Thanks Joe.

I'll try to reconstruct from memory some info I gave before it all went pear-shaped.

To make Open Door programmes you had to pitch the idea at the BBC and put in quite a bit of legwork to justify and then develop the idea. They could only be made by or on behalf of charitable/ community organisations, not by individuals, but in those days I was on the EFDSS NEC so that was legit.

By 1982, many of the folk clubs that had emerged in the 60s/70s boom years were struggling, so we decided to try and put a bit of the good music that you might find in a typical (not specialist) folk club in front of the public. Everybody involved did it for free including all the artists and the venue. The budget was minuscule. I asked artists I knew, on the basis that a) I thought they were good and up to it, b) between them we got as wide a cross section of music as we could in the four songs possible while c) having a good variety of instruments played and d) a decent gender balance. On top of that, the idea was that put together they would make a nifty ceilidh band for Eddie to call to. Oh, and I didn't think it was appropriate to play/sing or MC myself - I didn't want it to be wilfully misinterpreted as self-promotion.

Of course there could have been many alternative artists/ permutations of the above, but I think the set we had was very decent.

Of course it's dated now visually. Of course the clothes, haircuts, trousers etc look amusing - but then so do clips of the audience for Top Of The Pops in the same era. It was how people looked then. I hope the music stands up though. Oddly, the most criticism I remember after it was broadcast was that the women performers "let the side down" because they didn't have glam TV make-up, haird-dos and frocks!.

What I wasn't to know was that this might well turn out to be one of the few bits of reasonably professional documentary surviving from the folk club scene of that time.

Thanks to everybody who made positive comments before the thread got zapped. When I have time, I've also got a VHS tape (off-air again) from a nice full-length documentary that one of the southern region TV stations made of a later 80s Bracknell Folk Festival that I organised. I'll try to digitise that and upload it in the same way before long.

And yes, I know it's strictly illegal ;-)