcasting; as such they were disposed of by their successor Thames Television), although in recent years there have been occasional discoveries such as a 1959 episode of Double Your Money and the remaining missing episode of Around the World with Orson Welles, found by Ray Langstone in 2011. Many master tapes belonging to ATV have since deteriorated due to bad storage and are unsuitable for broadcasting. In particular, the ATV version of the popular soap Crossroads is missing 2,850 episodes of its original 3,555.

Most at risk were contemporary programmes; few editions of Southern's 1970s children's quiz Runaround exist, although shows shot primarily or entirely on film do survive (such as Southern's adaptation of the Famous Five stories from the same period). Expensive costume dramas (then studio-bound productions recorded on videotape) were also archived – such shows include Lillie and Upstairs, Downstairs (LWT) and Edward the Seventh (ATV).

Further, responsibility for archive preservation was left to individual companies. For example, ITV has no record of its live coverage of the 1969 Moon landings after the station responsible for providing the coverage, London Weekend Television, wiped the tapes. Of the 96 British inserts to the 1980s franchised Anglo-American/Canadian children's show Fraggle Rock, only 12 are known to exist as the library of the British producer (TVS) has been sold and subsequently split up.

In recent years, the trend of preserving material has started to change. The archives of Westward Television and Television South West are now held in trust for the public (The South West Film and Television Archive) whilst changes in legislation mean that dismissed ITV companies must donate archives to the British Film Institute. However, the change of ITV from a federal structure to one centralized private company means that changes of regional companies in the future seems highly unlikely.

Most material from the 1960s also only survive as telerecordings. Some early episodes are also believed to be damaged or in poor quality, whereas much of the output of other broadcasters – such as many early episodes of The Avengers (shot in the electronic studio rather than on film) produced by Associated British Corporation – have been destroyed.

Recovery of missing programmes

Since the BBC library was first audited in 1978, missing programmes or extracts on either film or tape are often found in unexpected places. An appeal to broadcasters in other countries who had shown missing programmes (notably Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and African nations such as Nigeria) produced "missing" episodes from the archives of those television companies. Episodes have also been returned to broadcasters by private film collectors who had acquired 16mm copies from various sources.

• Two Series 1 episodes of The Avengers (an Associated British Corporation production) which were thought to be missing were recovered from the UCLA Film & Television Archive in the United States.
• It emerged in September 2010 that more than 60 recordings of BBC and ITV drama productions originally sent for broadcast in the United States by the PBS station WNET in New Jersey had been found at the Library of Congress.
• The BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son is completely intact, although approximately half of the colour episodes only exist in monochrome; this was after copies of episodes thought to be lost were recovered in the late 1990s from early home video recordings made by writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.
• A few audio recordings of Til Death Us Do Part have been recovered, as well as an extract of the pilot and two episodes from Series 3.

Copies of several compilations from the British 1960s comedy At Last The 1948 Show, held by many to be a forerunner of Monty Python's Flying Circus, were discovered in the archives of the Swedish broadcaster SVT, to whom the producers Rediffusion London had sold them upon the companies' loss of its broadcasting licence (the master tapes, along with much of Rediffusion's programming, having been wiped or disposed of by their successor Thames Television).

Off-air home audio recordings of various television programmes have also been recovered, at least preserving the soundtracks to otherwise missing shows, and some of these (particularly from Doctor Who) have been released on CD by the BBC following restoration and the addition of narration to describe purely visual elements. Tele-snaps, a commercial service of off-screen shots of programmes often purchased by actors and television directors to keep a record of their work in the days before videocassette recorders, have also been recovered for many lost programmes.

Preservation of the current archive

Advances in technology have resulted in old programming being transferred to new digital media, where they can be restored or (if they are damaged or otherwise cannot be restored) kept from decaying further. In the United Kingdom, the archives of both the BBC and those available of ITV, along with other channels, are being switched from cumbersome 2-inch quadruplex videotape to digital format. This is an extensive and expensive process and one that will take many years to complete.

United States

In the United States, the major broadcast networks also engaged in the practice of wiping recordings until the late 1970s. Many episodes were erased, especially daytime and late-night programming such as daytime soap operas and game shows. The daytime shows, almost all of them having been taped, were erased because it was believed at the time that nobody wanted to see them after their first broadcast. The success of cable television networks devoted to reruns of these genres proved that this was not the case, as the large number of episodes that were required for a daily program made even a short-run game show an ideal candidate for syndication. By this time, however, the damage had already been done.

Ernie Kovacs

Many of Ernie Kovacs' videotaped network programs were also wiped. During different times as comedian, writer, and performer Kovacs had programs on all four major television networks (ABC, CBS, DuMont, and NBC). After Kovacs' death, the networks wiped many programs. Kovacs' widow Edie Adams obtained as many programs and episodes as she could find, donating them to UCLA's Special Collections.

Soap operas

Though most soap operas transitioned from live broadcast to videotaping their shows during the 1960s, it was still common practice to wipe and reuse the tapes. Most soaps began routinely saving their episodes between 1976 and 1979; several soap operas have saved recordings of all their episodes. The long-running Days of our Lives (airing since 1965) has recordings of all its episodes, and The Young and the Restless (airing since 1973) – along with cancelled soaps Dark Shadows (1966–1971) and Ryan's Hope (1975–1989) – saved most of their episodes despite the fact that they debuted during the 1960s and 1970s, before retaining tapes became common practice. Episodes of other soaps broadcast during the 1950s to 1970s do exist and have been showcased on various websites. The first two episodes of Days exist on their original master tapes, and were aired by SOAPnet in 2005.

The long-running soap opera Search for Tomorrow, which aired from 1951–1986, is a quintessential example of a soap that was wiped. While scattered episodes from the 1950s and 1960s survive on kinescopes, many episodes of the CBS (later NBC) soap from the 1970s were erased after their broadcasts in order to shoot more episodes, due to the high cost of videotapes at the time. In many cases, at least a decade is missing. All episodes of Search's from the show's NBC run (1982-1986) are believed to be intact, and were rerun on the USA Network in the late 1980s.

As the World Turns and The Edge of Night aired live until 1975, the year Edge moved to ABC and ATWT expanded from a 30-minute broadcast to one hour. Both shows began taping episodes in preparation for the move of Edge to ABC; Edge's ABC debut is believed to have survived. Overall, the number of surviving monochrome episodes recorded on kinescope outnumber color episodes for these programs.

Agnes Nixon initially produced her series One Life to Live and All My Children through her own production company, Creative Horizons, Inc., and kept a complete archive of monochrome kinescopes until ABC bought the shows from her in 1975. When the network wanted to expand Children from 30 minutes to a full hour in the late 1970s, Nixon agreed on the condition that the network would begin saving the episodes. ABC complied, and full hour broadcasts began on April 22, 1977. Unfortunately, a fire destroyed the vast majority of the early-1970s kinescopes, leaving only a few episodes from each season. Children episodes from its first year on the air (1970–1971) were seen on ABC in the 1990s and on SOAPnet in February 2005, the latter in celebration of the show's 35th anniversary. A 1969 episode of OLTL was featured on the now-defunct World of Soap Themes website, and at least one episode from the late 1960s exists in color.

Procter and Gamble started saving their shows around 1978. Very few pre-1978 color episodes of the P&G-sponsored shows survive, with most extant episodes preserved as monochrome kinescopes; in addition, a number of 1970s shows recorded by viewers using early VCR technology have surfaced on a number of websites in recent years.

Many black-and-white episodes of Guiding Light survive as kinescopes; although the quality of these films has degraded to the point where in some cases the video is too dark to be worth viewing, the audio quality is fine. A number of kinescopes from 1966, the year Light's setting shifted from Selby Flats, California to the Midwestern town of Springfield, were uploaded to a number of websites including the aforememntioned WoST. Audio recordings of 1973–1974 Light episodes have also been uploaded.

There are only three known surviving black-and-white episodes of Another World from 1964 at the Paley Center for Media. Another known AW episode available was a black-and-white kinescope from 1968, on the WoST website.

The UCLA Film & Television Archive holds a large amount of daytime television airings that were spared from the wiping practice. Virtually all episodes of General Hospital from its premiere in April 1963 through August 1970 are archived at UCLA. Also archived there are handfuls of episodes of each soap opera (that was on the air at the time) from 1971 and 1973, including long-forgotten series such A World Apart, Where the Heart Is, and Return to Peyton Place.

