Well, I see someone has forgotten to write anything on the first message, but one thing I always wondered about this show is how many the BBC actually kept in their archive ? I believe they don't hold a copy of the first edition and I wonder, considering it was live of course, how many were actually preserved ? I am also certain I remember a BBC2 Forty Minutes Documentary about Swap Shop which actually condensed a whole 3 hour plus show in to 40 minutes ! This was shown I think in the late seventies - anyone remember this ???

>Well, I see someone has forgotten to write anything on the first message, but one thing I always wondered about this show is how many the BBC actually kept in their archive ? I believe they don't hold a copy of the first edition and I wonder, considering it was live of course, how many were actually preserved ? I am also certain I remember a BBC2 Forty Minutes Documentary about Swap Shop which actually condensed a whole 3 hour plus show in to 40 minutes ! This was shown I think in the late seventies - anyone remember this ???


...Yes, you are right - BBC2 did indeed show a 40 Minutes documentary in 1979 I believe.

As for the archives, I guess they are pretty patchy for the early years, as the BBC quite often only used to record live programmes sometimes as 'examples' - Pebble Mill at One suffered from this fate.

Perhaps someone from BBC archives can enlighten us anymore ??