This might come off as strange to you, Americans. Over her in Eastern Europe, local TV stations behave like nothing except music videos and some movies was produced in the 90's and 2000-2005. It's like they have deleted all their archives. When asked to give you a copy, they always deny or say that all copies were deleted. Of course, it sucks having your favorite local childhood shows deleted, but there are even more serious implications. It's like they are trying to erase part of our TV history. I think they do it in order to falsify our recent history. For example, Wikipedia articles concerning results from local elections before 2005 are falsified with wrong data. And of course one can never get a TV record, showing the results from past elections, e.g. of the 2003 local elections. It's virtually impossible. It's like we are denied to see reruns and archive footage from the 90's and the first half of the 00's.

That's rather surprising since in the US/UK, 98% of everything made since around 1980 still exists in the vault someplace or another (assuming the tapes don't decay to whatever has been released). It may have been due to limited tapes available and/or cost immediately following the Cold War and this required wiping each tape to re-record. That may not be surprising as E. Europe has played catch up, and with digital video available, the days about worrying that video will be lost is pretty much a thing of the past (even some local news broadcasts are archived nowadays!)

That's rather surprising since in the US/UK, 98% of everything made since around 1980 still exists in the vault someplace or another (assuming the tapes don't decay to whatever has been released). It may have been due to limited tapes available and/or cost immediately following the Cold War and this required wiping each tape to re-record. That may not be surprising as E. Europe has played catch up, and with digital video available, the days about worrying that video will be lost is pretty much a thing of the past (even some local news broadcasts are archived nowadays!)


I believe the UK TV archives have been kept since the 1960s/70s (BBC destroyed a lot of footage to make way for new as you rightly pointed out) so they will always be locked away from this point on. I think what Jock is talking about is the attitude of TV executives over here in the UK. They rarely take chances and flood the channels with the same type of programming (for example we get a lot of 'reality'-based shows/souped up talent contests on Saturday nights and during the day on BBC they flood the programming with either antique contests or house-buying shows). In short, there is little variety on UK TV.

The CITV (Children's ITV) channel did take an 'educated gamble' recently and have a weekend of archive retro programming for adults to celebrate it's 30 years on the TV which I thought was cool but then will we ever see the like of that again until it's next milestone birthday?

I believe the UK TV archives have been kept since the 1960s/70s (BBC destroyed a lot of footage to make way for new as you rightly pointed out) so they will always be locked away from this point on. I think what Jock is talking about is the attitude of TV executives over here in the UK. They rarely take chances and flood the channels with the same type of programming (for example we get a lot of 'reality'-based shows/souped up talent contests on Saturday nights and during the day on BBC they flood the programming with either antique contests or house-buying shows). In short, there is little variety on UK TV.

The CITV (Children's ITV) channel did take an 'educated gamble' recently and have a weekend of archive retro programming for adults to celebrate it's 30 years on the TV which I thought was cool but then will we ever see the like of that again until it's next milestone birthday?


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It's a cynical programming schedule that seems to have lasted around ten to fifteen years perhaps. In the UK, we have to pay a yearly TV licence too - that royally sucks.