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What happened to the Western?
IT WAS Doctor Who's fault really. We were dealing with a story about High Wycombe's John Smithson who was involved in filming the first episode about the travelling time lord in 1963.
That, of course, then sparked a healthy' debate about who was the best Doctor Who. As someone who watched it from the outset I was batting for the first two - William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. After that the actors came and went with regular monotony and I lost interest because in my view, I argued, they couldn't hold a candle to those pioneers.
Anyway I then had this bright idea about logging on to YouTube to see what was out there in the infinite world of video clips. And there it was in all its black and white glory - the first episode of Doctor Who - An Unearthly Child.
Unfortunately, however, that was only the beginning. I recognised one of the key actors as being the star of an earlier children's TV series, Sir Lancelot and at that point someone tugged at some wires in my brain and unlocked Pandora's box.
The names of programmes from the early 60s came tumbling out of some dormant grey cell. Highway Patrol with Broderick Crawford (never heard of him since but the name has stuck for some obscure reason), Circus Boy (starring a very young Micky Dolenz who went on to become one of the Monkees), Rawhide (the debut series for one Clint Eastwood), Champion the Wonder Horse, Hop Along Cassidy, Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, Wagon Train and The Virginian.
I couldn't type the names quick enough into the search bar - and suddenly my past was unfolding before my eyes as YouTube delivered clip after grainy clip from all these programmes.
One interesting fact emerges. Apart from Highway Patrol, they were all Westerns. Television was full of them in those days and it left me wondering what happened to our appetite for cowboys and Indians, cattle drives, sheriffs hunting down badmen who were always dressed in black and the rounding up and breaking in of mustangs.
I've now even ordered a copy of the classic Western story, Riders of the Purple Sage written in 1912 by Zane Grey to read on holiday. By the way did you know his first name was Pearl? Strange name to give a boy and little wonder he went on to write more than 50 classic macho Western novels which in turn were at the heart of 110 films.
Anyway sorry for this reverie which will probably pass right over the heads of most of you, but there is a dark cloud looming on the horizon.
The jewel that is YouTube for unlocking such memories is now at the centre of a £500m copyright infringement lawsuit in America.
Google is arguing that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protects it from copyright infringement by users as long as illegal material is taken down once the company is notified.
Last week entertainment company Viacom won a federal court ruling forcing Google to release the records of EVERY video watched on YouTube including user names and web addresses.
That's going to be a shed load of data. Meanwhile if you've been saving this stuff down to your machine, then maybe it's time to saddle up and head out of town.
9:30am Tuesday 15th July 2008
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