JOE AND THE SHEEP RUSTLERS THE MISSING EPISODE

JOE AND THE SHEEP RUSTLERS

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A BBC engineer putting a videotape through a "washing machine".

The newly remade opening and closing titles to Episode 6 of Joe

Just because a television programme has been made and broadcast, doesn't necessarily mean that it can be shown again whenever anybody fancies. Back in the 1960s and 70s, videotape was ridiculously expensive so the BBC, and all other companies, would routinely "wipe" tapes of programmes once they'd been broadcast and use the video again for a new programme. The original programmes are then lost forever. You can read a bit more about this state of affairs on the BBC website, or on the site missing-episodes.co.uk

As it hapens, one episode of Joe and the Sheep Rustlers is missing from the BBC archives - when the schools TV team first trawled the archive to get all the old tapes out and ready to broadcast on the CBBC Channel, episode 6 (Prisoner in the House) was nowhere to be found.

Luckily, they kept on searching and eventually discovered a compilation tape, containing just the drama segments from episodes 6 to 10 edited together into a single "movie" format. I don't know where this compilation version came from - the story has never been broadcast in that format, nor have there ever been, as far as I know, any plans to release it as a drama film. The Look and Read dramas were always filmed and edited many months before the teaching segments of the episodes were even written, and the cast of the story were always shown a finished version of their work at a special screening. Maybe this compilation was made specially to be shown to the cast in that way.

So luckily the filmed segments of the episode did survive, and the story was complete to be shown to a new generation. But first the "missing" bits needed to be extracted and made into a new separate episode in their own right. This took quite a bit of persuasion and a lot of effort on the part of the team since obviously recreating an entire programme does take considerable work, and therefore budget.

In this case, as well some 'cleaning' work and fixing of edits that has been done to all the archive Look and Read stories to make them ready to broadcast again, a whole new set of opening and closing titles needed to be made. These were copied, as much as possible, from the surrounding episodes, simply overlaying the title caption for episode 6 on a paused frame from the title sequence of another episode. The end titles were newly written out with the posh modern computer systems that the BBC uses these days, so you can easily tell that they aren't the same as the roughly overlayed genuine rolls of manually created lettering used in the 1970s. But a lot of effort has been taken to make the new credits look passably in the same style as the originals - the same sort of fonts have been used, and in a nice touch they've used one of those old BBC logos with slanty boxes and underlines. Actually, of course, that logo's from the late 1980s and isn't the same plain old BBC logo used on the rest of the episodes, but still at least it's not the bland corporate modern one!

The "new" version of Episode 6, of course, is only ten minutes long from beginning to end with no break in the middle. But all the other episodes of the story are the full 20 minutes long, so when it's repeated on CBBC now, it is followed by 10 minutes of unrelated filler programmes to make up the time.

The original episode 6 was last seen on Friday 27th February 1976, and the new version premiered over 17 years later, on Wednesday 10th September 2003. There's complete broadcast schedules for every Look & Read story elsewhere on this site.


What's Missing

Let's try and work out exactly what was in the original episode but no longer exists...

EXHIBIT A: The Radio Times     [View Listing]
The straight-forward and not-very-interesting listing for the first broadcast of the episode in the Radio Times, just giving the episode title and cast.
• It lists the actors playing Joe and Jill and the Beasley Brothers, plus Powell Jones who only appeared in this one episode, and must've played the tramp that the kids meet while they're searching the woods.
• Mr West is not credited, so he probably didn't appear in the teaching segment of this episode.


EXHIBIT B: The Teacher's Notes     [View Notes]
Material about episode 6 from the Teacher's Notes accompanying the series' first broadcast. The notes were written several months before the final episodes were made, even before the teaching segments themselves has been written, so there's a good chance that plans changed after they were published. But they suggest that the teaching content of this episode included:
• revision (from episode 4) of the 'ee' vowel combination and silent letters like the 't' in castle.
• possibly Joe in his workshop "training ear and eye to note the difference between Beasley and beastly".


EXHIBIT C: BBC Programme-As-Broadcast Documentation     [View Page 1]   [View Page 2]
Most reliable of the lot, though by no means complete, here's a copy of the BBC's original "PasB" typewritten documentation from 1973, recording exactly what was trasmitted on BBC1 that morning. So here's step-by-step what it reveals:
• Only Joe himself appeared in the studio sequences, as could be guessed from the Radio Times. The rest of the cast list also agrees with the magazine, except the BBC've misspelled Paul Humpoletz's name on the PasB.
• Powell Jones did indeed play the tramp - he has a significant speaking role in the filmed story, but strangely isn't credited on the new reconstructed version of the episode -- maybe they just copied the credits over from another episode for the reconstruction, and since the Tramp only appears in this episode, missed him out.
• Jane Carr sang the song for this episode - and that song was "The song of the ea's" by John Baker (who also wrote the rest of the songs for the whole story). Presumably this was related to work on the words "Beasley" and "beastly", so maybe Joe did do that "training" business from the Teacher's Notes after all! The song was 2 minutes 21 seconds long, accompanied by 89 feet of silent film animation.
• MATHS: The story sequences used in the episode totalled 352 feet of 16mm film. This works out at 9 minutes 23 seconds of footage. Add on 26 seconds each for the opening and closing theme tunes, and you get 10 minutes 15 seconds, which is roughly the length of the reconstructed episode containing only the filmed material. Perfect!
• MORE MATHS: The whole original episode lasted 20 minutes and 6 seconds. Since those 10'15" survive (assuming the opening & closing titles sort of survive on other episodes, or at least can be easily reconstructed) that means a total of 9 minutes 51 seconds has been lost. Knock off the length of the song, and there was a total of 7 minutes 24 seconds of studio material, featuring Joe, in the original episode.

Fascinating stuff! And even more interesting, those PasB sheets reveal that the interlude between the previous programme that morning (Science All Around) and Look and Read was filled by three minutes of Bach's Sinfonia to Cantata no. 29, and two minutes of the BBC's Schools Signature Tune. The gap between the end of Look and Read and the start of the next programme (Watch) was so long that transmission was closed down for 13 minutes. Ah the good old days!

If you like these PasB thingies, you can see hundreds more of them - all related to a certain children's science fiction series - on the BBC website.

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