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Lost Footage Of Early Beatles On The BBC Found
It was on a popular show called "Top of the Pops" and if you were on that BBC program, you knew you'd hit it big. Back in 1964, the Beatles made their first ever appearance there, but somehow the footage was never preserved.
Now a company claims to have found the precious film in possession of a late collector, which not only features the Fab Four performing two of their biggest eary hits, but even shows them clowning around behind the scenes.
“Passages of the recording show the studio, the technicians, and the make-up ladies. There were four takes of the first song, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, with two being aborted because of technical errors. During breaks, the Beatles openly joked, and could be seen dancing to amuse themselves.”
The statement added, “The other song, ‘You Can’t Do That’, had two takes. During the second of these recordings, John Lennon pulled a funny face when the camera came in for a ‘close-up’."
No word yet on when the world gets to see this lost classic, but there are promises it will be made public soon.
Long-lost footage of The Beatles’ 1964 ‘Top Of The Pops’ performance unearthed
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Re: Lost Footage Of Early Beatles On The BBC Found
Sadly, it was a very common occurrence around the world at the time for TV programs to not be officially permanently archived. In many cases, the commercial video tapes used for the broadcasts were re-used by the networks over & over again until the end of their lifespans. In other cases, such as this, the tapes were kept for some time before being disposed of due to priorities and storage constraints. Even before video tape was a thing, in the pre-World War II era, the BBC is believed to have disposed of practically all of the film reels used for telecine (film to electronic video conversion) in their early TV broadcasts from 1936 onwards.
The good news here, ironically, is that what they've been left with is a 35mm film reel, which means that it the broadcast can be re-mastered in true ultra HD format with dirt/impurity removal and restored and re-graded color (the latter if it's color film), budget permitting, as some of their music videos already have been.
Here's a couple tastes of what we might be able to expect from the re-discovered film, quality wise: