I was 15 at the time and living with my ex-pat family from England in California, where I watched Roads to Freedom via Masterpiece Theatre on PBS television.
This show used to draw conversation with my friends and myself at our high school art class each week; to whether or not we saw the current episode, and to what we thought of it. My family only had a black and white TV at the time; however, I remember watching it in colour also at my best friends home; whom also, by the way, remembers the show and it's theme.
The theme, believe it or not, I still have on an old audio tape somewhere in a cluttered draw. When the first tape cassette recorders came out, I got one for Christmas, and I taped the theme to Roads to Freedom by holding up a microphone in front of the television speaker.
Home video recorders were not readily available to most consumers back in 1970/71, and if there were any obscure models about, they would have been unaffordable for most people, and probably technically crude in their quality of recording. Still, however, I believe that there may still be some hope in the recovery of all of those lost episodes from Roads to Freedom; even if the BBC did in fact erase them from their archives forever. The reason for this assumption, is because the BBC exported copies of this production abroad, as I was indeed a regular viewer when I resided in the US as a teenager, so I know this for a fact; and I would suspect that the programme would have been exported to other countries also, So, if the BBC did delete this programme; the possibility still stands that their could be copies elsewhere in the world in some archive vault; PBS, perhaps.
Before I close, I would like to make a comment about EwanScott's entry about Roads to Freedom being the flagship programme which announced the start of BBC 2. BBC 2 was launched in 1964, not in 1970/71 Or could it be that he was referring to the first show to start the evening broadcast?
This show used to draw conversation with my friends and myself at our high school art class each week; to whether or not we saw the current episode, and to what we thought of it. My family only had a black and white TV at the time; however, I remember watching it in colour also at my best friends home; whom also, by the way, remembers the show and it's theme.
The theme, believe it or not, I still have on an old audio tape somewhere in a cluttered draw. When the first tape cassette recorders came out, I got one for Christmas, and I taped the theme to Roads to Freedom by holding up a microphone in front of the television speaker.
Home video recorders were not readily available to most consumers back in 1970/71, and if there were any obscure models about, they would have been unaffordable for most people, and probably technically crude in their quality of recording. Still, however, I believe that there may still be some hope in the recovery of all of those lost episodes from Roads to Freedom; even if the BBC did in fact erase them from their archives forever. The reason for this assumption, is because the BBC exported copies of this production abroad, as I was indeed a regular viewer when I resided in the US as a teenager, so I know this for a fact; and I would suspect that the programme would have been exported to other countries also, So, if the BBC did delete this programme; the possibility still stands that their could be copies elsewhere in the world in some archive vault; PBS, perhaps.
Before I close, I would like to make a comment about EwanScott's entry about Roads to Freedom being the flagship programme which announced the start of BBC 2. BBC 2 was launched in 1964, not in 1970/71 Or could it be that he was referring to the first show to start the evening broadcast?