DuMont programs

It is believed that virtually the entire archive of the DuMont Television Network, covering its whole history from 1946–1956, was disposed of during the 1970s by a "successor" broadcaster (believed to be ABC) through dumping all of the kinescopes/videotapes into the East River to make room for other tapes at a New York City warehouse. Further, a large number of DuMont's kinescopes were destroyed circa 1958 for their silver content.

Although approximately 350 or so episodes of DuMont programming are known to exist, this is minuscule in comparison to the sheer number of programs, totaling 20,000+ episodes, which were dumped.

The Tonight Show

See also: The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson

Almost all of The Tonight Show with Jack Paar and the first ten years hosted by his successor Johnny Carson were taped over by the network, which is why Carson's late 1960s shows looked muddy compared to his competitor Dick Cavett on ABC; NBC was using the Tonight Show tapes repeatedly.

Early sporting events

See also: List of World Series broadcasters, List of Super Bowl broadcasters, NFL on CBS, and NFL on NBC

Many early sporting events, such as the World Series and the first two Super Bowls, were also lost, though a nearly intact recording of the first Super Bowl was found recently.

Super Bowls

Super Bowl I was aired by both CBS and NBC (the only Super Bowl to be aired by two networks), but neither network felt the need to preserve the game long-term; CBS saved the telecast for a few months and reran it as filler programming at least once before wiping it. A color videotape containing the first, second and fourth quarters of the telecast from WYOU (the CBS affiliate for Scranton, Pennsylvania) was found in 2005 and is in the process of being restored. Super Bowl II was aired exclusively by CBS and is also believed to have been erased. Though the telecast of Super Bowl III exists in full color, only half of the Super Bowl IV broadcast does (the rest was preserved by Canadian television in black-and-white), and the status of most of Super Bowl V remains unknown. It was not until Super Bowl VI that a continuous archive was established.

The National Football League had its own filmmakers, NFL Films, filming the game with its own equipment, and preserving its own telecast on tape was not seen as a priority when another source was available – though the networks' play-by-play comments, as a result, was lost.

World Series telecasts

All telecasts of World Series games starting in 1975 (Reds-Red Sox) are known to exist in full. Follows is the known footage of World Series telecasts prior to 1975:

• 1952 (Yankees-Dodgers) - Games 6-7 are intact.
• 1955 (Yankees-Dodgers) - Only the first half of Game 5 is known to exist.
• 1956 (Yankees-Dodgers) - Only the last three innings of Game 2 are known to exist. Game 3 is intact minus the second and third inning. Game 5 (Don Larsen's perfect game) is intact minus the first inning, and was aired on January 1, 2009 during the MLB Network's first broadcast day.
• 1957 (Yankees–Braves) - Game 3 is intact, minus a snip of Tony Kubek's second home run in the top 7th inning. Games 6 (most of the first six innings) and 7 reportedly exist as well.
• 1960 (Yankees–Pirates) - Game 7 was found intact on kinescope in December 2009 in the wine cellar of Pirates' part-owner Bing Crosby, who had the game recorded at his own expense. MLB Network aired it in December 2010.
• 1961 (Yankees–Reds) - Half-hour segments of Games 3 (the first two innings), 4 (the 4th and 5th innings), and 5 (open and top of the 1st inning) are known to exist.
• 1963 (Yankees–Dodgers) - Game 3 is intact.
• 1965 (Twins–Dodgers) - All seven games were preserved by the CBC on kinescope.
• 1968 (Tigers–Cardinals). All seven games were preserved by the CBC on kinescope.
• 1969 (Orioles–Mets) - Games 1-2 were preserved by the CBC on kinescope, while Games 3-5 exist on their original color videotape from "truck feeds".
• 1970 (Orioles–Reds) - Games 1-4 were preserved by the CBC on kinescope, while Game 5 exists on its original color videotape from the "truck feed".
• 1971 (Orioles-Pirates) - Games 1-2 and 6-7 are intact, while Games 3-5 only partially exist and Game 4 is near-complete.
• 1972 (A's-Reds) - Game 4 is intact, along with nearly all of Game 5 and a fair chunk of Game 2. Fragments exist for Games 1, 3, and 6, while Game 7 is missing.
• 1973 (A's-Mets) - Game 1 is intact, Game 2 is missing the last inning and a half (including both Mike Andrews plays), Game 3 is complete minus the last inning, Game 4 is intact from the pregame show to the top of the 4th inning, and Game 5 only has the last two innings. Game 6 is missing, while Game 7 cuts off with one out at the top of the 9th inning.
  • While the last inning and a half of Game 2 is missing from the Major League Baseball/NBC copy, the Andrews plays (totaling about 60 seconds of coverage) survived because after the World Series, NBC put together a 20-minute presentation tape narrated by Curt Gowdy to submit to the Peabody Awards in order to get consideration for an award for their coverage by the committee; the tape includes the two Andrews plays with Gowdy and Tony Kubek's calls and analysis of them. The presentation tape is held by the Peabody vault, creating a case where "reconstructing" a game in an incomplete format would require going to two different outlets.
• 1974 (A's-Dodgers) - Games 1-4 are complete, but Game 5 is missing.

