Talk:The Fast Lane

References

The article has been heavily improved using all the information that's online, but for a show this old, it's often hard to find.

MUCH of the information has been gleaned from reading TV Guides from the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age available on Google News, but unfortunately the Google New archive itself is missing huge chunks of editions from around the time of the programme.

At one point, three weeks of the paper are missing. Sometimes the Herald has the TV Guides, and sometimes the Age, but alas, we still don't get a complete coverage of the articles.

As mentioned in the main article, the ABC re-used all the Umatic videotapes the programme was recorded on, so no DVDs or even VHS copies of the show were ever released. If you go on to YouTube, a bit more than half of the episodes exist, as they've been painstakingly ripped from personal copies of VHS tapes where they've been recorded off air. I've watched the entire first series now, and progressively get to the second. This won't take as long, as EIGHT of the NINE first series shows have managed to be salvaged, but only four or five from the second series have been located in people's old boxes of VHS tapes.

If ANYONE has VHS copies of the show, please drop over to my talk page and make contact with me. If you can digitise them, great, but even if you can't, if I can be sent the VHS tape, I can digitise it for us all. Even if we have digitised copies, then due to the poor quality of many of the episodes, it'd be nice to see if other copies we locate are any better.

Just to let you know how this project is progressing...

TheBustopher (talk) 12:34, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for all the work in building up the page. Having tried in the past few weeks to track down the odd episode, summaries and additional material, I appreciate the magnitude of the task.

Additional sources that have assisted include the program guides in the Canberra Times, available on Trove, and the collection of VHS recorded episodes that Peter Hosking (who played the police officer, Blair), has now put on his own Youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuBLqdNs95OYPcTmffG-7iYr5TDR8-xWf .

He seems to have recorded (or at least uploaded) only the episodes he appeared in, so again it's not a complete record, but there are 13 episodes in all and it does seem to fill in most of the gaps from other collections on Youtube. But his own titling/episode order doesn't help with the confusion about the order of the final two episodes in Series 1.

As you say in earlier edits, the program guides for the original screening have "The Below Average Samaritan" (TBAS) as Episode 8 and "All's Well That Himfella Buggerup Finish" (All's Well) as Episode 9, thus the final episode in Series 1.

The back announce for TBAS on Daniel Hunt's VHS recording on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59f4WcaUhqk has it as the final episode. Hosking's titles have TBAS as S1E9 and All's Well as S1E8 (thus reversing the program guides order as well). But the back announce of Hosking's recording of All's Well has "this is the final program in this series", which would make it S1E9.

To me, the feel of All's Well, particularly the ending, make it more likely the final episode of Series 1.

The back announce for TBAS on Hunt's recording refers to a "heart warming documentary" on Mother Teresa following the mid-evening news. This never followed the original screening in 1985, but it did follow a repeat screening of the episode on 18 December 1986 http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/130635839 which suggests Hunt's recordings are from the repeat screening of Series 1 in late 1986. I think the error in making the back announce about TBAS being the final episode occurred because the final (All's Well) episode was not scheduled for the following week (being Christmas Day 1986), but was instead shown two weeks later on 1 January 1987 http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/119472473

All in all, if I do say so, all of this has been a research exercise worthy of one of Excelsior's (or rather Pat's) better efforts. Now if only the ABC had properly archived the originals ...

Romeril1971 (talk) 15:13, 29 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks heaps for your additions. The day before yesterday I thought I'd have a look at YouTube and see if there were any extra episodes online, and naturally found the 13 eps that Peter Hoskings sent up. With Daniel Hunt's contributions I now have all nine episodes from Series 1 and 7/10 eps from Series 2. Only three more to go now. Peter Hosking's videos seem to be of slightly better quality than Daniel Hunt's - they are certainly more COMPLETE - a couple of Dan's come in a couple of minutes into the show. I downloaded them all yesterday but will need to watch them all and try to recreate them in the best form possible using my video editor, and transcode them to a consistent format. This'll probably take a couple of weeks as I've had a quick look at some of Hosking's uploads and some have some weird VHS distortions in some parts. Fragments of some of Hunt's might need to be interspersed with some of Hoskings's! (Don't panic, I'm a highly experienced video editor).

Peter's replied to one of my comments on his YouTube uploads already, so my further question to him was "how confident are you of your episode numbers?", as they didn't seem to correspond exactly to our list here on Wiki, although most of them match.

And worse luck - today (Sunday) - the Trove digitised Newspaper archive is down due to excessive user accessing. I'll get back to it in the early hours of the mornings (I tend towards being nocturnal anyway). Anyway, this challenge *IS* going to need Pat's work rather than Bryce & Ken's!

TheBustopher (talk) 04:43, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

While I'm here - here's an excellent resource for episode descriptions and numbers: http://www.australiantelevision.net/fast-lane/episodes.html

TheBustopher (talk) 05:02, 17 December 2017 (UTC)