An interview with Tim Beddows (1963-2022), the founder and managing director of Network Distributing.

Introduction

Like many, I was shocked and saddened to hear of the death of Tim Beddows in November last year. In 1997 Tim founded Network, the distribution company, which, among other accomplishments, has rescued, restored, and revived more than 3,000 British film and television releases. This includes many obscurities which might have remained undiscovered, or even lost altogether, were it not for Tim and his company’s intervention. It is thanks to Network that we have been able to discover or rediscover such remarkable TV shows as The Strange World of Gurney Slade, Danger Man, The Public Eye, Nigel Kneale’s Beasts, Budgie, Callan, Ripping Yarns, Out, Man in a Suitcase, amongst many others. And it is thanks to Network that our understanding of British cinema has been greatly enhanced and expanded by such series as the Ealing Studios Rarities (56 films collected on 14 dvds), British Comedies of the 1930s (48 films collected on 12 dvds), and Edgar Wallace Presents, as well as countless other individual releases. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the Network catalogue is now one of the most important archives of British film and television that we have.

The interview that follows took place in 2018 and came about as part of research for an MA I took in film and television studies at Birkbeck University, London. The essay – my final dissertation, which you can read here – looked at the way archive films and television programmes were being brought out of obscurity in great numbers and put back into the audience’s hands, using the tools and platforms available in the new digital age. My study focused on two small independent companies in Britain that have been at the forefront of this effort – Network Distribution and Renown/Talking Pictures TV. Tim kindly agreed to be interviewed and over a long and fascinating conversation at the Groucho Club, recounted how he got his start in the industry, the deals that unlocked the archives, the processes involved in salvaging and restoring deteriorated film masters, and much else.

One of the things that emerges very clearly from the interview is that Tim was first and foremost a fan, and as such he had an instinct for what people might want to see. We take it for granted now that public information films of the 60s, 70s and 80s are important cultural artifacts, but it was Tim who first recognised their intrinsic merit and digitized and collated them for public consumption. Similarly, few would have suspected that the badly dubbed French/ Italian/ German TV series The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe would have the potential to sell thousands and thousands of copies. Tim did, because he understood the show’s nostalgic appeal to a generation that had grown up watching it in the 60s and 70s. Like so many of the other shows that Network have brought back into circulation, Robinson Crusoe evoked for many not only a better time in their lives, but also an era as culturally rich, and perhaps richer, than that which we are living through today. Tim summed it up best in a post written on the Network website in July 2022, to mark 25 years since the launch of the company:

“When so much has changed, arrived and disappeared; when you barely have time to blink and with so much put in front of you, like it or not, it is gratifying to know that we can still offer a little break from it all in form of something from the past as stirring, emotive and pioneering as anything made today.”

Postscript

The day after I finished writing this introduction, I discovered that the Network website had gone down. The following day I was surprised and dismayed to learn through the website filmstories.co.uk that Network Distributing had gone into liquidation. Since there has yet been no statement from Network, there is no way to know what the circumstances are behind this regrettable turn of events. One can only hope that the company might find a way to solve the current crisis, or that another will step in to rescue its catalogue, an archive our culture would be far poorer for losing.

Interview with Tim Beddows, Managing Director of Network Distribution, conducted on the 2nd May, 2018.

Could you tell me a little bit about your background in the film and television industry and how you came to set up Network?

I’ve always been a fan of film and TV. I probably spent more time than I should have watching TV when I was a kid. So I grew up with all these TV shows like The Prisoner and The Sweeney and I used to go to the cinema a lot too. So I left school and I didn’t really have any qualifications, and I didn’t have any formal education, and I found myself in a lot of dead end jobs, a bit without direction, but I always had this knowledge about things that I’d seen when I was younger and continued to enjoy. I was about twenty-five when I got a job in an advertising production company, and I had an interest in photography, so suddenly I found an opening that didn’t require any formal qualifications. So I spent two years doing that. Then I answered an ad in a local paper for a sales rep for a music company that was setting up in the midlands, and I applied for it, and got it. So then I found myself selling cassettes, and vinyl, and a few CDs in those days, to the likes of Virgin and HMV. And I did that for 7 or 8 years, and then I went off to do graphic design on my own. Also, at that time, I had a contact in Central Television in Birmingham and I discovered that they had a small vault of public information films that the Central Office of Information had produced. And these films were in cans, they were on the rack, and in limbo. They’d been taken out of commission, but they hadn’t been told formally to dispose of them, so they were just sitting there waiting for some kind of instruction. So I licensed them. I did a deal with the COI to acquire the prints, and then licensed them for home video distribution. I was interested in them because they’re interesting little films. There was everything in there from Joe and Petunia to Charley the Cat. These things were showing endlessly in the 60s and 70s. And it was Martin’s idea – who is now our head designer – it was his idea that these films could be sold on video. I was a bit sceptical, but I had nothing better to do with my time at that point, so I pursued it, and he was right. And that was a grounding for me, because I did everything. I did the editing, I did the sleeve design, I did all the research, I wrote the sleeve notes. It was an early effort, but it kind of saved my life really. It got me going in the industry. Although it was a terrible release – you look back at it now, and everything I could have done wrong, I did do wrong – but it worked. So I found myself doing everything for this release, all the technical work, the marketing, the sales, and I also appointed a distributor. So it was a learning curve, as I had no formal experience of doing this. And suddenly the money started coming in, so then I went back to my old boss at the music company, and I told him I think I’m onto something here, I’ve got an idea for a video label. And he gave me the keys to a company car, and a small salary, and just let me go off and do what I wanted. So I found myself on the way to Paris to buy the rights to The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which was this really badly dubbed French/ Italian/ German co-production, which just ran on BBC1 every summer, endlessly until their rights expired in 1982. And, of course, everyone remembers it; everyone remembers the score. So I had a platform now, and the finance to do a proper job on it, but it was still just my second project, so I had to prove myself again with Robinson Crusoe. I tracked down the actor who played Crusoe in Salsberg, and brought him over. So, suddenly, I was doing PR, and marketing, and you’re learning all this as you go along. And thankfully I did everything right that second time, because we sold thousands of these things – thousands and thousands. So we used that income then to finance our next project, which was Robin of Sherwood – the HTV series from 1983 with Michael Praed. Again, it had been off the market for years and years. I wasn’t a huge fan of the show, but I knew there was something in it, and again, because I had all this in-depth knowledge about who owns all this stuff, and where it could be found, and where the materials were. That kind of started it then because we took control. It wasn’t just a question of taking the series, and pulling the first tape from the shelf, and putting it out. You know, as a fan of this stuff, I’ve always been driven by the way that I wanted to see these things as if I was buying them myself – this is how I would like it presented – and that kind of driven us. So with Robin of Sherwood, we had to find the original negative, the original mag-tracks, do a fresh transfer, so it looked better than it had ever been seen before. We tracked down all the casts. We did a mammoth five-part documentary, which is far more than is necessary to be honest, but to this day it’s the definitive version of that series. There’ll never be a better version of it. And ever since then, each deal that we’ve done, we’ve always reinvested the money that we made from the previous deal and put it into the next project. And just over time, these projects have just got bigger, and bigger, and bigger. And then we started doing stuff with the BBC, licensing things like Ripping Yarns, and again we found some stuff in the archive that had never been seen before.

