About a week after our recent visit to the BFI Archives, we received an email concerning our piece on Sebastian the Incredible Drawing Dog. It had been sent by James who just happened to be a vintage television enthusiast. Interestingly, he also just happened to have found a 1987 Betamax tape which contained an episode of Sebastian. And would we be interested in it? As you can imagine, we kept our calm, downed a glass of Courvoisier and then bit his hand off at the offer.
James forwarded us a DVD conversion of the episode - Tall Hat Joe - and finally we owned a copy of Sebastian. To be honest, we had long given up any hope of recovering an episode. How many people out there still have old videotapes lying about from 25 years ago? There's not many and what chance of there being a forgotten show such as Sebastian would be of them? An episode of The A-Team - that's likely, in fact we have one in a box somewhere! We were wrong, of course, to doubt this and it makes us wonder what else is out there on old discarded tapes.
Whilst this discovery is not exactly finding episode 6 of Doctor Who - The Tenth Planet, it's important to Curious British Telly as it's our first real achievement. One of our aims was to get hold of some screenshots of Sebastian - particularly of Michael Barrymore in action. We've managed to do this thanks to the generosity of James and have an internet first regarding a TV show. It's renewed us with confidence in pushing forwards with the blog and seeing what else we can uncover.
The updated Sebastian article can be found here: Sebastian
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