The Mausoleum Club Forum

The second half of the interview - Philip Martin (1938-2020) Part Two: Philip Martin on The Remainder Man (BBC Play for Today , 1982) and The Unborn (1980): https://forgottentelevisiondrama.wordpress.com/2021/04/22/philip-martin-1938-2020-part-two-philip-martin-on-the-remainder-man-bbc-play-for-toda...

John Hoare of Dirty Feed searches for the source of the "I know exactly who reads the papers" routine: What the Papers Say http://www.dirtyfeed.org/2021/04/what-the-papers-say/

James Chapman's Swashbucklers: The costume adventure series has a lot about Kip Carpenter's serials and is well worth reading.

The first installment of a three part interview and tribute on Forgotten Television Drama: Philip Martin (1938-2020) Part One: Philip Martin on Gangsters (BBC Play for Today , 1975, and series, 1976-78) - https://forgottentelevisiondrama.wordpress.com/2021/04/08/philip-martin-1938-2020-part-one-phil...

Stuck in lockdown last year, the veteran television drama director Brian Parker occupied himself by starting to write his memoirs. Unfortunately he had only got up to the first chapter when he died in December, but the Forgotten Television Drama blog can publish what he had written: Brian Parker – G...

Stuck in lockdown last year, Brian Parker occupied himself by starting to write his memoirs. Unfortunately he had only got up to the first chapter when he died in December, but the Forgotten Television Drama blog can publish what he had written: Brian Parker – Getting Started as a TV Director, 1964-...

An overlooked detail: The 90m cut that is now circulating isn't the original broadcast version, which runs to 105m.

Play For Today: Volume 2 has been announced. The plays included are: Stocker’s Copper (Written by Tom Clarke | Dir. Jack Gold, 1972) The Elephant’s Graveyard (Written by Peter McDougall | Dir. John Mackenzie, 1976) Gotcha/ Campion’s Interview (Written by Barrie Keeffe / Brian Clark | Directed by Ba...

I am guessing if it were made now there would be warnings before and the standard 'if you have been affected by issues in this programme, please call..." at the end. Written by Brian Phelan. If the nightmares and trauma are anything like Article Five , Phelan's banned 1975 Centre Play about torture...

Aren't there some Blue Peters that are telerecordings into the 80s? There's one from 1981 and one from 1982 (there's also a missing episode from that week, thanks to a wiped 2" tape). Perhaps the latest black & white telerecording of all is some location footage of the 1989 Doctor Who story Surviva...

Excluding Crossroads , what are the latest ATV drama episodes to be missing? Not missing, but looking at the TVBrain listings, I am surprised to discover that a 1981 ATV ITV Playhouse drama, Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind only survives as a b/w 16mm telerecording. That's about five years later than when...

Richard Marson's Blue Peter: Inside The Archives tells us:

Appeal target reached: Presenters drive old people's bus into studio
Equipment bought with appeal money
Review of the year
Birds' Christmas tree and winter bird food
James Bond's sledge + tk clip

The television director Brian Parker died last month, shortly after the Blu-ray release of his 1973 Play For Today film, Shakespeare - Or Bust (he was delighted to receive a copy, but didn't have anything to play it on!). My old colleague Lez Cooke had been in correspondence with him last year, and ...

This series of articles hops out of chronological sequence to tell us about the BBC Television Christmas night drama for 1960. This one survives in the BBC Archives!:

Tuppence in the Gods by Michael Voysey - https://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/20 ... gods-1960/

The next two plays in the season, both lost: The Ruffians by Alun Owen - https://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/20-new-plays-the-ruffians-1960/ Pay Day by Roderick Barry - https://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/20-new-plays-pay-day-1960/ An intriguing, sad, story behind the autobiographical Pay Day .

Interesting infographic from Mark Gibbings-Jones: The programmes shown on Christmas Day BBC1 on the most occasions, 1946-2020 https://twitter.com/BrokenTV/status/1338548250656301056 . (enlarged version here - https://postimg.cc/N2XvpB0z )

None of those sources tell you what his real name was or about his life after 1960, though.

This is an impressive ongoing investigation that will be worth keeping track of over the coming weeks. John Wyver has hooked on to a forgotten, prestigious, 1960-61 season of twenty new original plays for BBC Television, and is blogging about each play in turn. Introduction: '20 new plays', BBC, 196...

John Wyver on a (surviving) BBC Television Gala entertainment, and competing Light Entertainment on the just-started ITV: This Is Music Hall (1955) - https://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/th ... hall-1955/

John Hoare on tracing the source of a recent addition to the field of misremembered Fawlty Towers quotes - http://www.dirtyfeed.org/2020/11/faulty ... -with-him/

For those interested in ITV history, David Elstein for openDemocracy is fascinating on the long-term fall-out of Thames Television’s Death on the Rock report in 1988: Thatcher’s poisonous television legacy is still being felt - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/thatchers-poisonous-tel...

The key to the success of the documentary was the centrality of the archive. We were doubly fortunate; first that Illuminations were given the keys to the BBC Archive and were able to use anything, and then fortunate in the care with which they treated it and the imagination and 'deep archive' knowl...

I presume the list takes the most-watched edition of each title, I mean EastEnders was regularly topping 20 million in the late 80s, even if that did include the Sunday repeat. I was intrigued by the most watched News of the 1980s... It turns out that the bulletin for Sunday 25 November 1984 was br...

The JICTAR figure for the episode broadcast on Fri 18 January 1980 is an impressive 19.3m (the second most watched programme that week), so its not a wholly fallacious claim. Only two episodes of the repeat run got into the Top 20, though. ...but one of the ones that did got into the Top 20 most wa...

The latest Forgotten Television Drama ' Play for Today at 50' blog post is Nipper by John Hill: https://forgottentelevisiondrama.wordpress.com/2020/10/06/play-for-today-nipper/ A diary for all of the assorted fiftieth anniversary activities this month: Streaming now: BFI at Home 'Play for Today at 5...

David Edgar, Lisa Kerrigan, Jack Thorne and Ken Trodd on the 'BFI at Home' panel discussion for the Blu-ray and season. Convened by John Wyver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aDqm33 ... e=youtu.be

A previously unpublished 2000 interview by Lez Cooke, posted as part of the Forgotten Television Drama 'Play for Today at 50' series: Mike Leigh and Play for Today - https://forgottentelevisiondrama.wordpr ... for-today/

This handy page details all of the autumn Play for Today activities - https://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/play-for-today-50-years-on/ Two new things that we learn are that the Radio 4 feature is to be an edition of Archive on Four , produced by Just Radio and presented by Alison Steadman and that t...

The latest Forgotten Television Drama ' Play for Today at 50' post is about a play on the BFI collection: Jon Dear on A Photograph . Contains spoilers: https://forgottentelevisiondrama.wordpress.com/2020/09/28/play-for-today-a-photograph/ Reading this made has me realise how rewarding it might be to...

I wonder if there was a higher proportion of lone viewers watching Crossroads at 6.30 than there would have been watching a sitcom at 8.30, or drama series at 9.00 (programmes that would perhaps be more likely to be watched by whole families, or couples together). No multiplier could take this into ...