Forty Years Ago Today…

This may seem like an odd commemoration, but it was forty years ago today that I first used a video recorder. As I recall, Dad rented the VCR from an electronics store called Granada (some of the first blank tapes we got were branded “Granada”). The first movie we recorded was the first Star Trek film. That would have been on Monday, September 3rd, 1984. I had my opportunity to play with the VCR the next day, Tuesday, September 4th, 1984. How am I so sure of these dates? I still have a tape of things I recorded that day, and this is on that tape:

That’s a page from Ceefax, the BBC’s Teletext service that provided news and other information to those who had a TV set that could decode the signal. Notice the date on the top?

The VCR pictured at the top of the page is not the exact model we had, but it’s the closest I could find. It was a JVC with the large buttons that clunked when you pressed them. One feature it had that’s not on the one pictured is an input for a remote pause. This was a simple switch that plugged into the front of the VCR that enabled you to pause the tape without having to get up (as long as the cord stretched as far as your chair). I remember having that device because I made much use of it, creating music videos by flipping channels and recording pieces of whatever was on at the time then dubbing music over the top (I figured out from the user manual how to plug in a cassette player and record audio over the video).

Why might these tapes be important? Because this is how modern history is written. Home videos are not just an archive of our lives, but they can also be an archive of our culture. The news stories that were selected for broadcast, the shows we chose to record, weather reports, odd personal interest stories on local news programs–they tell us something about the times in which we live that would be lost to future generations without tapes like these.

I have several videotapes of stuff I recorded from the TV over a period from 1984 to around 1990 that I have recently been able to digitize thanks to the generosity of my daughter who got me a PAL VCR for Christmas (PAL is the video format used in the UK–I have not been able to play these tapes since I moved to the US which uses the NTSC format). Over the coming months, I’ll be posting some of the gems I find on these tapes to my YouTube channel (non-monetized, of course). I’ll draw attention to items of particular interest here.