That’s one of my favourite shows of all time.

Well, to date, that remains our single biggest selling title. On a unit-by-unit basis, Ripping Yarns has sold more than anything else we’ve sold to date. And, of course, again, we’ve got Michael and Terry on board. So once you get the support of the talent, and you’re as enthusiastic as they were when they made it. Once you’ve got all those plates spinning at the same time, you’ve got a hit, because people can see you’ve put some care and attention into it, and love into it. And I look at these things and I think that’s the way I want it on my shelf. And suddenly you realise there are hundreds and thousands of people just like you, and your vision of these things is exactly right, but not many people get the opportunity to do it. So I’ve always been grateful that I’ve managed to do it while never quite knowing what would happen next year. It’s always been, we’re going to do this series, and then the next series. Then in 2004, when Granada merged with Carlton to form what is now ITV, some of this huge library was up for licensing. We started to get very ambitious at that point. The industry looked at it at the time as a madness deal. We were owned by Virgin at that point, and they actually backed us in launching this audacious bid for this programme film catalogue from ITV, because we weren’t a major industry player. At that point we’d still only done bits and pieces from various archives, we’d never done a bulk deal, and we’re talking millions of pounds here. It was really ambitious. And I did at one point think: we’re biting off more than we can chew here. But the upshot was, that after a period of negotiation, I managed to get some shows included in there that would give us the financial security, because anybody can sell James Bond or Harry Potter – they’re easy sellers. And in our little world it’s easy to sell things like Upstairs, Downstairs, and On the Buses – they’re just perennial sellers. And to make this deal work I needed those titles, whereas ITV wanted to keep them because obviously they’re good sellers, and after some protracted negotiations we actually got those shows, but in that same deal were things like The Persuaders, and The Prisoner, and some other things, like films they wanted to give us like The Ipcress File, which is one of my favourite films. So again I knew exactly how to release it. I mean, up to that point there was only a pan and scan version available, which is criminal. At the same time, the industry had started to consolidate at that point, so there was a serious lack of content. So we mopped up the TV stuff. Then we went to Freemantle and did the same thing with the Thames library. We’d already done stuff like The Sweeney, and completely re-mastered that, and things like Callan, and all these iconic shows, and then we did another deal with Freemantle that gave us access to most of the Thames library, which we’re still going through now. It’s still a relatively untapped library in real terms. And then we did another deal with Alliance Atlantic, which gave us things like Due South. That was like a little bonus thing that was just an opportunity we grabbed at the same time. So suddenly we had three big deals all at the same time, so we were okay for content – that was going to keep us going for another ten years. And we’re still doing it. That was 2004, and that’s like 14 years ago. We’ve already renewed the deal with ITV twice. Then our last big deal was with Studio Canal which gave us access to all these British films. It suited them to licence them out to us and enabled them to then concentrate on other things like their big theatrical releases, whilst they were going to get some revenue from a catalogue that would otherwise just be dormant. And the chances are that no-one is ever going to come along and say what’s in that can of film, whereas that’s what we like doing. We like getting our hands dirty. I mean loads of films in that Studio Canal deal I’d never heard of, and I really know my stuff. But we know there is a bit of risk there, but we’d already proved with the ITV deal that you can release the most obscure TV series that no-one seemingly has ever heard of, and you will sell thousands of units. Now I cant explain that. I always cite a show called Gideon’s Way from 1965. It was shot on 35mm film. It looks stunning. If you get a transfer from the original neg, the high-definition picture, it’s like looking through a window, And I always cite that show as The Sweeney of its day because it’s quite violent in places. But when we released it, people said: ‘What the hell’s Gideon’s Way? Why are you releasing this?’ And it’s expensive to put out because you have to get it classified – twenty-six hours is not cheap to classify. And on paper that should not have worked. It’s a series that hasn’t been seen since 1968, and yet we sold 12,000 box sets within a couple of years. Now I can’t explain that. I can’t explain who went out and actually bought that series, but it was an instinct I had. Something tells me that this is going to do well, and it’s not just because it’s an established literary character. And that’s kind of what’s driven us. You know if you ask most people if they’ve heard of most of the things in our catalogue, most people would never heard of them, and yet people are buying them. We can guarantee that we’ll sell at least 2000 copies of anything we put out, and that’s a good business model for us. We’re not a normal publisher in this respect. We’re not interested in releasing something on the 1^st May and then expecting a huge spike in sails for the first month, then it just drops off a cliff. Our model has always been that we’d rather sell a couple of hundred the first day, and then, you know, it plateaus out very quickly, but it sustains for years and years, so we’ve got regular long-term income rather than peaks and troughs, because I don’t like running a business on peaks and troughs. I like steady persistent revenue, and this product that we put out is absolutely perfect for that, so from a business point of view it works really well. But I get a lot of fun out of it as well. It’s like running your own TV station.

