ITV
The BBC was not alone in this practice – the commercial companies that formed its main rival ITV also wiped videotapes and destroyed telerecordings, leaving gaps in their archive holdings. The state of the archives varies greatly between the different companies; Granada Television holds a large number of its older black-and-white programmes, the company having an unofficial policy of retaining as much of its broadcast material (albeit by telerecording) as possible despite financial hardship in its early years. This includes the entirety of the soap opera Coronation Street which is now held at the Yorkshire Television archive, which itself possesses largely intact archives (although some early colour shows from the late 1960s and the early 1970s such as the entire output of the drama Castle Haven, the first two series of Sez Les and the children's variety show Junior Showtime are missing and believed wiped). The former ITV company Thames Television also has a significant library.
These cases tend to be the exception, however; the former nature of the ITV network, in which private independent companies were awarded licences to serve geographical areas for a set period of time, meant that when companies lost their licences their archives were often sold to third parties and became fragmented – and/or risked being destroyed (ownership and copyright remained with the production companies rather than with the network). The archive of networked programmes made by Southern Television, for example, is now owned by the Australian media company Southern Star Group (no connection) – but Southern's regional output is in the hands of ITV plc, whilst the few surviving tapes of Associated-Rediffusion belong to many different organisations (the majority of Associated-Rediffusion's tapes were recorded in monochrome and therefore deemed of no use upon the arrival of colour broadcasting; as such they were disposed of by their successor Thames Television), although in recent years there have been occasional discoveries such as a 1959 episode of Double Your Money and the remaining missing episode of Around the World with Orson Welles, found by Ray Langstone in 2011. Many master tapes belonging to ATV have since deteriorated due to bad storage and are unsuitable for broadcasting. In particular, the ATV version of the popular soap Crossroads is missing 2,850 episodes of its original 3,555. Also often largely lost are quiz shows; few editions exist of the 1970s version of Celebrity Squares with Bob Monkhouse, or Southern's children's quiz Runaround.
Further, responsibility for archive preservation was left to individual companies. For example, ITV has no record of its live coverage of the 1969 Moon landings after the station responsible for providing the coverage, London Weekend Television, wiped the tapes. Of the 96 British inserts to the 1980s franchised Anglo-American/Canadian children's show Fraggle Rock, only 12 are known to exist as the library of the British producer (TVS) has been sold and subsequently split up.
In recent years, the trend of preserving material has started to change. The archives of Westward Television and Television South West are now held in trust for the public (The South West Film and Television Archive) whilst changes in legislation mean that dismissed ITV companies must donate archives to the British Film Institute. However, the change of ITV from a federal structure to one centralized private company means that changes of regional companies in the future seems highly unlikely.
Most material from the 1960s also only survive as telerecordings. Some early episodes are also believed to be damaged or in poor quality, whereas much of the output of other broadcasters – such as many early episodes of The Avengers (shot in the electronic studio rather than on film) produced by Associated British Corporation – have been destroyed.
Read more about this topic: Wiping, United Kingdom