The Continuing Madness of Betamax

It's the video format which keeps on giving

The above box contains around 320 Betamax tapes which I picked up on Thursday. Now, you might think that collecting 320 dusty Betamax tapes is a ridiculous thing to do. And it is, but it gets crazier. You see, not pictured is another box containing another 60 tapes which I couldn’t fit in this box. So, yes, in total I took ownership of 380ish tapes. It truly is full steam ahead for Curious British Telly’s Betamax train and I couldn’t be happier.

I’m pretty certain it’s the biggest tape donation I’ve ever received. The previous best was around 250 VHS tapes a few years back, sadly there was barely anything of worth in those. Yes, the world of archive tape digging can be a truly dispiriting pursuit at times. But, moving on, I have high hopes for these tapes.

In fact, they’ve already achieved great success. The first tape I checked out contained the entire first series of Just Another Day - two episodes of which had never made it to YouTube. The key word in that last sentence is ‘had’ as I’ve now uploaded the Battersea Dogs Home episode here and the Sotheby’s episode here. Truly, this is why I bought a Betamax player. But where did all of these tapes come from?