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FROM THE MANCHESTER EVENING NEWS:

Raiders Of The Lost Archive

WHAT'S in your TV archive?

Mine dates back to the early 1980s and includes thousands of video recordings, as well as more recent DVDs and hard drives.

But in the 1960s, before the invention of cheap video recorders, tape was very expensive.

TV companies routinely wiped programme footage once it had been broadcast so the tape could be used again.

Many live TV shows also vanished as no-one saw the need to record them.
Other recordings simply went missing.

Now a new four-part series has unearthed TV footage thought to have been lost forever.

Michael Parkinson, Bruce Forsyth, Rolf Harris and Bill Oddie are among those reunited with some of their earliest TV material.

Hardly anything of Granada show Scene At 6.30, which employed Parky as a young reporter, appeared to have survived.

But new four part ITV1 series Raiders Of The Lost Archive presents him with some hilarious clips from his early career.

Parkinson, now 71, is seen being tattooed and discussing liquorish and quoits from newly found 1962 editions.

There's film of one of his first ever celebrity interviews, a rather awkward affair involving the actor Sir Laurence Olivier.

The series also includes a rare glimpse of Parky as a frightened war correspondent in 1967.

Rolf Harris is overcome with emotion when he's presented with lost footage, including his first film appearance in 1955 - at the age of 25 - a film that Rolf has been trying to track down himself for decades.

He's also seen talking to Stockport's Joan Bakewell in a 1967 edition of BBC2's Late Night Line Up.

Other highlights include rescued footage of Morecambe and Wise, Cliff Richard's only straight acting TV role, Bruce Forsyth in 1968 on "Tarbuck's Back" and material from The Goodies which turned up in Germany.

Max & Paddy's Road To Nowhere star Paddy McGuinness reunites the stars with the early TV material when the new series begins at 10pm on Tuesday Jan 16.

Posted by Ian Wylie on January 7, 2007 10:10 AM |

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FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES:


The Sunday Times January 07, 2007


Found: early stutterings of Parky and Rolf Richard Brooks, Arts Editor


NOW he is known as the suave king of the chat show, but footage unseen since it was first broadcast 40 years ago reveals Michael Parkinson was once a far more awkward young reporter.
In one of the clips he is shown as a reluctant and frightened war correspondent.

The sequence, from the BBC's 24 Hours current affairs programme, is among a number thought to have been destroyed but now rediscovered by the British Film Institute.

It shows Parkinson against the backdrop of the 1967 six-day war in the Middle East. "I'll tell you, I was the most terrible war correspondent,"
said Parkinson, now 71, on being shown the footage again.

"I was terrified. I was really looked after by my cameraman, who protected me. I quickly realised that I would be much better off working in the studio. It was better paid and much warmer."

Another Parkinson clip, which will be shown in Raiders of the Lost Archive on ITV on January 16, shows him interviewing Laurence Olivier. It is taken from Cinema, a 1960s series.

"It was one of the very first celebrity interviews I did," said Parkinson, who has now been conducting celebrity chats for some 30 years. "I was terrified of Olivier."

The actor gives clipped responses to Parkinson's nervous inquiries. The only interesting reply comes when Parkinson asks Olivier if he likes acting in films. "Not very much," Olivier replies tartly.

Other revealing clips show the earliest screen appearances of a young Rolf Harris. The artist and broadcaster arrived from Australia in 1952 when he was 22 and landed a small role in the 1955 film You Lucky People.

"I'd been trying to find a copy of this film for years as I'd never seen it since then," said Harris. "I was such a nonentity in those days, even on screen. So insecure too. I never knew what on earth I was doing there. I did a lot of little films."

By the mid-1960s Harris had made his name as an artist and a musician.

Another clip, newly found from 1967, shows Harris talking to Joan Bakewell on BBC2's Late Night Line Up while playing his didgeridoo.

There is also a clip from 1969 of Harris in a stylophone duet with Liberace.
"I must admit I have no memory of doing this," confessed Harris.

There is also footage of John Humphrys, the Today presenter, as a 25 year old interviewing Morecambe and Wise in 1968; Sir Cliff Richard in his screen acting role in the television drama A Matter of Diamonds in the same year; an episode of The Goodies, the 1970s comedy show, dubbed into German; and the first known footage of Bruce Forsyth filmed at a Devon resort.

Previously unseen footage of The Beatles will be shown on Timewatch on BBC2 this Friday.

It includes film shot by a 15-year-old fan of a concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco in January 1966, the last time the group performed together apart from their session on the roof of the Apple building in central London in 1969 to promote their Get Back single.