League Championship Series telecasts

For the League Championship Series telecasts spanning from 1969–1975, only Game 2 of the 1972 American League Championship Series (Oakland-Detroit) is known to exist, however the copy on the trade circuit is missing the Bert Campaneris-Lerrin LaGrow brawl.

There are some instances where the only brief glimpse of telecast footage of an early LCS game can be seen in a surviving newscast from that night.

• The last out of the 1973 National League Championship Series as described by Jim Simpson was played on that night's NBC Nightly News, but other than that the entire game is gone.
• On the day the New York Mets and Baltimore Orioles wrapped up their respective League Championship Series in 1969, a feature story on the CBS Evening News showed telecast clips of the ALCS game (albeit with no original sound). This is all that likely remains of anything from that third game of the Orioles-Twins series.

While all telecasts of World Series games starting with 1975 are accounted for and exist, the LCS is still a spotty situation through the late 1970s:

• 1976 ALCS - Game 5 is intact, from the ABC vault.
• 1976 NLCS - Game 3 is intact, albeit an off-air recording taped in the Portland market. Apparently, this copy is the only extant version because the ABC vault copy has no sound.
• 1977 NLCS - Game 3 is intact, from the Philadelphia Phillies' local NBC affiliate. A copy is held by Major League Baseball, who also appears to have Game 4 as well.
• 1977 ALCS - Game 5 is intact, with both the WPIX and NBC versions existing through off-air recordings.
  • Clips of these games may be seen in highlight shows or programs such as Yankeeography. It is believed that incomplete tapes of the ALCS exist. It is possible these games are not shown in part because the audio quality is poor. A common method of getting around such deficiencies would be to overlay a radio telecast or narration by a player or commentator where gaps exist.
• 1978 ALCS - All four games (ABC version) are intact via off-air recordings.
• 1978 NLCS - Game 4 is intact, again from off-air recordings.

NBA Finals

1973: Knicks-Lakers - Games 1-4 is missing, while Game 5 only has the final 2 minutes of the game.

Wiped programs

Early live shows

Many programs in the early days in television were broadcast live and never recorded in the first place; while they are also lost forever, they in fact were not wiped programs because they were never recorded. Most prime-time programs were preserved by the kinescope recording process, which involved filming the live broadcast from a television screen using a motion-picture camera (videotape, for recording programs, was not perfected until the late 1950s and was not widely used until the late 1960s). This was also a common practice for broadcasting live TV shows to the west coast, as performers often performed a show back-to-back, but never back-to-back-to-back.

Daytime programs, however, were generally not kinescoped for preservation (although many were temporarily kinescoped for later broadcast, episodes recorded in this way were often junked). Many local station and network newscasts were prone to wiping.

News

Some early news programs, such as Camel News Caravan, are largely lost. Moving images of Walter Cronkite reading the news in his studio every night for six years are gone with the exception of his coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the JFK assassination in 1963. Studio shots of Peter Jennings inside his ABC studio during his first year there (1965) are also gone.

Vanderbilt University has kept all evening national news telecasts since Monday, August 5, 1968.

As of 1997, CBS had saved 1,000,000 videotapes of news reports, broadcasts, stock footage, and outtakes according to a report that year from the National Film Preservation Board. The same report added, "Television stations still erase and recycle their video cassettes", referring to local news programs.[1] Many local stations contract with outside companies for archiving news coverage.

Situation comedy

Little of the first sitcom, The Mary Kay and Johnny Show, remains today. It was initially live and not recorded, but later in its run kinescopes were made for rebroadcasting. Fragments of episodes and one complete installment are known to exist.

Game shows

Game shows, more than any other genre, were prone to wiping. Many games between 1941 and 1980 had insignificantly-short runs (some measured in a span of weeks or even days) that the networks felt it unnecessary to keep them for posterity, whereas recycling the tapes would be more profitable and less of an effort than attempting to sell the series in reruns, in an era before cable television.

Mark Goodson–Bill Todman Productions (and to a lesser extent, Barry-Enright Productions and Chuck Barris Productions) had the foresight to preserve many of their games for later reruns; for years, these shows dominated the Game Show Network (GSN) lineup.

Most other game shows from that era were not so fortunate. Almost all of the Bob Stewart, Heatter–Quigley, Hatos–Hall (except for a large portion of Let's Make a Deal), and pre-1980 Merv Griffin productions have been destroyed, with the exception of a few rare pilots and "cast aside" episodes. The few remaining episodes have therefore become collectors' items, and an active trading circuit exists among collectors.

NBC and ABC continued the wiping process well into the 1970s; while ABC ceased in early 1978, NBC continued to wipe some shows into 1980, leaving much of their daytime game show content lost forever. CBS abandoned the wiping process by September 1972, largely as a result of their collaboration with Goodson-Todman; as a result, even the network's shorter-lived games (such as Spin-Off) still exist in their entirety. Incidentally, all three networks ended their wiping programs during the time Fred Silverman led their respective networks.

While it remained in business, DuMont wished to keep its programs as intact as possible. However, the network ceased in 1956 and its archive was destroyed in the 1970s. The corporate successor to DuMont, Fox, not only has never aired any daytime programming (other than its Fox Kids block from 1990–2001) but debuted in 1986, well beyond the wiping era.

Examples of shows with a history of wiping include:

The $10,000/$20,000 Pyramid (CBS/ABC, 1973-1980)

Another example is Pyramid (renamed several times over the years with higher dollar amounts), which was on two networks (CBS from 1973–1974 and ABC from 1974–1980; beginning in January 1976, The $10,000 Pyramid became The $20,000 Pyramid).

Of those episodes that survived, three weeks from November 1973 (15 episodes) which were taped at CBS Television City in Hollywood instead of the normal taping location, the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City, were spared (they exist as master copies). A few were also recorded on videotape from the original broadcast. Aside from clips seen in the openings of the existing $20,000 Pyramid episodes, no episodes of the ABC $10,000 Pyramid exist on videotape.

As ABC ceased destroying daytime programming at the beginning of 1978, the remainder of the run survives.

The Big Showdown (ABC, 1974-1975)

The Big Showdown was one of several short-lived ABC series in the mid-1970s, during an era when the network was a distant competitor to NBC and CBS in the daytime department and rotated game shows quickly in and out of the lineup. It is notable for the fact that it has only two episodes surviving in full (the original pilot titled Showdown, and an episode in which host Jim Peck slips and falls down the stairs during his introduction), along with a bonus round from another; what happened to the rest of the latter's origin episode is unknown.

Concentration (NBC/Syndicated, 1958-1978)

In the case of Concentration, which had a very long run (1958–1973 on NBC and 1973–1978 in syndication), it was believed that the NBC version was completely destroyed. However, it was reported in 1999 that both the Hugh Downs/Jack Barry/Ed McMahon/Bob Clayton run fully exists on kinescope and the Jack Narz run fully exists on videotape.

GSN tried to purchase the Narz and Alex Trebek episodes (Classic Concentration) prior to launching in 1994, but NBC refused for unknown reasons.

High Rollers (NBC, 1974-1976/1978-1980)

Another example is the original NBC network run of High Rollers, where two episodes from the first run (1974–1976) are known to exist. Ten episodes from the 1978-1980 revival exist in personal collections, including the finale.

The Hollywood Squares (NBC/Syndicated, 1966-1981)

For a long time, it was thought that all but approximately the last two years of the original Hollywood Squares were wiped until a large number of episodes, mostly from the short-lived 1968 NBC prime-time and long-running 1970s syndicated runs but including some daytime episodes (such as a 1977 Storybook Squares episode), were discovered.

GSN aired about 130 of these episodes from 2002–2003, and on two occasions left the NBC "In Living Color" peacock intact; on one of those two occasions, the NBC "snake" logo was also left intact.

