Hacker CinemaOut of the Trees
TV series
Out of the Trees is a 1975 television sketch show pilot written by Graham Chapman, Douglas Adams and Bernard McKenna that was broadcast on BBC 2 in 1976. The show shared some of the stream-of-consciousness style of Monty Python's Flying Circus, of which Chapman was a member. Actors included Mark Wing-Davey and Simon Jones. The concept of the show was, according to Chapman, to follow the exploits of two modern-day linguists who would travel around a Britain gripped in rapid decline. The linguists would comment upon the origins of a word or phrase, which would then be the genesis of a sketch. Although two scripts were written, only one episode was ever filmed. It was broadcast only once by the BBC, with little promotion, at 10pm on Saturday 10 January 1976 opposite Match of the Day, and so was seen by relatively few people. The videotape recording of the show has since been wiped, as used to be common for archived BBC shows, due to the relatively high cost of videotape at the time. The film segments shot in outdoor locations survive, and consist of a sketch titled "Severance of a Peony", and some inserts intended for an item about Genghis Khan. The former was included on the DVD for Adams's 1981 TV series adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and also appeared, rewritten as an anecdote, in Chapman's book A Liar's Autobiography. Rewrites of the Genghis Khan sketch appeared in some editions of Adams's posthumous work The Salmon of Doubt as the short story "The Private Life of Genghis Khan".
1 neutralfrom 1 commenter
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
Videos commenters linked
From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
1 comment on Hacker News
Really unlikely, as VHS and Betamax wouldn't be created until several years later (1976 and 1975, respectively), and any tapes still in existence would be in formats that likely have no players anymore.
They MIGHT be lucky if it they find tapes in the same VCR tape format as the BBC's "Out of the Trees" from 1975. It was a sketch comedy show from Monthy Python's Graham Chapman and at-the-time-writer-for-Dr.-Who Douglas Adams, who would go on to Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fame.
A copy was recently restored and put on Youtube after a tape in the VCR format was discovered. It was a home taping made by Graham Chapman himself, and the only existing copy of a recording. A multi-year effort was made to rebuild a player for the tape from scratch, with the final results put on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saxhV4gzm5c
So, it's potentially possible, the the real issue is that during the early years of the BBC they generally re-used the tapes they had and would record over previously used tapes, which is why so much of BBC history is lost from that period. Famously lots of early Dr. Who episodes are lost to time(lords).