Imagine that there are works of art that can only be seen in certain circumstances, by certain privileged individuals. Individuals who can tell the less privileged about these works, but cannot show them, or copies of them, in public. If the works of art in question were paintings or novels, this bizarre situation would be unthinkable in the modern era. But when it comes to television, the law-and the practice of those who hold the archives-is ensuring that such is the case. In effect, you are being denied access to much of the medium's history.
Last year, in a lecture celebrating the 25th season of his South Bank Show, Melvyn Bragg declared that "we can now examine the television of 30 or 40 years ago as closely as the novels of the time, and who is to say that Fawlty Towers or Blackadder might not survive longer than the English comic novels of that era?" But if by "we" Bragg means the ordinary viewing and reading public, he is wrong. Although it seems that, as television channels proliferate, more and more old programmes are being reshown, the fact is that some of the best dramas or documentaries of the last few decades are unavailable to the public. We may have helped pay for them, but we now have little chance of seeing them. From bookshops or public libraries we can buy or borrow the prizewinning novels of the 1970s or 1980s but, Fawlty Towers aside, what chance have we of seeing a good comedy-drama series from the same era, such as Don't Forget to Write or Private Schultz? If either of these had been released as a commercial video, you could have bought it or might have found it in your local library. Or perhaps it would be in the country's only accessible television archive, the "TV Heaven" gallery at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford. Here a collection of some 600 "classic" dramas, comedies, children's shows, documentaries and the like from the last 50 years of British television can be viewed, thanks to a special deal with the copyright owners. Alas, neither of the above-mentioned series have been admitted to TV Heaven.
If you can pass yourself off as a serious researcher, you can view the copy of any programme that the British Film Institute has in its National Film and Television Archive. But you will have to pay a fee and you will not be able to take the tape home. The BBC will lend out viewing tapes from its archive to those with the right credentials but even they will have to pay and are not allowed to make copies. "We have to make sure academics don't use it for teaching," a BBC archivist told me recently.
That remark illustrates the absurd restrictions that surround the use of archive video. Because of the way rights have been negotiated, anything that comes from a video archive cannot be publicly shown, even in the context of a school or university lecture about Dennis Potter's work, say, or the development of television documentary. Similarly, if a teacher shows his or her students a commercial video of something first shown on television, he or she is breaking the law.
There are exceptions. The BBC puts out a range of videos "for education and training" which includes material such as the BBC Television Shakespeare series that ran from 1978 to 1985-the copy of Hamlet that I saw is prefaced with the warning "This programme is to be screened for training purposes only." (Training on how not to be a prince of Denmark?)
For teachers, a far more useful tool is the 1988 copyright, designs and patents act, which gives them the right to record off-air any radio and television broadcast without infringing copyright. Section 35 (1) of the act set up the Educational Recording Agency (ERA), which licenses educational establishments to record "for educational purposes any radio or television broadcast and cable output of ERA members." Even so, this latitude allowed to educators can lead to odd anomalies. A class on television dramatisations of Dickens, could use a recording, made under the ERA, of Tony Marchant's adaptation of Great Expectations (shown on BBC2 in April 1999). An earlier television version of the novel, shown on BBC1 in the 1981 and starring Stratford Johns as Magwitch, is available commercially from BBC Video. But, as we have seen, that will be prefaced by a copyright notice that forbids it from being shown publicly, even in a classroom. A teacher could watch it at home and tell his or her students about it, but could not show it to them. But if a re-run channel such as BBC Choice or UK Drama chose to show the serial, then it could be taped under an ERA licence and legitimately shown to students.
Bragg is right to stress the accessibility of television and its value as an artistic medium. All over the world, people are tuning in to some of the finest current products of the medium, from The Sopranos to The Simpsons. We are free to videotape current programmes off-air and then watch the tapes at home. But easy access to non-current television programmes-the ability to examine them "as closely as the novels of the time"-is exactly what we do not have, and may never have. Compared to the availability of literature or music from previous eras, television's past has disappeared. It may still exist but if it is unviewed and unremembered, what is the point?
We can, of course, buy or borrow serious books on television drama, collections of television reviews or books about EastEnders without breaking copyright laws. But the written word is fairly liberated compared to the moving image.
Let me conclude with two examples. In the summer of 1989, Channel 4 put out an impressive five-and-a-half-hour drama serial written by Simon Moore called Traffik. Filmed in England, Germany and Pakistan, it was about the international drugs trade and succeeded not just as a thriller but also as a character-based investigation of the links between opium growers, drug smugglers, agents of law enforcement and heroin users. It deservedly won awards and was later shown more than once on PBS in North America. But by the mid-1990s it had disappeared from sight. It was only when a Hollywood producer picked up the rights and got a new version of the story turned into the two-and-a-half-hour cinema film Traffic, directed by Steven Soderbergh and relocated to Mexico and the US, that the original Traffik was recalled. But not recalled well: film critics praised Soderbergh for his use of different colour filters for different strands of his multilayered narrative, as if the idea was his and not lifted from Alastair Reid's direction of the original serial. Traffik had disappeared from the cultural memory. Still, as a result of Traffic, the longer (and superior) version got shown at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York and Los Angeles last year, and received a late-night repeat on Channel 4. But that would not have happened without the stimulus of the less worthy, but more prestigious, cinema film.
Now go back 13 more years to an even less well-remembered serial. In 1976, ITV put out a 26-part (yes, 26-part) adaptation of Arnold Bennett's Clayhanger trilogy. Produced by the now-defunct Midlands company, ATV, it was adapted by Douglas Livingstone and featured a range of top-rank actors, notable among them Janet Suzman, Peter McEnery and Harry Andrews. You can read some comments about it in Clive James's first collection of television criticism, Visions Before Midnight-but can you view any of it? Well, one episode can be seen at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, and there's one other episode in the BFI archives. Because the series was made before home videocassette recorders became common, few other episodes are readily available, and for years the Arnold Bennett Society, a band of enthusiasts for the Potteries-born novelist, has tried to locate copies of every episode to show them to its members. ATV no longer exists, having been replaced by Central Television, which is now owned by the London-based Carlton, from whom the society has so far failed to secure any answers as to whether further Clayhanger episodes are available. Meanwhile, by a roundabout route, the Bennettians have got hold of copies of a few more episodes-videotaped from a later showing on Irish television-and are circulating copies of these among society members. Whether this is legal, I am not sure.
The film Fahrenheit 451-still available on video, I trust-ended with a memorable sequence in which people memorised and thus preserved (contrary to the law of the land) the texts of destroyed literature such as David Copperfield or Don Quixote. Just so are the living rooms and college libraries of Britain preserving, on perhaps illegally copied videocassettes, the country's television heritage. It is not a satisfactory situation, but what else can be done? Melvyn Bragg may celebrate the fact that "at last technology has given popular art access to posterity," but what use is that technology when the video archives are hardly more accessible than medieval chained libraries were 700 years ago?
