I Finally Find Some 1970s Footage on Betamax

It's brief, it's fuzzy and it mentions Jimmy Savile

One of my earliest objectives with archive tape digging was to find some material which was broadcast before I was born. And I found that fairly quickly, as, whilst recordings from 1982 are hard to find, they’re not ridiculously elusive. With this ticked off my list, it was time go even further back, and into a different decade altogether.

But finding footage from the 1970s proved tough. Not only was home video in its infancy at the time, but these recordings then had to stick around for 40 - 45 years until I came looking. Sure, I found a few recordings from the late 70s, but there was little more of a millisecond of content around these which wasn’t commercially available.

There was a 1979 edition of Doctor Who where, for a second, I caught a glimpse of the BBC globe. And I found a 1978 broadcast of a film on BBC1 with, at best, a millisecond or two, of continuity advertising next week’s film. People clearly didn’t want to leave the tape running back in the 70s, not a surprise when you consider how expensive the tapes were back then.

But, finally, I’ve managed to excavate some footage which, although, not much longer, at least gets into double figures in terms of seconds. And, as with all my recent finds, it comes from the Betamax tapes I recently picked up in London. Best of all, rather than the late 70s, this Top of the Pops continuity hails from the mid-70s. To be precise: Christmas 1976. A whole 47 years ago.

Betamax, of course, wasn’t available in the UK at the time, unless someone had imported a Japanese model. Nonetheless, the Philips VCR system had been available for a few years at this point. And this is where this footage comes from. The owner of these Betamax tapes - as pointed out in a previous article - had previously owned a Philips VCR and copied some of their tapes over to Betamax.

So, it’s less than 30 seconds, and a bit wobbly, but it’s a curious peek into the way the BBC were presenting their programmes at the time. Sure, the mention of Savile is a reminder we don’t need in the cold light of day, but this is the past. Anyway, my favourite part is the Christmas record on the Top of the Pops slide, it’s cute, simple and, boy oh boy, is it from a bygone era.

And, there was, in fact, a full edition of Wildlife on One from 1977 on the same tape. But it’s already on YouTube! The hunt, then, goes on for something a bit more substantial. Thankfully, there are other tapes labelled up as Philips copies, so I’m looking forward to digging through them.