Lost television broadcasts are television programs that were not preserved after their original airing, rendering them permanently lost. This particularly affects television programs that aired before the widespread use of home video recording and digital archiving. A significant portion of early television programming was never recorded, largely because recording equipment was unavailable or the content was considered to have little monetary or historical value.
Wiping Wiping and junking are colloquial terms for actions taken by radio, television, production and broadcasting companies to erase or destroy old audiotapes, videotapes, and kinescopes. Although the practice was once typical, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, wiping is much less common today.
Ongoing recovery efforts
Australia The majority of locally produced original programing in Australia was funded by the government-owned Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). Commercial stations created their own programs, yet by June 1964, ABC had produced 185 of the 212 plays, all 31 operas, and 90 of the 95 ballets shown on Australian television in that period. Although many important ABC programs from these early days were captured as kinescopes, most of this material was later lost or destroyed. In a 1999 newspaper article on the subject, author Bob Ellis recounted the story of a large collection of kinescopes of early ABC drama productions and other programs, including some of the first Australian Shakespeare television productions and the pioneering popular music show Six O'Clock Rock. Learning that the ABC planned to dispose of these recordings, Bruce Beresford (then a production assistant at the ABC) arranged for a friend to pose as a silver nitrate dealer, and the anonymous collector purchased the films for a nominal cost. Subsequently, the collector occasionally rented some of the recordings out to schools for a small fee. However, the daughter of one of the actors involved (Owen Weingott), recognized her father from a Shakespeare production and told him about it. Assuming that ABC still owned the print and was making money out of these recordings without compensating the actors, Weingott lodged an official complaint. Commonwealth police descended on the illegal collector, but he was warned that they were coming, and in a panic, he destroyed almost all the material he possessed. The National Film and Sound Archive holdings of 1950s-era shows include several episodes of the 1957 discussion series Leave It to the Girls, most of the 1958–1959 soap opera Autumn Affair, and several episodes of the comedy game show The Pressure Pak Show.
Brazil From 1968 to 1969, Rede Tupi produced new episodes of the telenovela Beto Rockfeller by recording over previous episodes; as a result, few of the older episodes survived. After the closure of TV Tupi in 1980, the 536 tapes at its São Paulo studios were transported to a warehouse in the São Paulo municipality of Cotia. They were left to deteriorate there until being recovered by the Cinemateca Brasileira in 1985 and subsequently restored by TV Cultura in 1989. Only two Rede Tupi–owned and operated stations are known to have any preserved videotapes; TV Itacolomi's archives are now owned by TV Alterosa, the Minas Gerais affiliate of SBT in Belo Horizonte. In contrast, almost all of TV Piratini's material was lost in a fire in 1983, two years after the building of the extinct station was occupied by TVE-RS, the statewide public television station in Rio Grande do Sul. The few surviving TV Piratini tapes are stored at the Hipólito José da Costa Communication Museum in Porto Alegre, which are in a heavily deteriorated state. Additionally, a number of tapes at the Rede Tupi studios in Urca, Rio de Janeiro, were later found to have been significantly degraded by vinegar syndrome, so they were unable to be migrated to a modern format. However, part of the library of Rio de Janeiro TV Tupi studios was founded in 2005 at the headquarters of Radio Tupi and later donated to the Brazilian National Archive, which signed an agreement with Globo in 2007 to preserve the material. The public television network Cultura has preserved many old programs and has one of the most complete archives among Brazilian television networks. Despite having suffered a fire in 1986, this fire did not reach the station's archives. After the bankruptcy of Manchete in 1999, most of the collection was seized at the station's studios in Rio de Janeiro until it was included in the bankruptcy estate and later auctioned by the Brazilian courts, which caused part of the library to be lost. However, some telenovelas (such as Pantanal) had reruns by some television networks (such as SBT and Band).
Canada The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has rarely wiped programs it has produced. As a result, the CBC now maintains a nearly complete archive of all programming it produced that was recorded. One exception was the 1953–54 science‑fiction series Space Command, of which only one out of 150 episodes are known to survive. However, the whole series was kined for distribution to stations across Canada. The CBC has also said that the 1984–1993 music video series, Video Hits, no longer exists in their archives.
Chile During the 1973 coup, the military burned a large portion of the publicly owned Televisión Nacional de Chile (TVN) archives between 1969 and 1973. Canal 13 (formerly Catholic University of Chile TV) also had programs whose records are lost or never existed because they were only broadcast live. Although Sábado Gigante began in 1962, it only had recorded programs or fragments since the early 1970s. Popular live sitcom El litre 4916, broadcast between 1963 and 1965, was not recorded and had no surviving episodes.
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