The Clitheroe Kid - s02e02 - No Match for the Kid

28:46

The Clitheroe Kid - s03e09 - The Wheels of Misfortune

28:42

The Clitheroe Kid - s03e12 - Job for the Girl

29:27

The Clitheroe Kid - s04e03 - Grandad's Back

29:13

5

29:59

The Clitheroe Kid - s04e10 - The Wreck of the Soppy Sue

29:07

The Clitheroe Kid - s06e07 - Accidents Will Happen

30:03

Where do these come from?

Ed 999

(0 Sterne)

As a condition of being given access to this collection, I have agreed not to include details of those people who provided the recordings to me, at their request; or, in some cases, because I don't have permission of the people from whom the recordings came to give out that information. Some information is publically available on the internet however. For instance, the late Peter Copeland was an old-radio collector and engineer, who became head of the National Sound Archive. He circulated many old-radio episodes that he had preseved, among collectors. Keith Lester is simply a Scottish fan of the show, who owned a couple of episodes on cassette that he had recorded in the 1960s. Many other home listeners and collectors also contributed recordings which they had held since the 1960s, or had found on open reel tapes in recent years. If you find someone's name mentioned in a filename, it will usually be the name of the person who taped or who found that recording. Much credit must go to the BBC Transcription Service, which preserved 154 episodes on LP, slightly edited due to the limitations of that format, all of which flooded onto the open market during the 1990s, when radio stations around the world were digitising their sound collections and selling-off the original vinyl discs. Much credit is also due to BBC radio producer James Casey, the man who wrote and produced the show, who preserved all the original broadcast tapes for all episodes which first aired after 1 Jan 1970, when he discovered that the BBC Sound Archive was not doing so. His tapes were digitised by the BBC in the 1990s, which then junked them: or tried to, but the late Mike Craig, another BBC radio producer, rescued them! Mike later passed them on to an old-radio collector: who had them digitised again, for his own collection. Various old-radio enthusiasts have, for some years, been collecting formerly lost episodes of the show, and donating these to BBC Archives, but at the same time have also circulated their finds amongst collectors. I was part of one such group. Lancs Archive is a division of the public record office in Lancashire, which holds a collection of radio and theatre recordings starring Jimmy Clitheroe, because he was born in that county and always lived there. Some of the items are from Jimmy's personal archives from his career, which he recorded himself using his own tape recorder, preserved after his death by his cousin, Mrs Irene Oxford, who donated his tapes to the North West Sound Archive (which has now been absorbed by the Public Record Office). Some items are taped radio episodes donated by Lancashire residents or old-radio collectors. In 2007-08 an appeal was conducted in Britain, nationwide, in nearly every local newspaper in the country, seeking lost episodes of Jimmy's radio show. This was run by Derek Boyes, a dedicated fan of the show. Some of the finds -- a small number of the hundreds of tapes donated by the public over 2 years -- were found to be formerly missing episodes. A now-defunct website was used just for that newspaper appeal. In all these cases, a very few people realised that preserving this show meant collecting the recordings in .wav format (or some lossless variant thereof), and rejecting the unfortunate old habit of turning tapes into low bitrate mp3 files. Occasionally, the only known version of an episode is still an mp3 file, sadly. But the main purpose of these people was to produce digital recordings of broadcastable quality. Personally, I've been collecting recordings of this show since 1972. It was eventually brought home to me that if I walked in front of a bus, or became a victim of covid, my recordings would in all probability be lost forever; and I wasn't willing for my fondness for this particular radio show to perish with me... ADDITIONAL #1 -- I've been asked to make it clear that all the .wav recordings (preserved here as lossless .flac and lossless .ape files) are genuine full bandwidth .wav files. None are conversions of low bitrate files! The people who have preserved these recordings had a desire to save the show in broadcast quality, and so set out to convert the surviving tapes and LPs losslessly. Only a tiny minority of the episodes presented here are mp3 files, i.e. low bitrate files, and those are in fact the episodes for which no tape was available to us. The "strange" files which are not audio files, such as the AFPK and PNG format files, are automatically generated by the Archive.org website's software. They were not uploaded by me. The main reason why the BBC lost interest in this show was that its attempt to sell the show on cassette and CD, in the 1990s, was unsuccessful. I do NOT say they didn't try, they did. But sales were poor, and this show never sold in the numbers that some other shows such as "Hancock's Half Hour", "The Navy Lark", or "The Goon Show" did. ADDITIONAL #2 (October 23rd, 2023) -- I have now added 'The Girl Who Got the Message' (series 4 episode 7), the omission of which was just an accidental oversight. Thank you for telling me. But it was omitted because I only have it as an mp3, which you probably already have. In several cases no tape of an episode has turned up, so I only have an mp3 file which I found online. If you have ANY episode on a reel or on cassette, that I have posted as an mp3, please let me know. I would like to borrow the tape to make a WAV file. As for the poor sales of the BBC Radio Collection tapes... The original cassette release of 4 episodes in 1992 was preceeded by repeats of the show on Radio 2. This was an attempt to boost sales of the cassettes. But it was a bit of a double-edged sword: on the one hand, the radio repeats in 1992 raised the show's public profile (as there had not been any repeats since 1983), but on the other hand they made a serious mistake by mainly repeating the episodes which were on the double-cassette. To the best of my recollection, three of the four episodes on the double-cassette were included in Radio 2's short season of repeats which immediately preceeded that cassette release. This may actually have harmed sales, rather than boosting them. In my opinion, they were just too much into penny-pinching to pay for the rights to more than a handful of episodes. They would only pay for 5 episodes, repeated 4 of them on Radio 2, and then tried to sell 3 that had just had a radio repeat plus one other. Also, they were too mean to pay for the music rights, for which they had broadcasting rights but not the right to sell the music. So the cassettes sold in 1992 contained no opening nor closing theme music, and had no incidental music either. So the old-radio collectors held onto their off-air copies of the Radio 2 repeats (even if they had poor recordings), because those were complete, and they ignored the cassettes, which were not complete. It was surprising that the news of this travelled so fast in those pre-internet times. It was a double-whammy, selling episodes that most people had just taped off Radio 2, and selling them in a damaged state compared to the Radio 2 broadcasts. Other shows released on tape in the 1990s were not mistreated in that way: The Goon Show, Navy Lark, Hancock, Steptoe and Round the Horne did not have the music stripped out of the cassette releases; and the cassettes mostly contained episodes which hadn't been heard on the air recently. As late as 2001, when I was investigating the BBC Sound Archive at Broadcasting House, the archives only held 13 complete episodes on the original master tapes. So in the 1990s there was a very limited choice of which episodes could be released on cassette, and the show may have appeared to have very little sales potential, compared to other shows. This, too, may have been a factor. (Other recordings actually were held elsewhere within the BBC, but very few people were yet aware of that.) You may not have understood previously that there were these specific reasons that might explain why the cassettes sold badly, and why this show was poorly handled, compared to other shows. I cannot be certain that this is a complete explanation of the poor

