Hi everyone - Greg Taylor from Granada here. I thought I'd share my information
on Crossroads archive holdings with you.

A brief re-cap first - forgive me if you know all this...

The Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) awarded the Midlands ITV franchise
to ATV Midlands Ltd in December 1980 (for the period commencing 1.1.82) on the
condition that the shareholding and structure of the company was changed to
reflect a more Midlands-based company. A new name was also required, hence
Central Independent Television plc was born.

A deal was done under which ownership of all ATV's programming broadcast on and
before 31.12.81 passed to ITC Entertainment. The exceptions to this deal were
regional programmes, news programmes and some schools programmes. Although
certain network programmes continued after the ATV-to-Central transition
(Bullseye, Family Fortunes, Tiswas, Crossroads, Link etc), in general the
on-and-before 31.12.81 editions still passed to the ITC Entertainment library.

The ITC Entertainment library was bought in the mid-1990s by Polygram, and
changed hands again in the late-1990s, when it was purchased by Carlton
International. The majority of the archive is still made up of 16mm film and 2"
videotape and is held in a bonded storage facility in west London.

Central Independent Television's library (ie everything they inherited from ATV
and originated themselves from 1.1.82 onwards) is held in storage at Carlton
Studios, in Nottingham.

So in Crossroads terms, the storage of the series is split between two divisions
of the same company. Carlton International have the ATV episodes, and Carlton
Studios (Nottingham) have the Central episodes.

(The UK Gold transmission covered only the Central episodes because, at the time
the deal was done, the libraries were in separate ownership. UK Gold's contract
was with Central Television Enterprises (the distributor) and their transmission
commenced with the first Central-broadcast episode in 1982.)

Although they have them, Carlton International do not sell the pre 31.12.81
episodes (even clips) because of an embargo within Carlton, because of the
existence of the new series. Management are conscious not to tarnish the image
of the new series...

In terms of which pre-31.12.81 episodes exist, you may like to know that I have
a 16-page list of those which exist. I obtained this from Polygram in 1997 in
the course of doing some research into the series.

You can see the first four pages at:

http://www.granadakids.com/xrds1.jpg
http://www.granadakids.com/xrds2.jpg
http://www.granadakids.com/xrds3.jpg
http://www.granadakids.com/xrds4.jpg

As you can see, prior to June 1978 the holdings are very sparse. It is not clear
whether those episodes which survive do so because of their dramatic
significance. Personally I think this is unlikely. All television companies
junked programmes regularly - as is now well publicised - in the interests of
conserving storage space and for financial reasons - videotape was very
expensive back then.

Most episodes are still on 2" videotape which is a bulky, old format requiring
the attention of specialist VT engineers As they're not easily viewed, this is
why the logging is so poor.

The BFI also hold a handful of episodes from circa 1966, IIRC they're episodes
496 to 500.

Hope this is useful/interesting!

Greg


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