We think we belong to the age of do-it-yourself; think we invented it. Thats because we are are so utterly unconscious of our past, because for a thousand years everybody was almost entirely do-it-yourself The words are Jacks. The image is of Jack Hargreaves, my stepfather, with his cameraman of over 20 years - Stan Bréhaut - who died in 2005. Jack Hargreaves OBE (31 Dec 191-15 Mar 1994) was an author and TV presenter, whose enduring interest was to comment, without sentimentality, on accelerating distortions in relations between the city and the countryside, via the weekly programme Out of Town (OOT), first on Southern Television in 1963, following the success of his 1959 debut with the B&W series Gone Fishing. His country TV programmes continued in the 1980s with Old Country for Channel 4. Andy King said recently on these FB pages that his liking for Jack Hargreaves Out of Town broadcasts revolved around having the countryside and nature explained to me without being trivialised, or sentimentalised, or anthropomorphised. It has been tricky to recover original recordings of OOT. In 2012, after much research by Jack’s stepson Simon Baddeley, Simon Winters, the classic television organisation Kaleidoscope, and the archive expert David King, 34 episodes of Out Of Town – not seen since broadcast in 1980/81 – came to light and are available on DVD. Over 28 hours of Out Of Town are presented in their original form for the first time since they were broadcast 30 years ago. outoftown-dvd.co.uk/the-lost-episodes/ What about the other Out of Town films that have been available for many years? Delta have re-issued them: outoftown-dvd.co.uk/out-of-town-box-set/ Jack always intended these for VHS and DVD. They include earlier film by Stan Bréhaut, but the commentary by JH was added sitting in his front room at home, 5 years after the end of Southern TV. For 26 years these versions of OOT were the only ones available. They were put together by my stepfather and a team led by Steve Wade in 1986, using archived location film by Jacks cameraman Stan Bréhaut. To these Jack added a new commentary (Stans 16mm location film was silent), new sound effects and new start and finish insets, while based in his real shed at his home - near Belchalwell in Dorset. Until the 2012 unearthing of 34 original recordings, the only authentic material from C4S Old Country or STVs original Out of Town that I could stream were ones sent by viewers who made recordings on video recorders at the time the programmes went out. We also now know that the the British Film Institute (BFI) hold copies of the successor to Out of Town, Old Country which we believe was handed over to them by Channel 4. The BFI also have some episodes of Out of Town. A biography of Hargreaves by Paul Peacock was published in July 2006. Paul plans to republish it as an e-book.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 15:12:07 +0000
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