Why do you think the people who buy Network DVDs prefer to watch these older TV shows and films as opposed to more contemporary content?

I was interviewed quite a few times when we did Robinson Crusoe a few years ago, and was asked a similar question – why are people interested in this? Why was this TV show that hadn’t been seen for 30 years so popular? Although I hate using this expression, you could say: we’re selling people their memories back. And as much as I hate it, I still think it’s true. Probably more so today, as you and I are talking, because of what’s happening in this country at the moment. I think people are hankering after what they perceive to be a better time in their lives. I think that’s an illusion, to be honest, I think things were just as bad then as they are now, but I think these shows remind them of a better time in their life. I think it’s just a perception, I don’t think that’s the reality, I really don’t. But watching them now does take you back, you feel comfortable, it’s like comfort food really. And I feel it myself. I know exactly what it’s like. I’ll watch, for example, an episode of Budgie, that great series with Adam Faith, and I can block the rest of the world out and be back in 1971, watching this thing on a Friday night at 9 O’clock. You know, it’s that sort of thing, though it’s difficult to quantify with some of our releases. We’re going right back to the 1930s now with some of these British films, and I think there’s a genuine cultural interest in them, because I don’t think there are many people around now who would have seen those films when they were in the cinemas at the time. Some of these films were shown in cinemas and then they just disappeared. They’d never been shown on television, a lot of them, because they fulfilled their criteria at the time they were released and that was it. And nobody would have thought there was a residual value in the future, but they’re fascinating look back at.

They’re a document of the time.

Yes, they are. They’re very much a social document. So, I think, there’s a curiosity there. Other films from the 1950s, again, I think there’s a warmth around memories of going to the cinema when cinemas were a very different and were the predominant form of entertainment back in the day. And who wouldn’t want to go back to seeing a B movie, a feature, a Pathé newsreel, some old adverts and trailers – and actually that’s what we’re coming to in the next phase of our involvement. We’re going to start presenting an evening out at the pictures as it would have been in the 60s or the 70s, and so I’m personally interested in presenting this stuff now. It’s not just about selling a film, it’s about how we present it. And I’m quite keen to present it as it would have been presented when it was originally shown. And that’s something that people will remember and will resonate with them.

Do you have a metric for evaluating your DVD releases as a way of measuring success post release?

No, my industry contemporaries would be horrified at my answer, but no. Running a business on gut instinct you shouldn’t really do, but that’s the only way I can operate. Most of my hunches have been well placed. You could probably count on the fingers of three hands the number of commercial failures we’ve had. And when we ventured into theatricals – I had this vision that if I can make a successful business out of this narrow band of rights from all these TV shows, and all these films that no-one has ever heard of, imagine what we could do if we acquired all rights: television, theatrical. So we took ourselves off to Cannes, and I had £200,000 to spend and I came back with 4 or 5 films – all completely different, but all very much Network compatible. So, in other words, nothing obviously commercial, but films that just fitted in with what we do. And like most theatrical films, most of them failed. And we had to pay over the odds because we were an unknown quantity in the industry. But we worked hard so that people like Pablo Larrain made the choice to go with us. He’s successful in the UK because we’ve done his entire catalogue up to Jackie (2016). And, of course, he’s Oscar nominated, so we jumped on that, and saw that early on. But commercially, that’s the riskiest business you can possibly imagine. So when I go back to my gut feeling on the archive stuff, that actually makes a lot of sense when you try to compare it to try and build a business on acquiring new titles outright for the UK. That is just impossible. But I’m quite proud of my gut instincts, although there’s more to it than gut instinct. You’ve got to look at the films credentials and who the audience will be. And you have to take into account how much it’s going to cost to restore it. How much the classification is going to be. And there are some things that we’ve had to turn down simply because they’re too expensive to get to market. You know, we could spend tens of thousands of pounds on something just to get it to a state where it’s marketable, but then if you figure you’re only going to sell two thousand copies of something, you have to make that difficult decision, you know, that you’re not going to release it. You know, for me, culturally I have a real problem with that, because that means its going to be locked away and no-ones ever going to get to see it. It’s a difficult decision. But thankfully those instances are rare, but they do happen. There’s a series called Court Martial, which is another one of these ITC seasons that’s like 26 hours in all. The original negatives for that are with NBC Universal, because it was a co-production and they’ve got the negs in the US. Now, to get scans of those so that we can do something with it in the UK, I mean, that’s going to be something $20,000. And by the time you’ve done that, and you’ve graded it here, and you’ve got it into a presentable state, and then you’ve got classification on top of that – well we’re just not going to get our money back. Which is a shame, because that’s actually a really good series, but even my gut instinct tells me that we’re not going to make our money back.

Could you explain a little bit more about the archive of film and television in Britain – who owns what and how did the content get there in the first place?

I’ve always had a reasonable knowledge of who owns what and where this stuff is. Even in my teens I used to get all the BFI handbooks and there’d be a useful list of archives and libraries. The big problem is when they change ownership. Sometimes the new owners will take over an archive, and they’ll embrace it and really look after it, and they’ll research it like it’s never been catalogued before. And then there are others who don’t really see the value of the stuff, and they’ll junk things that actually they shouldn’t be junking. There’s a guy who works with us who used to work in ITV’s library, and he used to work for Rank, and his father used to work for Rank, so that lineage in the industry – that’s fast disappearing now. And you need people like that. If you’re going to do this sort of stuff you really need people with that sort of knowledge, because once they’re gone, that knowledge is going to be lost. When you’re researching this stuff, you need to know what to ask for and you need to know where to find it. All of us in our team we just know this stuff, and if we don’t know we, we know who to ask. So the Studio Canal catalogue, or the ITC, they’re good examples, they’ve had successive owners.  When EMI owned these films, that was one long continuous reign for them, and then they sold it to Lumiere who then became UGC who ultimately got swallowed up by Studio Canal. Now, those owners in between either had no interest, or they seriously undervalued what was there, but very few of them did any proper investment. There tends to be a reactive approach to all this, rather than a proactive, so you’re constantly asking the questions: Do you have this? Do you have that? We have evidence that it did exist but we don’t know if you still retain it. And ITV – they moved their archive from Perivale up to Leeds – and of course there has to be some rationalisation when that happens. They’re not going to retain stuff that they don’t think they’re going to need. We would always hope to keep as much as we can. We wouldn’t keep old tapes of stuff that we have better transfers of, and subsequently even safety copies, but we would never chuck away any film elements, because once you’ve lost those, you’ve lost them, they’re a major asset. Thankfully, all the 35mm negs for things like The Prisoner, they all still exist, and we have access to this stuff. We’re a trusted pair of hands with all the partners that we work with in this business. Once we identify what materials we want, and assuming they’re there, that’s it. They will hand them over to us and then we will do the work on it. We’re always more than happy to do that.

