169. Out Of Town

• Out Of Town – Branding / Cider
• Out Of Town – Bee Skips / Pheasant Shoot
• Out Of Town – Appleby Horse Fair / Rams
• Out Of Town – Market / Minnows / Lobster Fishing
• Out Of Town – Brick Making / Stonehenge
• Various time-shift (details further down)

To avoid any undue excitement from the outset these are not original episodes. For an overview of the various incarnations of Out Of Town you could do worse than have a quick peek at yesterday’s post about Jack Hargreaves.

In 1986 after a long broadcasting career Jack entered semi-retirement with a set of VHS releases. These were compiled from original 16 mm location films, some of them going back to 1969, bought from Southern Television with new links and commentary recorded at Jack’s Dorset home.

In 1994 Meridian television started to broadcast these reconstructed episodes and five of them are on this tape, recorded on a repeat run in 1996.

There are a couple of minor differences between these recordings and the Contender videos. Firstly, each video segment begins with a title caption which isn’t present in the broadcast version.

And the position of Stan Bréhaut’s name in the closing credits differs.  Stan was a staff cameraman for Southern Television and as well as all the filming for Out Of Town he also filmed for news reports and numerous Southern programmes, including the much loved children’s adventure series Freewheelers.

When these Contender episodes were first broadcast by Meridian, Stan was a little miffed to see that he hadn’t received a credit – understandably given that every piece of film in the programmes had been shot by him. With Jack’s help the situation was resolved and Stan gets first billing  as the credits scroll across the bottom of the screen on these later transmissions.  On the reissued DVDs there is a static caption at the end.

In both cases his name is in his preferred abbreviated form of Stan and with the accent in place on Bréhaut, something he had never managed to get the caption writers at Southern to achieve!

When Contender Group reissued the videos on DVD in 2004 they labelled the first two discs “original series as seen on TV“, which is half true at best. The remaining seven discs made no such claim. For their part, on one example on this tape, Meridian  claimed the programme as their own.

 

The final edition “Brick Making and Stonehenge” was only very recently released by Delta Leisure as a DVD and even then only as part of the 10 disc box set. Soon afterwards Delta went into administration, consequently this particular episode is pretty scarce.

The tape then carries on to an advert break and the ends of previous temporary recordings:

• Adverts and trailers
• A Drop of Digance
• Glorious Goodwood
• CBBC continuity around Tom & Jerry
• Dalziel & Pascoe
• Auf Wiedersehen, Pet

The trailers are for an early Nick Knowles’ show for Meridian called RidgeRiders:

and an upcoming Channel 4 series Moving People …

… a reality show about moving house fronted, rather implausibly, by John Peel.

Then there is the briefest glimpse of a  young Tim Vine on stage in A Drop Of Digance.

Followed by  more time-shift ends: Racing from Goodwood; Tom & Jerry on CBBC;  Dalziel & Pascoe; and another Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

Almost unbelievably it’s another standard tape in a BASF Chrome Cassette box, together with an incomplete note of the tape contents.