Episodes
Steptoe and Son is rare among 1960s BBC television programmes in that every episode has survived, despite the mass wiping of BBC archive holdings between 1972 and 1978. However, all the installments from the first 1970 series and all but two from the second that were originally made in colour only survive in the form of black and white domestic videotape recordings. Myth has it that the episodes were recorded off-air by Galton and Simpson themselves, but in fact they were copies made from the master tapes for them by an engineer at the BBC using a Shibaden SV-700 half-inch reel-to-reel b/w video recorder—a forerunner of the video cassette recorder. In 2008 the first reel of a b/w telerecording of the series 5 episode "A Winter's Tale" (lasting approx 15 minutes) was returned to the BBC; this is the only telerecording of a colour Steptoe and Son episode known to still exist.
The original 2" Quad videotapes of all the episodes of the original 1962–1965 series were wiped in the late 1960s. However, these episode mostly survive on film transfers of the original videotapes as 16 mm black and white telerecordings. The exception being 'My Old Man's a Tory' which only exists as an optical transfer made from a domestic 405 line reel to reel videotape obtained from Galton and Simpson.
The BBC has released ten DVDs of the series—each of the eight series, and two compilations entitled "The Very Best of Steptoe and Son" volumes 1 and 2. Two Christmas specials are also available on DVD, as are two feature films: Steptoe and Son, and Steptoe and Son Ride Again. A boxed set of Series 1–8 and the two Christmas specials was released on Region 2 DVD by 2entertain on 29 October 2007.
Also 52 episodes were remade for BBC radio, initially on The Light Programme in 1966/67 and later Radio 2 from 1971-1976.
Read more about this topic: Steptoe And Son
Famous quotes containing the word episodes:
“What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)