It’s rather like being a detective.

Yes, you’re right. I don’t have much time to do that now but I always used to get a kick out of finding this stuff. And we’ve had some major finds over the years. We’ve done a lot of the cataloguing along the way. You know, that wasn’t our goal, but that was something that had to be done in order to assess what we were going to be able to release, and what versions. So things like The Prisoner,we found a 35mm print of the original cut of the first episode, and up to that point there was a really bad transfer of a 16mm print, so we were able to do that in proper HD and everything. Now, not boasting here, but no-one else would have done that, no-one would have had the diligence to go through those cans of film to see which version was best, because no-one knew it was there and if you don’t know it’s there no-one’s going to look for it whereas we did. We knew there was another version so it was just a process of elimination, but we saved it from being junked, because otherwise it would have ended up in the bin, and that’s it, it would have been lost forever. And there are other programmes that were thought lost, and if we’re going to release it we have to go through it to see what’s there. You open up a can of film, labels fall off cans, a roll of film is not put back in the right can, so you open it up and it’s not what you think it’s going to be, it could be a completely different episode, it could even be a completely different programme. But that’s all part of the fun of it, you know, to find something that you’ve never actually seen before. Another example is The Strange World of Gurney Slade. Now that’s a remarkable television series. Admittedly it’s one that I failed to identify. We should have made that a priority, whereas that came out at the end of the list that we had from ITV, and we had trouble finding the 35mm elements of that, but we did. They were in 2 or 3 different locations, but we managed to get them altogether. And then there were other cans of films there that just weren’t identified, and by the time we opened them up and transferred them, there were trailers and promos there, which are as bizarre as some of the episodes themselves. Now they were a real find for us, they helped us market it as well because we had to do very little work. We could just use those promos as they were shot and edited in the 1960s. And that was a joy for us. That’s a joy when you get something like that. And I still get a joy of opening a can of film that no-one else has touched for like 50 or 60 years and just seeing the contents emerging. I love that.

The title of my dissertation is Buried Treasure.

Well, there you go; that perfectly illustrates it. You get your hands physically dirty doing this stuff because it’s just been on a shelf gathering dust, and if it hasn’t been stored properly some of the cans will be rusty. If the owner hasn’t done due diligence and transferred them to something more suitable for storage, even if they don’t do anything with it, it’s got to be preserved. It is such a massive job though, there is so much of this. And I know people mourn the loss of TV episodes that were junked by the BBC in the 60s. They’re always a prime target for people saying it was criminal that these things were chucked away. And yet they overlook what was retained – I mean, there’s tons of this stuff. And if I was going to start watching everything that we’ve released over the years, from day one up until now, I’d be dead before I could do it. There’s just a huge amount of material. There comes a point where you have to give up on the ambition to watch it all. And that’s the thing we’re finding as a business. Ten years ago we were competing with people’s money. If someone goes into HMV and they see a big studio release, or they see a boxset of The Sweeney, and they’ve only got thirty quid, and they can only buy one or the other, that’s the sort of thing that we’re competing against. Now we’re competing for people’s time because that’s the valuable commodity. No-one has got much time, and when there’s so much content available – the iPlayer, Netflix, studios releasing stuff in the cinema, all these new productions that are going on – who’s got enough time. So you have to be very selective about it. I have to do it, you know, I’m at an age where I have to think: do I really want to watch that again? And I’ve got to the point where even some of my favourite stuff, I’m probably not going to see again, because there just isn’t enough time. You know there are not physically enough years of my life to re-watch some of the stuff I fell in love with twenty years ago. There are some exceptions. I’ll always watch The Prisoner, I’ll always watch The Strange World of Gurney Slade, I’ll probably watch things like The Sweeney. I mean everyone’s got their favourites, which they’ll always make time for, but even then my life will end before I get to see them again. But yeah, that’s what we’re up against now, we’re competing for people’s time rather than money. And I see my job very much now to steer people to something, you know – you may not have seen this, and you may be put off that it’s not brand new, but you need to trust us. You need to see this. This is really interesting for XYZ reasons. And there’s no better ambassador for this stuff than myself, and the guys who work for the team, because we really care about what we do.

By curating you are influencing what people see.

Exactly, and these British films – I’m amazed at the reaction that we got, because again it was a bit of an unknown quantity. And, again, I had to ask Studio Canal if we could have some headlining titles because I don’t want to just be seen as a dumping ground for films that no-one else wants to put out. So we had to have some well-known gems to introduce the range. But people still like collecting; they still like seeing a bunch of sleeves on their shelves. And it helps if you get them hooked on some nice new transfers of stuff that they are familiar with, to introduce them to stuff that they might not be so familiar with. And then you have to build a bit of trust. We say to our audience: ‘Look, you haven’t seen this, we think you should see it.’ But we don’t say that if it’s a terrible film. We’re not going to go out and say: ‘Don’t bother with this.’ They have to discover that for themselves. If there’s something that we really feel needs to be shared with the world, we’ll stand on the rooftops and shout about it. We’re very enthusiastic about our films too.

Do you feel, to some extent, that Network, by cataloguing and restoring this material, and getting it out so the public can see it, are taking on a role that should be undertaken by the BFI?

