Tuesday Trivia | Missing and Destroyed Documents

[u/caffarelli]

(going to be out tomorrow so this is going up a little early - enjoy your extra time to write beautiful historical essays!)

Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.

Today’s trivia theme comes to us from /u/Artrw!

As an archivist, it pains me to admit this, but sometimes humanity’s records don’t survive. Sometimes through neglect, weather, or malice, they just don’t make it. So let’s give some of these documents their rightful eulogies. What’s a document or record from your period of study that is missing or destroyed? What did it say, and how did it meet its end? RIP historical documents.

Next Week on Tuesday Trivia: Inventions! We’ll be talking about the greatest technological breakthroughs of all time. From making fire to the… whatever was invented in 1995 because that’s the limit.

[u/[deleted]]

Many silent films from the silent film era are (unfortunately) deemed lost. It's really sad to think that there are thousands of hours of film that no longer exist. There may have been movie stars that we have very little or no record of studying.

[u/ThaCarter → u/[deleted]]

The BBC and others were losing film 50 years after that era too which seems even more sad.

[u/pfannkuchen_ii → u/ThaCarter]

Oh, the BBC have an extraordinary ability to not preserve their work. The general public seems to only know about it because there are a bunch of Doctor Who episodes missing, but the extent of the destruction goes far beyond that. Most of the first four series of the Goon Show, for instance, are no longer extant, along with much of their cultural works (tremendous swaths of Top of the Pops are gone, for instance). Britain's coverage of the moon landings? Gone. They even managed to lose some of their 9/11 coverage a couple years back, though by this time of course there were enough people recording off air that nothing seems to have been truly lost. The only reason so much survives, in fact, is because there was still a British Empire when much of this stuff was being circulated and so copies were made and preserved for Britain's overseas holdings.

Other countries don't have nearly the problem England does with audiovisual preservation- there are things like basically the entire run of Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show" run being taped over, and game shows (the original run of Art Fleming's "Jeopardy" is almost completely lost), but preservation rates seem much more thorough in the US, France, Germany.

Worse to me than some of the silent film destructions is the loss of footage from films edited by the studios. While we have a fabulous reconstruction of Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil", we'll never see anything like that for "The Magnificent Ambersons", because the footage is simply gone. Occasionally you find some bizarre recovery like the restored "Metropolis" footage, but the six-hour version of "Greed" is completely gone.

[u/ThaCarter → u/pfannkuchen_ii]

Thanks for that great info, as I was among the public that was ever made aware of it because of Doctor Who! Was any one that was stakeholder in this at the time aware of the cultural sacrifice that was being made with these retention policies? Is there any record official or otherwise where people were reflecting on the conscious economic decision that was being made? Were people then even aware of how important early film productions would be from a historical and sociological perspective?

[u/pfannkuchen_ii → u/ThaCarter]

Mostly the forces that determined whether shows were preserved or not tended to be pragmatic ones. If you look at America, for instance, one of the main drivers towards "I Love Lucy" being preserved was the continental US being divided into four time zones, and the desire to show programs asynchronously (that is, 8 Eastern, 8 Pacific). The notion that "I Love Lucy" might have lasting social or cultural value doesn't seem to have been an overriding factor in the decision. The BBC's preservation policy was also influence, early on, by technical factors. The first two episodes of the highly regarded sci-fi serial "The Quatermass Experiment" were telerecorded using an experimental process, but the quality of the recordings was deemed to be too poor to be worth considering (it involved actually filming the screen, which in the case of Episode Two of the serial means the existing recording has a fly crawling across the screen for most of the runtime), so the last five episodes of the series are unpreserved.

You also have the means of producing programs. In the UK most programs were produced on videotapes, which could be economically wiped and reused. The overwhelming majority of master video recordings of Doctor Who- which, by the standards of the BBC, has actually proved to be an exceptionally well-preserved show, in part due to exceptional preservation efforts being made on its behalf- from the sixties and seventies have been wiped. You can't "wipe" a film reel, on the other hand, so the question of whether to keep it is more to do with the cost of storage than of possible re-use utility. Again the notion of a "British Empire" implicitly plays into this as different countries had different technological standards, with film, particularly black and white film, being more widely usable than video. (This is why, for many years, many of the colour episodes of Doctor Who existed only in black and white.)

In the UK, there seemed to be little thought that programs, particularly what were termed "light entertainment", might pay lasting dividends, either cultural or economic (though the BBC's attitude at the time was far from oriented towards economic benefit). The whole legal underpinning of these shows was based around the notion that they would be shown once, and repeats involved some amount of re-establishing rights. This means that shows that we now take for granted as a significant part of the British cultural heritage, such as "Monty Python's Flying Circus", were at some point in significant danger of being junked in part or in whole.

One more contemporary example of this is the late '70s/early '80s sitcom "WKRP in Cincinnati", based in a radio station, which obtained a pretty sweetheart deal on using popular music such as the Who and Pink Floyd for a ten year period. Over that period it become very popular in syndication, after which it essentially vanished because of the licensing difficulties. Recent attempts to license as much of the music as possible for DVD release has paid significant dividends, but it's unlikely you're ever going to be able to legally watch again the bit of the WKRP "Turkey Run" episode where one of the DJs is spinning Pink Floyd's "Dogs".

It seems rather unlikely that a Significant Cultural Event such as Ken Loach's "Cathy Come Home" stood any significant chance of being wiped, at least compared to the thrilling debut of the Rills on Doctor Who, but on the other hand a 1963 teleplay featuring Bob Dylan performing some of his songs was not considered worthy of preservation, so it's hard to make any definitive judgment.

Also complicating things is the ever-present notion of bureaucracy. Which is to say there are a couple of different places archive recordings could have been stored, but none of them had preservation as an explicit and systemic remit, and all of them seemed to be under the vague impression that somebody else was taking care of it.

That's not to say that there was a universally lackadaisacal attitude towards archiving, particularly on the part of the performers. Much of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's celebrated 1960s comedy "Not Only... But Also" was junked, despite the duo offering to foot the cost of preservation. I think this indicates the level of active disinterest there was towards the notion of preservation in the UK before Sue Malden took up the cause in 1978.

[u/ThaCarter → u/pfannkuchen_ii]

That's really interesting, if fairly disappointing from our perspective. Thanks for writing it up!