The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #84796   Message #1572549
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
29-Sep-05 - 09:09 PM
Thread Name: BBC2/PBS Sept 26 No Direction Home
Subject: RE: BBC2/PBS Sept 26 No Direction Home
Madhouse on Castle Street? A very peculiar programme - as if they were intentionally trying to ramble around the story without telling it, and without even playing the sound tapes they had managed to get hold of.

Maybe the idea was to echo the way Bob Dylan in the play wandered round in the background, singing songs more or less at random. At least that's how I remember the play.

And I suppose the showing of fairly arbitary newsreel clips from the time, mostly about the weather, may have been a way of commenting on the way that the BBC decided to hold on to these, while destroying the tape of the play.

But the oddest thing was that there was no attempt at all to give any information about how it was that the decision was made to destroy the tapes six years later, at a time when Dylan was at the height of his fame. Who dunnit? Why did they do it? What was the actual story? (It's part of a bigger story about all kinds of other remarkable TV material which was arbitrarily wiped around the same time.)