Yes, I sometimes feel they do it because they have to do it, because it’s in their remit, as opposed to us who do it because we want to do it. And there is a bit of a difference there. We work a lot with the BFI and I know they’re underfunded. They’re always going to be underfunded, there’s never going to be enough money for them to do what they want. But they’ve got so much hidden in their archive that I feel will never ever see the light of day, and I think that’s criminal. You know, they’ll have the original negative of something that’s been donated to them, but they’ll charge us a fortune to retrieve it, and if we don’t, then it stays in the archive and no-one will ever get to see it. Now I don’t get that. I just don’t understand that attitude. If we’ve got a limited budget then we end up taking the risk, and I don’t think that’s fair. We are a commercial outfit, but that doesn’t mean we have a huge amount of money to spend. And we have a cultural interest in this as well, and if that means we should be working with partners to help release some of this stuff, then I think that’s perfectly fine. Politics and money shouldn’t really stand in the way here. An archive isn’t simply a depository to put stuff in and lock the door. You have to find a way of unlocking it. And, although I don’t want to boast, I don’t think we get enough credit for the fact that most of this stuff would never have seen the light of day if it had not been for us intervening all those years ago and showing there is a market for it. You know, the reward for us commercially is good, and we wouldn’t be here without that – we have to run a business – but we have proved we can run it as a business and satisfy a cultural remit as well, you know, it just kind of works. It would be nice to get a bit of help and work with people who have the same kind of enthusiasm for it as us. Okay there’s a rate card. Okay, well, we cant afford that. Well, okay work with us and we’ll see what we can do. Let’s find other ways of trying to do it. I don’t want to work with civil servants in this business. It’s not why I got into this – you understand where I’m coming from?

I do, it’s one of the reasons I wanted to write about this topic. On the question of where you get your material from – you’ve covered this quite a bit – but I wondered if you could talk about that a little more?

I can put a bit more meat on that. Obviously we’ve got Freemantle and ITV and Studio Canal, but there are lots of orphaned films that are not owned by any of these studios unless they’re independently owned – so people like Halas and Batchelor, for example. That’s still owned by the daughter of Halas and Batchelor, so we’ve worked very closely with her, and we’ve restored a lot of their material, and again it’s all about passion. She’s not going to let the legacy of her parents go with just anyone. And we get on very well with her, and she understands what we do, so we’re the perfect partner for her and these shorts and cartoons. So you do get little independent pockets of independent content that you have to do, it may only be one film, but it’s worth sticking out for. So we do have our three major suppliers, but we also have many contacts with independent producers and distributors that we’re able to do something with, because, again, the passion is there. They like us, and we get on with them, and they know we’re going to do a good job with their work.

From your experience, would you say there is any material held in British archives that is in danger of being lost or deteriorating beyond repair?

Not with the BFI. They have these huge vaults in Gaydon outside Warwick and in Berkhamsted. I’ve been round their archives and I can understand what they’re up against, because they have so much material they have to preserve and it has to be kept in the right conditions. So humidity, temperature, all that has to be constantly monitored, otherwise it will deteriorate. All this stuff will deteriorate eventually. It may take a couple of hundred years but it will decompose eventually. I think people are much more conscious now about junking stuff, and that’s driven partly by the BBC story – the fact that all these missing episodes got junked. They wouldn’t do that now, but you still occasionally hear some horror stories where the responsibility for keeping an archive has been given to somebody who doesn’t actually know a piece of film from a piece of tape, and they look at labels and don’t see what’s there. A lot of this is archaeology, you know, you have to understand the problems of the thing that you’re holding. If it’s a copy of a copy of a copy, okay, if there’s no other copy available then you have to keep it. If we’ve got the three previous generations then maybe we don’t need it, but there are lots of people who don’t understand it, and they’ll just make a decision based on what the label on the can says, which as we know, isn’t  always accurate. You can’t put your trust in what it says on the can, or even what’s in the can, unless you physically open it, and take it out, and look at it, and only then can you assess whether you actually need to keep it. And most the BFI are experts at that. The owners of these libraries they don’t always do it. You always have to do your own due diligence.

What sort of condition are the films in when you buy them?

I can give you a recent example. We’ve just restored Zoo Gang, which is six 1 hour programmes from 1973. It’s a great series, and it looks absolutely beautiful. Now before that we did Randall and Hopkirk, and Department S, we’re slowly working our way through that library. Now, you’d expect the 1973 series to be a much easier job than the series from 1968, and yet the negatives were in a really bad condition. It’s the most difficult job we’ve done so far on the TV front. So it really depends on how they were stored. Those negs had to come over from the US and maybe the storage conditions over there weren’t as good as they are over here. There’s so many factors that can effect these things, but from what I can remember, they were covered in little green marks here and there, and they had to have specialist attention, because if we can get rid of it we will. We can’t do everything, but the pictures that we’re preparing now, that should be it. Our ambition is that those pictures will never ever need to be messed with again, you know, they are fit for the future. We’ve got everything we could possibly get out of that negative and piece of film. On The Zoo Gang there was one episode that had been transferred, and you could see a big vertical rip in the negative. Now that was beyond even our skills to repair, and what they did, because it was the original neg, they simply cut it out of the episode. So there’s just like a couple of seconds where you see a car driven by a policeman going down a driveway, but we’ve kept that as a separate section within the disc just to demonstrate that actually this is beyond repair, but we didn’t want to not include it at all, or have people querying why it’s missing. But that’s from a 1973 series that you would have expected to be in better condition than a series from 1968. I mean, the truth is you never know what you’re going to get, so it really depends. At the time you access it, you’ve no idea where it’s been, what the conditions have been, where it’s been stored. So when you embark on a project you don’t know what you’re going to be confronted with until you actually start on it. So we could say we’re going to start work on this show, and were going to get it out in two months time, and then when you’re on episode three and you come across a reel of film that is completely unusable and then you have to start calling down alternative materials and, you know, it’s like a jigsaw. In an ideal world you would start with the first reel and go right through to the end reel and the last episode and it would all be straightforward but it never works out that way. So you have to call up alternative materials and there always has to be a plan B and sometimes a plan C with these things to get the result that you want. I mean, we’ve set up a studio now for this restoration work, and I can sit here and tell you that, certainly on the TV stuff, there’s no-one in the world that does what we do on it. No-one will ever put the time and effort to make them look as good as we do. Whether the series merit it or not, that’s not another question. But, you know, for me, once you start doing it, you might as well do it properly. There’s no point in half doing it, you know, why bother? And sometimes that takes up a bit more resource than you originally intended, but you can’t get off that track. Once it goes, that’s it; you’ve got to see it through to the end.

