archiving

The Timekeepers of the Millennium

Remember how I made that post a week or so about getting to visit the Millennium Dome? I mentioned how there was a children’s TV show to go with one attraction, but it was mostly lost. Well, I found the first three episodes!

Presenting The Timekeepers of the Millennium! It used a combination of live-action, puppetry and CGI to take kids on a irreverent ride through British history. Well, sort of. Kids of the time probably wouldn’t have actually learned a damn thing from it, I know I didn’t, but who cares! They built a park inside a doooooome!

….Yeah, about that.

Well, regardless of the quality of the actual Dome, this show isn’t all that bad. The two main muppets are charming enough and all the actors playing historical figures seem to be having fun at least. Also let’s face it, the demographic for this was definitely “tweenagers who would pester their parents into taking them to the Dome so they could meet the characters” and no-one else. There was indeed a Cogs and Sprinx running round the Millennium Dome back in the day!

(no using that image please.)

RIP Timekeepers! I found out recently that their ball-pit-like Dome attraction was about the only one in the building not sponsored by some evil mega-corporation so they got that going for them too.

VHS Lady

This story has been bouncing around the internet for the past couple days. I’ve heard people saying “She must have had OCD!” but so what if she had? She did something truly impressive here. She might have preserved old TV shows that would’ve otherwise been lost. (Doctor Who fans will recognise the pain of that.) This story has also served to remind me I need to really work on digitizing me and my mother’s three or so boxes worth of VHS tapes from the ’90s before they’re lost forever.

So from one Overly Devoted Archivist to another, thank you, Marion Stokes.