Thank you Ed!

dan4lau

(5 Sterne)

Thank you so much for your reply to my inquiry Ed, and thank you so much for the wonderful thing you've done making these programmes available. I totally respect the position of your donors. And it's just wonderful that people like them... and you, with such dedication and passion exist. Yes I noticed that some of the files were still MP3s, accompanied by some strange files I'm not sure of the purpose of, such as AFPK and PNG. Yes it is sad about the habit of converting tapes to low-quality MP3s, of course in the beginning it was understandable, incredible how things have advanced in such a short time regarding storage capacity. I'm also so happy to hear your sentiments concerning what might have befallen if you hadn't shared your collection. It's one of these things I often want to point out to certain collectors, but that is of course hard to do in a nice way. In any case thank you again for the hours of entertainment these shows will give, and for the information you've presented here. It's a shame about the various Clitheroe Kid websites, surprising there's not an official fan club really isn't it? And that Auntie hasn't considered the programme worthy of more commercial releases, like its contemporaries The Navy Lark and Hancock's Half Hour. Much belated addition... I'm surprised they didn't sell as well, after all there seem to be a great many people who enjoy the programme, but of course I've no actual figures to compare. By the way, do you know you're missing episode 7 of series 4, The Girl who got the Message? I was first introduced to the Clitheroe Kid in about 1996/7, when a boy at school lent me the BBC's one commercial release of the programme. I adored it immediately, and for years and years lamented that there were just those four episodes. Then at about the age of 17 I discovered the internet. (came rather late to that party), I'd actually wanted nothing to do with it until I discovered that it could furnish me with old radio programmes, which have always been my passion. I was just so tickled pink to find about fifteen more Clitheroe Kids, mostly from series15/16. Didn't have a computer of my own, so used to sit in the college library... with everyone no doubt staring at me as I rocked with smothered laughter! Another addition, 10 Nov. 2023, re: Ed's addition of 23 Oct. You make some very good points about the cassette sales, I would not be at all surprised if you were right. Isn't the whole 'rights' thing just insanely complicated! Like the recent announcement of practically all of the original Doctor Who being put on iPlayer, except the very first four episodes because: "...we don't have the rights to those,". I mean! They only made the blasted things! I know it'll be some ridiculous technicality over streaming rights I suppose, perhaps again due to music. Praying for a good quality off-air recording of episode 3 of series 1 of Hitchhiker's Guide to turn up one day. That got mutilated in commercial release because of the inclusion of Beatles music... silly old Auntie! (using it in the first place I mean.) I get it though, they could never have foreseen its popularity and all that. No, sadly I have no tape of Girl who got the Message, yes I do have the mp3, just thought I'd let you know. Finally finished labeling all the flacs with broadcast date and series and episode numbers today. One more time, thanks so so much for your hard work and generosity.