In common with many other quality DVD publishers you often include booklets, extras and commentaries as part of the package. How do you normally decide when to include extras and who do you normally draw on to contribute this content?

We used to do a lot more of that than we do now. I think we have to move with the times. We used to do a lot of commentaries. I personally hate them now, so tend not to do them. If we do audio commentaries, what I prefer to do, is to get the talent to comment on particular scenes, which we’ll present as a separate extra. I think commentaries were a gimmick. It was a gimmick that used the technology, but I can’t think of anything more unnatural than watching the film with someone talking in the background. I mean you get these embarrassing pauses where they’ve got nothing to say. And I know you can have a moderator, but I think to talk the entire way through an hour and a half film is just too much. It’s just the most unnatural thing. So if we’re going to do that I would rather get talent in and get them to commentate on a handful of scenes within the film, because that’s far more interesting and more focused than a sort of casual conversation. I mean you wouldn’t go to the cinema and start chatting with someone – it’s just bizarre. And I understand that the technology allowed for it when it was introduced, but I think it’s just a bit crap now. In terms of other extras, we tend to raid the archive, so we’ll look for outtakes, we’ll look for trims, we’ll look for stuff that has definitely never been seen before. We’ll commission booklets from people who have the specialist knowledge that we need to write something interesting. But if we’ve got nothing to say about it, and we can’t find anyone to say anything about it, then fine, we’ll just put it out without anything. Because, at the end of the day, we’re really coming back to the essence of whatever it is we’re releasing. So these Blurays that we’re doing for the TV shows; we got lots of complaints because we were putting them out with no extras, and we weren’t even porting over the extras that we did for the original DVD releases, so there were howls of protests from the collectors. And they said that they weren’t going to buy them. But they soon converted when they saw the quality, because what we’re offering is, you know, there’s nothing to commentate on. It’s the TV show that we’re selling here, and you know you’re losing sight of the TV show, which is the thing that you’re actually interested in, and you’re seeing it in an entirely new light. You know, the pictures that we’re putting out now – this is a new experience. And the fact that we were issuing them quite sporadically helped us fund the restoration. And that’s one of the reasons why we did it that way, so that people might get into the habit of watching an episode a week, which is how they went out, you know, it’s that sort of thing. And you know they’ve all got into it now. We’ve sold thousands of these new restorations, but we’re not doing the extras, because everything that we had to say about them is on previous editions. And, you know, I don’t like commentaries, myself. If we find something new in the archive that’s emerged since the first time, we will definitely include it because that sort of stuff is interesting, but if we can’t find anything new to say about it, or the title simply doesn’t warrant it, then we won’t. I mean, we have to do some commercial stuff like Birds of a Feather, but no-one’s going to be interested in an interview with the cast of the show on that DVD, it’s just not going to happen. It’s always the archive stuff that’s going to dictate it, but even then I’d much rather promote the film rather than all the nuts and bolts we can put on it. I think people are getting too carried away with all this stuff. And the other thing you have to remember is that most of the talent for these things now is no longer around. There’s just no-one around now that can give you any kind of insight.

I have been watching recently a London Weekend series on Network DVD called The Frighteners from 1972 and noticed it was released in conjunction with an initiative set up by some academics at Royal Holloway called the ‘History of Forgotten Drama in the UK.’ Can you tell me a little bit about how you worked with them?

Well they kind of bridged the gap for us, because with the ITV archive, we’re getting down to the titles now where we really have to consider whether we’re going to cover our costs of releasing it, because the classification costs are really what stop these things now, as I mentioned earlier. We have to pay the same amount no matter what it is. I think something is going to have to change there, because you can put this stuff online, we can put it on our own VOD platform, which we’re planning to do, and we wouldn’t be subject to classification. Well that makes a mockery of that whole regulation there, and I’m all for some kind of regulation in some kind of advisory capacity, but it’s just getting too expensive. DVDs are on the decline and yet it costs us proportionately more to get this stuff to market than it would be for a VOD, so that’s going to be another way we’re going to start promoting this stuff, the stuff that we can’t justify putting out physically. To go back to your question about The Frighteners – we have started this strand with Royal Holloway because they do have a great interest in it. They are experts on this stuff, and know far more about this strand of forgotten TV drama than we will ever know, so it really does make sense that they fly the flag for us as we have access to the content. There’s a bit of a funding thing there as well, which means that we are able to bring this stuff to market. I think in the case of The Frighteners, we would have done that anyway.

I’m glad you did, I’m really enjoying it.

It’s a great series isn’t it, and again that’s done quite well for us. And they were able to bring something extra. We could have just put it out and it would have done nicely, but I don’t mind teaming up with somebody who can actually add something, and that relationship is going to continue with another series now.

I wanted to ask about your audience. How would you describe a typical buyer of Network products? Do you get feedback from them and how does that influence what you release?

I can’t answer that. I mentioned Gideon’s Way selling 12,000 copies, but I’ve no idea who these 12,000 people are. They’re likely to be of a certain age, but as I said before, it’s my job to introduce this stuff to a new generation and that is slowly happening. It’s like Robinson Crusoe, when we released that I was getting lots of people commenting that they used to watch it as a kid, and now they’re putting their kids in front of it – probably boring the hell out of them to be honest – but they’re putting their kids in front of it. And that’s how they’re introducing it – this is what your dad used to watch when he was a kid.

So you believe that younger people are being introduced to these shows?