Jeopardy! (NBC/Syndicated, 1964-1975/1978-1979)

NBC destroyed the majority of the original series hosted by Art Fleming, however the show's 1975 finale used several clips from episodes not currently known to exist; this may mean that the network began destroying the run starting from the first show. Incomplete "paper records" of NBC games exist on microfilm at the Library of Congress, including two episodes featuring future Senator and Presidential candidate John McCain as a contestant, as well as the Tournament of Champions wins by Hutton Gibson and Jay Wolpert.

According to Encyclopedia of TV Game Shows co-author Fred Wostbrock, the 1970s syndicated version and 1978-1979 revival are both intact on videotape. Of the original NBC series, approximately 15-20 episodes remain from its original 2,753 (including the 1964 "test" episode).

The Magnificent Marble Machine (NBC, 1975-1976)

Another Heatter–Quigley show that was at one time believed to be extinct, which involved a giant pinball machine played by a contestant and their celebrity teammate. Only two full episodes are known to exist, along with footage shown during the 1979 film The China Syndrome.

Mindreaders (NBC, 1979-1980)

NBC also destroyed a majority of episodes from the Goodson-Todman game Mindreaders, leaving the pilot, two full episodes, and the first two minutes of the New Year's Eve show. This was one of the few Goodson-Todman shows that has been lost to the process.

Password (CBS/ABC Daytime, 1961-1967/1971-1975)

The ABC version of Password is one of the few Goodson-Todman series that is almost gone. GSN aired a 1971 episode featuring Brett Somers and Jack Klugman. A 1972 studio master has also survived, along with three 1975 episodes (including the finale of Password All-Stars and the June 27 overall finale). UCLA also has a small number of episodes in their archives.

Both this version and most of the CBS daytime version is considered lost and/or destroyed. Most of the CBS nighttime version and final daytime year (the latter of which was produced in color) survive. The color episodes were edited for syndication, whose high ratings through 1970 convinced Goodson-Todman to revive the series.

The ABC version was supposedly wiped to record Richard Dawson's Family Feud, a common cause for the disappearance of many shows.

Second Chance (ABC, 1977)

The 1977 game Second Chance, the original version of the more popular Press Your Luck, is believed to be completely destroyed. Only Pilot #3 and the series finale are known for certain to exist, the latter as an audio recording; several monochrome photographs of the set also exist.

Snap Judgment (NBC, 1967-1969)

The NBC game Snap Judgment, hosted by Ed McMahon, is an example of a series that was completely destroyed by the wiping process. Only one full episode, plus an opening and a bonus round, are known to exist on audio tape.

Three on a Match (NBC, 1971-1974)

NBC destroyed a majority of the episodes from Three on a Match, with the exception of six episodes from 1973 and another five from 1974.

To Tell The Truth (CBS, 1956-1968)

An example of a casualty of wiping/non-preservation is the CBS daytime version of To Tell the Truth, which does not have a complete archive. A small number of episodes prior to 1966 still exist, three of which (two from 1964 and one from October 25, 1965) exist on film. The rest survive on videotape. It is believed a large number of episodes from 1966-1968 do exist. GSN has shown most of the surviving daytime episodes.

Wheel Of Fortune (NBC, 1975-1989)

NBC also destroyed the majority of the episodes hosted by Chuck Woolery, although about 15 circulate among collectors (the E! True Hollywood Story on the show featured clips from the 1974 pilots and 1975 premiere). It is unknown where precisely the network stopped destroying episodes, although it is likely they ceased in 1980 along with their other shows.

Winning Streak (NBC, 1974-1975)

A majority of the episodes from the NBC game show Winning Streak was completely erased by the network as well, with the exception of two episodes (the pilot and the August 9 episode). The first two minutes of the December 26 show were recovered in February 2010.

See also

• Doctor Who missing episodes
• British television Apollo 11 coverage
• Missing Believed Wiped
• Kinescope
• Lost film
• Film preservation
• List of surviving DuMont Television Network broadcasts

References

• Fiddy, Dick (2002). Missing, Believed Wiped: Searching for the Lost Treasures of British Television. London: British Film Institute. ISBN 978-0-85170-866-9. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

External links

• Full Details of the BBC's treasure Hunt
• Lost Shows (UK) search engine, Kaleidoscope website
• British TV Missing Episodes Index
• Wiped News.Com - A news and features website devoted to missing TV, Film & Radio
• The hunt for TV’s lost baseball treasures