Welcome

If you only have time to read one of my blogs, make it number 24.

Most of the scenes from television mentioned below can no longer be viewed on my website.

Introduction, 30th May, 2019

In February 2015, I created a website that included a video of my 1995 journey to Morocco and scans of most of the pages of five books that I wrote about the south of England in the 1980s. In the twelve months from 16 November 2017 to 16 November 2018, the site was visited by 8,000 people.

In May 2018, I published my autobiography, ‘Happy Memories’, and signed copies are available at half price from the link provided. I thought it might reach more people if I incorporated it into my website, and this is what I did on 10 September 2019. At the same time, I added a sequence from my collection of scenes from films and television. From ten hours of recordings, I chose a series of scenes from Russian and East European musicals that were filmed in the 1950s and broadcast in 1988. Not only are these a source of pleasure, but they are also of historical interest because they convey a feeling of optimism that conflicts with the popular image of that part of the world at that time.

In February 2019, I added two more sequences, one about the New Forest and one about the Dorset villages of Yetminster, Chetnole and Leigh. The picture quality is poor compared with that of more recent broadcasts, but this is more than offset by the quality of the programmes.

I then tried to upload the whole ten-hour collection in one-hour sequences. This was found to be impossible, but I was able to do it by dividing the collection into a hundred sequences, some of them taken from most of the programmes and others from only one. I included the words ‘Golden Treasury of Video’ in the titles so that people who find a scene and like it can find similar ones. Where my chosen scenes are very similar to ones already on the internet, I avoided repeating them by providing a link. On 30 May 2019, I added an index to make the sequences easier to find.

It must be said that some people don’t like my selections, but many people do. One lady returned them with a note saying that they made her forget her worries and that they took her and her friends back to what she called their ‘happy recollections’. For more about this collection, see Chapter 13 of my autobiography.

The panoramas that I produced in the 1970s can be viewed at
www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/panoramas/chrisjestypanoramas.html

You are welcome to copy the website in any way you like.