I think it’s harder to do now because of Netflix. You know, with the content and technology delivery now, kids are finding their own way through this. I don’t think parents have much opportunity now to sit down with the kids and say: ‘this is what I watched when I was your age.’ But in terms of a typical audience, they have to be of a certain age, unless we proactively go out and introduce it to a younger generation, and that is difficult to do. We’ve never done an analysis. I was a guest at The Prisoner convention a couple of weeks ago, and I gave a little presentation about it, and the company, and the restoration work, and my association with The Prisoner. I had a few conversations with people afterwards and I was staggered at the cross section of people; I probably misjudged our audience, if anything. Somebody came up and asked me about Mrs Thursday which is this drama series with Kathleen Harrison. It’s a great detective series from 1967/68 and we’re just doing the third series of that now, but this guy came up and asked me if we were going to release it and I said we have released it. We released series 1 five or six years ago, series 2 came out last year, and I had to show him on Amazon that it was available. And he was delighted, but I was asking myself: ‘how can you not know about this?’ You’re a fan, it’s easy to google this stuff. It’s easy to go on Amazon, because that’s what I will do now. If I’m really into something I will go on Amazon, rightly or wrongly, because that’s the quickest way I’m going to find out if something’s available. Whether I buy it or not from them, it doesn’t matter. And I’m amazed that this guy had never done that. And another person came up to me and bought a copy of our Prisoner film In My Mind. He would never put his credit card details on a computer, which means he’ll never deal with Amazon, which means that he’s been cut off from what we do unless we have personal interaction with him as on this occasion. And then there were other people there who clearly get their information from the fanclub magazine, which comes out four times a year, and that’s their sole source of information. Now, I knew nothing of any of this, until the point where I attended this convention. All my perceptions of the audience, such as they were, were sort of turned on their head after that, and I’m now thinking we probably need to assess, and probably need to do some more research into audience. I know they’re selling, but I don’t know enough about the people who are actually buying this stuff. Do you know this Talking Pictures station?

Yes, they’re the other company I’m going to be focusing on in my study.

I think you should. I’m just starting to find this out. I mean they’ve got twice as many Facebook followers as we have for The British Film range.

I’m planning to interview them too.

Yes, that would be interesting. I mean, they’re slightly different because they actually own a lot of the content they put on the screen. And also they’ve licensed a lot of the stuff from ITV that we’ve released. And the Studio Canal stuff – they’re our masters that they’re using to show. So we perform another function there, because we make the masters available, which means that they’re able to get another airing, and that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. So I’m interested in that station because they regularly get over a million viewers.

It’s phenomenonal, really, they’ve gone from nowhere to somewhere between 1 and 2 million viewers a week. They’ve also encountered something of the same thing with the audience you mentioned. You can’t underestimate how a lot of older people just don’t understand the internet. They have a great enthusiasm for these old films, but they’re stuck in the past and don’t know how to access them. So when a new station suddenly appears on their television, of course they embrace it. They could have watched a lot of this stuff before, but because it’s on the old style platform it’s something they understand.

Absolutely, yes, you’re right. They have my respect and admiration for doing that, because I don’t think I would have ventured that far, to be honest. I mean, I know what we do with these things in a physical media point of view, but I would have never thought of putting them on air, but all credit to them.

Do you find a non-British audience are interested in your output as well?

I haven’t done a lot of research into that to be honest. The closest I can come to answering that is when I went to the ‘Six of One Convention’ in Portmeirion a couple of weeks ago. There was a German group of Prisoner fans and they really know what’s what. And they’ve ended up buying the Network set of The Prisoner because it’s not available in Germany anymore. And the same goes for the Americans. I had one American guy come up to me and thank me for the work that we do, and he buys tons of our stuff. How he gets to find out about it I don’t know, but it’s definitely finding its way outside the UK. And I suppose Australia is another obvious market. But you know, most of the stuff we’re talking about here never made its way to America in the first place, so, again, you wonder how they encountered it. And I’ve never been sure how strong Network is as a brand. I mean, I like to think they chose us because they trust us, but that’s all down to the content. If they buy a fantastic film that they’ve never seen before, but then they take a punt on the next one that turns out to be a really terrible film, it has another effect. Because not everything we do is fantastic. In fact, I’m actually quite embarrassed by some of the things that we have released. And there have been other things where I’ve asked myself: ‘should we really be putting this out in this day and age?’ So I don’t know how they find out about this stuff in America, but people are embracing it so I can’t really complain.

Are you considering introducing Video on Demand?

Yes, the website is called Networkonair, and it was called that for that very reason, because we are planning to go on air with a VOD platform. We’re almost there with it now. We should be going to air before the end of the year. Although I can’t really say much about it, all I will tell you is that I’m not interested in selling a film for a couple of pounds here, or an episode of something for 50p there. I’m not interested in doing that. We’ve got a very creative way of how we’re going to present this stuff, which is going to be different. Whether it’s going to work or not in terms of the audience, I don’t know. I think it will, because we’re not just showing films, it’s something way more than that. We’re going to be selling a whole evening’s worth of entertainment. So, for example, if you turn to any day in the TV Times from say 1973, just pick a random week in 1973, or random day in 1973, 80% of the content of whatever was transmitted that day is under licence to us, so that gives you a clue.

Has social media changed the way you engage with the audience?

Well, yes and no. I’m not into social media so I can’t really tell you too much about this. I would like to engage more, but from a resource point of view it’s just really, really difficult. A lot of questions that we get asked have to come to myself, because a lot of people are asking very specialist knowledge. So if someone posts: ‘are you going to release this or that?’ We always get shopping lists of programmes people want to see, and howls of protest when we say: ‘that’s not our schedule.’ Or worse that we can’t release it, because there are some programmes and films that are trapped in rights hell and always will be. So we’re probably under-resourced in that respect and we can’t engage with the audience as much as we want to, because people like myself, and Steve, and Mark, we’re not always around, and we’ve got so much to do with this business. We’re not always able to do everything we’d like. I mean, there’s nothing worse than just going back to posting publicly with: ‘We have no plans to do that.’ Because then you’re going to lose engagement. So we have a little work to do there, but it definitely has to be a strong part of the business going forward. I mean it has to be, because that’s the only way you’re going to get this new audience in. That’s the only way you’re going to communicate with them. They’re not going to read a piece of paper. That’s fine for the older audience, which is why we do well on mail order, and I still think there is a huge audience there, but we’re not tapping an audience that Talking Pictures has done really well with. So those are the kinds of questions we need to ask ourselves.

