Quote: Steve Sunshine @ July 16 2010, 9:39 PM BSTWho was the new fella who wasn't in Reginald Perrin?
Edinburgh Award-winning Jonny Sweet. He's definitely one to watch out for and has a few projects in the pipeline. You may have seen him on TV before without realising it. He played a young David Cameron in that Channel 4 drama, and has guest starring in that episode of The Inbetweeners where they go to a nightclub. He was brilliant in the Radio 4 sitcom Party too I ought to add.
Quote: Aaron @ July 16 2010, 9:37 PM BST2 Entertain are worse than useless with archive programming. They just don't care.
Yes, it's odd that. They take great care with some things such as Doctor Who releases, where they produce a great deal of new material, but for archive comedy, they seem to do the bare minimum. Very often the extras on these are listed as 'scene selection'. Yeah, cheers.
Network(for eg.) by contrast, seem to put a lot more effort in to these type of releases and sourcing extra material.
Got around to seeing the Lost Sketches, and agree with the general comments that it would have been better to see those sketches which don't exist in any form.
I'm not really so much bothered by 'extras'. I know that, if I'm buying a sitcom from 1971, the chance of them having anything 'extra' is relatively slim, and what they may be able to dig out is likely to be of little consequence. What annoys me is, to a minor extent the lack of any restoration on many releases, but for the most part that they just don't release things, issue them innaccurately, and leave us waiting years between one series and the next. There's so much good stuff lying in archives that they'd make a mint from releasing, but they're just not bothered by most of it. The complete (surviving) Dad's Army has only been available for a few years now; what does that say?
I think it says something that they didn't even bother releasing the relatively classic 'Hi-De-Hi!' off their own backs.
Or The Good Life.
And countless others.
But to be fair, who buys the rights doesn't (or rather, didn't) have an awful lot to do with 2 Entertain. Particularly in the case of Hi-De-Hi!, the rights to which I'm sure were sold pre-2 Entertain. Ultimately, Worldwide are probably obliged to hand the tapes over to whoever makes the best offer, and Universal Playback could afford more than BBC Video.
