Collecting is one of the great hobbies and can have cultural and historical significance in preserving important artefacts. But it can also tip over into being an obsession, sometimes leading to hoarding. Very often the contents of a collection are known only to the collector, which means that when they die and someone unfamiliar with the material has to deal with it, valuable items could be unknowingly disposed of and lost to posterity.
This is now a reality in the world of vintage film and TV programme collecting. Several prominent collectors have died in recent years and there are fears important material could have been just thrown away as their homes were cleared. This realisation led to the founding of an initiative called Film is Fabulous (FiF) with the aim of retrieving such collections, cataloguing them, restoring any damaged material and returning them to the relevant archives.
FiF came about after an open day for the film collecting community at a late collector’s home in 2022, where people were confronted by film cans and other material filling the bedrooms and garage of a three-bedroom house. “It was rammed,” comments Paul Vanezis, who went along on behalf of the BFI. “From what I could see there were some interesting items but nothing groundbreaking. However, you can’t go through an uncatalogued collection in a day and the house needed to be cleared, so there was a danger everything would end up in landfill,”
Vanezis is a freelance producer/director who has worked on a number of significant restoration projects, including the entire Monty Python’s Flying Circus series, Morecambe & Wise and Doctor Who. He is also a collector but more focused on finding lost programmes or elements to restore existing material. While at the open day, Vanezis met John Franklin, whose interest is in feature films. “John is purely into film and didn’t know about archive TV,” Vanezis explains. “So I brought him up to speed on that side.
Realising that rare features and vintage TV shows could be at risk as more collections became vulnerable to disposal, Vanezis and Franklin began working with other enthusiasts and film historians at the Cinema and Television History Institute (CATHI) of De Montfort University (DMU) to secure and identify movies and old TV programmes held on film stock.
FiF was formalised as a project with DMU in the summer of 2023 and collections started arriving at the university towards the end of last year. Case studies began earlier in 2024 to catalogue and secure specific items. Vanezis emphasises that neither FiF nor DMU is able to act as an archive; the aim is to recover and log material, after which it can be transferred onto digital media, which may also involve cleaning or more extensive restoration work. The physical film is then either returned to the original broadcaster, if it still exists, other archives or sold at auction.
The first case study was of a collection that had been built up over 30 years (Vanezis preferred not to name individual deceased collectors because, in some cases, the estates are still in probate). This did throw up some missing items of old UK TV, including programmes produced by former broadcasters ATV (ITC Entertainment), Associated-Rediffusion, Southern and Thames, as well as the BBC. Material that already existed was sent for auction. “I did know this collector personally,” says Vanezis. “He was a bit of a magpie and, like other collectors, never turned down anything he was offered. We never spoke about any missing programmes he had and although I knew he had an extensive collection I didn’t know how extensive it was.”
Vanezis observes that “most collectors like to think they know what they’ve got” and this knowledge has seen some missing episodes, for example of Doctor Who, returned over the last 20 years. In many cases the film cans are labelled but often only with the name of a programme, not any details that might reveal buried treasure, which has meant going through almost every individual can and film.
Because the intention of the project is not to retain material long-term it does not require an involved media asset management system. Instead, Vanezis explains, the films being brought are catalogued according to criteria laid down by FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) and the BFI. “The acquired information is simply inputted to a spreadsheet,” he says. “The kind of information we gather includes title and subtitle, gauge and length/duration, stock date if available, condition and the owner.”
The items are also numbered so material can be tracked. “For the purposes of the pilot study this is [on] a simple label but in the future, items will be barcoded,” Vanezis says. “The bulk of the material will go to auction, so information regarding condition is important for the auction houses but also for any of the copyright holders that may take the original material.”
Several collections have already been received at DMU and were part of the pilot case studies that ran this year. The painstaking investigation and cataloguing of the contents has unearthed some unexpected treasures. On the film side the 1919 silent movie Sealed Hearts, thought lost for nearly a century, was discovered on tinted 35mm nitrate stock. Directed by Ralph Ince for Selznick Pictures, the print is being returned to the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York State for restoration.
The FiF scheme has been as successful, if perhaps more so, in bringing to light TV productions that were missing from the archives. These have included complete programmes – such as three episodes of the 1970 series of BBC children’s show Basil Brush and a 1967 ATV music special starring singer Tom Jones – and programme fragments like the soundless insert rushes from the second instalment of the 1968 two-part episode Take it with a Pinch of Salt from influential BBC crime car drama Z-Cars.
Among the most significant finds have been two episodes of The Third Man, a 1959-62 series loosely based on the 1949 film noir of the same name, one of which was missing entirely and one that did exist but not in the BBC Archive; and two episodes of The Vise (sic) and one of its sequel, Saber of London. These were produced by the American-born Danziger brothers, who made mystery melodramas in Britain during the late 1950s and early ‘60s for the American market as well as the UK.
“The various Danziger productions came from the fourth case study and are 3 mm negatives,” Vanezis says. “That catalogue of filmed programmes is incomplete in official archives. If something turns out to be unique, or a master as opposed to a duplicate print, we’ll give that much closer attention than a general print that’s been in circulation for many years, which does not mean some of the 16mm dupes we’ve come across aren’t important either. An example of this is The Third Man, a series of half-hours starring Michael Rennie. It was co-produced by the BBC, which retained the UK rights but doesn’t have copies of everything, and we don’t know of anyone else with 35mm originals or anything else of it. So the BBC is interested in episodes of The Third Man on any broadcastable format that might help complete its collection.”
As for the condition of films being brought in, Vanezis describes it as “very variable.” He continues that every collection has some material suffering from vinegar syndrome, which affects cellulose-acetate-based film. This is caused by not being stored properly in conditions of high humidity and temperature, which leads to buckling and shrinkage. Another serious problem is if the wrong glue was used to make edits when commercials were spliced into a programme. This can dry out and cause the film to come apart when passed through equipment such as ultrasonic cleaners or film scanners.
The Danziger shows have been so affected by vinegar syndrome that many are now solid blocks of film after liquefying at some point in the past and then drying out. Vanezis fears some might be beyond retrieval right now but thanks to a crowd-funded scheme, there is some hope. Tests carried out on a missing episode of Saber of London at restoration facility R3store Studios retrieved the visuals from the 35mm negatives, which will be scanned at 4K after the prints have been cleaned. Unfortunately, the situation with the separate optical soundtrack is described as “more problematic” and further tests are being carried out to see what can be done with it.
The broadcast world is now more aware of the need to preserve programmes after the wiping and junking of many shows from the ‘60s and early ‘70s left big gaps in the archives. Those missing pieces could return at some time – and some are already – thanks to the enthusiasm of a very particular breed of collector.
This article originally appeared in the December issue of TVBEurope, which is available to download here