I imagine you need somebody to work fulltime on that aspect.

Yes, and it’s not that easy to find people. In terms of marketing this – I posed this question a few months ago to a few industry colleagues, and they agreed – I said: ‘look I’m finding it impossible to find someone who’s got marketing experience, and PR experience and the knowledge of what we do.’ Because we can’t have people in who just know it’s a shiny disc. They have to know what the content is, where it sits in the history of this stuff, the history of our label, and the cultural history. I know it, but I don’t have time to do this stuff. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to find someone who fits that bill. We’ve had very few people through our doors with that level of knowledge and experience. They are few and far between. And after twenty-one years of doing this, I only realised that a couple of months ago when I started asking the question: ‘where do you find these people?’ It’s a big ask.

Do you think that part of the reason for Network’s success is that you haven’t followed the rules or accepted what might be considered the traditional way of doing things?

Well we’ve been doing it for twenty odd years. When we did the ITV deal there were raised eyebrows in the industry about the money we paid for it, they thought it just wasn’t sustainable, but then they didn’t know what we knew. They didn’t know what I knew about this buried treasure that was in the archives, so I think even now we’re a bit of an oddity in the industry. We’re not an industry player. We’ve never been members of the Trade Association. I mean we don’t rebel on purpose, we just do what we do. We’re not interested in what anybody else does. We’re not in competition with anybody else. We’re not interested in competing with other labels. We’re interested in doing what we do. We’re not interested in conforming to any industry rules if they don’t apply to us. So we don’t need to be members of the Trade Association, and it hasn’t stopped us being successful. I remember we got into a conversation with the BBFC. They were stricter about how they dealt with things back then when James Ferman was there. So when we got Robinson Crusoe classified, they would never tell you when you could expect classification. So you could sent the classification in, and you could wait weeks, or you could wait months, because they kept all that information to themselves. They would just do it and you just had to put up with it. And even the packaging then had to go through a classification. I think it was called VPRC, I don’t know if it still exists, but they wrote to me telling that I needed to get it. So I said: ‘I don’t want you to approve the sleeve.’ And they said: ‘if you don’t then you might not get it into stores,’ and I told them I was willing to take that risk. This is Robinson Crusoe – I’m not going to put a picture of naked lady on the front of the video. This is common sense here. Why do I need you to approve it? And they charge you for the privilege as well. So they not only classify the content, they want to vet your sleeve to make sure it complies with their stipulations. And I thought, I’m not signing up to that, but they opt you in and don’t tell you this. And when I contacted them and said: ‘where’s my classification?’ They said: ‘well you haven’t told us about the VPRC.’ And I said: ‘I don’t want the VPRC.’ And they said: ‘well you have to tell us you don’t want the VPRC.’ And I said: ‘well you didn’t tell me that I have to opt out of it.’ And I’ve still got James Ferman’s letter saying: ‘yes you have opted out, just so you’re aware that without this you may not get your stuff into retailer’s shelves.’ And of course it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. So that’s an example – everyone else complied with it but I didn’t see the point in it. So we decided we’d go our own way, and that’s how we’ve always done things.

It seems to me that independent companies like yours and Talking Pictures are the ones that are really championing Britain’s film and TV heritage. I mean, we have a body like the BFI that is supposed to do that, but on a grassroots level the real enthusiasm is coming from you and the audience.

Yes, absolutely, you’re dead right. You’re absolutely right. And if anything we’ve done more to promote the British film and TV archive than anyone else. Because any fool can sell Kind Hearts and Coronets, or Genevieve, or The Cruel Sea or any of these films, but to dig deep like we’ve done is harder. We’ve brought this audience out. We’ve shown that there is an audience for it, so other people should react to that because we’ve proved it’s there. We’re still here after twenty-one years. Not many people thought that we would be. I mean Studio Canal had these 450 films. They knew they had them, they just didn’t know how best to get them out to market. To be fair to them there was always a desire to do that, but they needed a partner – someone like us. But I think of all the companies out there, we were the only one that was brave enough to wade in with a cheque book and a desire to do the work, because there was a lot of work involved in that. It wasn’t just a question of paying them a commercial rate so that they get something out of it. We had to invest a lot of money in. You know, you have to pay to access materials, you have to pay to transfer materials. We must have spent 600,000 quid just in technical fees and access fees. And there is a part of me that thinks, actually, if we’re going to do the work, we should access this stuff free of charge, you know, the BFI shouldn’t be charging us because we are doing a service. I wouldn’t say we are doing their job for them. Well, I guess we are really. But they should help us bring this stuff to market. It’s very expensive to get this stuff out there. I can’t be too critical because I still have to work for them, but I hate working with them, is the truth. I think someone told me they are the most expensive archive in the world to access. I know that they have huge bills to keep this stuff going, and their funding is always getting cut, but my argument is that there’s lots of stuff that they shouldn’t be doing. They shouldn’t be holding awards ceremonies for the London Film Festival. I mean why do they need to do that? They shouldn’t be competing with other festivals around the world to make their mark – they are the British Film Institute. I mean we all need PR but they’re supposed to be…

Promoting British Film.

Yes, exactly, whether it’s archive or new. Yes, they’re supposed to be nurturing new talent, but if they’re preserving it for future generations then it’s no good if these future generations are never going to get to see it. To be fair they made a lot of money available. They had this ‘unlocking film heritage’ scheme which all the companies, including us, did take advantage of. And they did help us, but there were strings attached to that – not unreasonably. But that’s finished now, so we’re back to paying the normal rate per reel to access, and that is really expensive. And it can make the difference between bringing something out, and saying: ‘forgot it we might as well not bother.’ And that really does piss me off, because there’s an appetite, and we want to do it. We really want to do it, but you’ve got to help us do it. You know, we can’t do everything.