History
Swap Shop was a success, attracting substantial ratings not only among its target audience of children, but also students and parents. It ended in 1982, to allow the presenters to move on to other projects - notably Edmonds, who became one of the highest-profile TV presenters in the UK. It was replaced by a series of similar programmes, most notably Saturday Superstore, Going Live! and Live & Kicking.
This first ever question for the live audience was, 'Where will the next Olympic games be held (1980)'. Moscow was the answer.
Swap Shop is poorly represented in the BBC archive. For some time it was believed that either the programmes were never routinely recorded in the first place, or they had been wiped on the orders of the BBC's Archive Selector Adam Lee in 1993. The truth, as related by ex-Blue Peter editor Richard Marson on the archive television forum The Mausoleum Club in 2006, is that almost every edition of Swap Shop was recorded in full every week onto two 90-minute Quad tapes. These tapes were held by the BBC until the late 1980s, at which time the Deputy Head of Children's Television, Roy Thompson, allowed many of them to be wiped and sold to Australia as recycled stock. Although Quad tape was considered obsolete in the UK, Australia was still using it extensively at that time, and as the Swap Shop tapes had no physical splices in them, they were considered ideal for re-use.
As a consequence of this action, many of the clips used in the retrospective It Started With Swap Shop and as extras on some DVD releases of other BBC shows had to be taken from domestic video recordings that had survived in private hands. Amongst the editions wiped were those featuring appearances by Blondie, XTC, Trumpton creator Gordon Murray, and numerous cast and crew members of Doctor Who.
On 20 December 2007, the BBC announced that Swap Shop was returning to BBC Two for a 13 week run. Barney Harwood presented the new show with Basil Brush. The new show is titled Basil's Swap Shop. The first series went well so the BBC commissioned a second series of the Saturday mornings series.
Read more about this topic: Multi-Coloured Swap Shop
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“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
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