The earliest surviving complete Richmond Home and Away broadcast - Round 22, 1977 - has been discovered.
The two U-Matic tapes covering Channel 7’s telecast was saved by, would you believe, a Carlton supporter named Al, who rescued them from being trashed at a storage facility back in the 1980s. They have now been digitised and uploaded to Rhett Bartlett’s YouTube channel.
The broadcast is of the last Home and Away game of 1977 – where Richmond kicked 25.21.171 to defeat St Kilda 17.10.112 at the MCG.
It was Barry Richardson’s first year as Richmond coach, Bruce Tempany’s debut game, Kevin Bartlett (33 disposals) and Neville Roberts (22 disposals) kicked five goals each, and Peter Laughlin in just his second game kicked the game high six goals. For St Kilda, the great ‘Cowboy’ Neale was playing his final match.
The turning point of the game occurs just before half-time. With the Saints up by 23 points, Val Perovic strikes Bartlett, breaking his nose. ‘Hungry’ kicks a goal from the free kick, and another a few moments later. Bartlett recalled later he suffered from double vision after the incident until his nose was readjusted in the changerooms at the main break.
Bartlett being attended to after getting his nose broken.
The Tigers finished the season in 4th position, and would defeat South Melbourne in the Elimination Final before losing to North Melbourne in the Semi Final. Both of those games by the way do not exist in a complete form, and are thought to no longer have survived.
Outside of Grand Final telecasts, no complete Home and Away matches from the 1970s appear to have survived in the vaults of Channel 7, Channel 9, ABC, or the AFL.
As was often the case back in the day, highlights of goals, marks and incidents were cut out of the tapes to be shown on the footy shows (and subsequent releases like ‘That Was The Season That Was’), and the rest simply discarded and destroyed.
In total, Al saved ten tapes - including a dub from Channel 7's master tape of the 1978 Grand Final (with ads!), and the 1977 documentary ’V.F.L. 80 Years’.
The tapes originally were addressed to Craig Kimberley, the then South Melbourne President and founder of Just Jeans (who were sponsoring the 1978 GF broadcast).
In Tigerland history, Kimberley is an important footnote - he gave one of the largest single donations during the Save Our Skin campaign, as Just Jeans was based in the Richmond area.
U-Matic tapes are much larger than VHS, and were widely used by television stations in the 1970s and 1980s. However, over time the tapes could suffer from ‘sticky shed syndrome’ where the oxide becomes moist preventing playback.
To be able to digitise these tapes, Al donated them to Rhett Bartlett, who then paid for them to be “baked” by Queensland archivist FlemishDog.
The baking process is literally placing the tapes in a food dehydrator for two days so they temporarily re-absorb the moisture. Once ‘baked’, they were quickly digitised (timing is critical as the tapes revert back to their damaged state again).
The 10 tapes rescued from destruction in the 80s.
The broadcast has now been uploaded to Rhett’s YouTube channel Rhettrospective and can be viewed here.
