The Wisdom Channel YouTube truth

Putting up the Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel on YouTube in July 2007 was initially a wrong move. It is totally stupid to publish some rare video material which is not available anywhere else in the world.

And then of course one should be decent enough to ask the copyright holder for permission. Luckily, after a while, the traitor was forgiven by the parties involved: Tom Lehrer and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation - the NRK. They must have regarded this as a worthy cause, and Lehrer's songs are again spread by enthusiasts, like they were around Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1940's, 50's and 60's.

The videos are not on YouTomb

The twelve songs are still (2010) available on YouTube, and they've even been republished in 4:3 aspect ratio and in higher quality. That's much nicer than being on YouTomb.

YouTomb? Yes, some students at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts have created their own interesting website called YouTomb. It features an updated list of YouTube videos removed because of copyright violation. Thanks to Tom Lehrer and the NRK, his YouTube songs do not belong on that list, but the site is worth a visit. Another link to YouTomb is here.

The Ampex Quadruplex recording

Why are these twelve videos considered so rare? Because few whole Lehrer performances were ever recorded to video. A lot of the shows in which he appeared are lost. This was the time when Kinescope (Telerecording) or the Ampex Quadruplex two inch video tapes ruled the broadcasting world.

Lehrer appeared on a few late night American talk shows, like "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson". He was usually recorded on the same Ampex equipment as was used to record the performance on YouTube. Virtually all of Carson's pre-1970 shows, including his debut as host and Tom Lehrer's appearances, were lost to history when, following standard procedure at the time, the extremely expensive videotapes were reused.

Ampex Quadruplex video tape recorder

In England, the Lehrer BBC peformances, along with a lot of other classics, disappeared.

As Ampex videotape in the 1960s could be used up to 100 times, this meant that tapes were reused and programmes could be recorded over each other. It was during this decade that many programmes now considered to be 'classics' were recorded over and lost. But not in the NRK in Norway. They kept their Ampex tapes.

You can watch the old Ampex two-inch format in use here:

Read more about the Ampex Quadruplex videotape format on Wikipedia, here or on another page here. You can read about Kinescope or Telerecording here.

The other formats from 1967 to now

The Lehrer performance was preserved by the NRK via copying to Bosch Fernseh (BCN 1" SMPTE type B) one-inch video tape. Read more HERE. The present copy is stored in the Sony Digital Betacam format. Scroll down a page and read more about "digibeta" HERE.

The problem with Tom Lehrer was that he stopped performing in the Ampex years (1960's), and that a complete Lehrer concert was never directly recorded on less costly video tape formats.

A tape sleeping in the archives

The present day Sony Digital Betacam copy of the original Ampex recording is sleeping very well in the NRK archives.

It is possible to find other live video clips of Tom Lehrer on YouTube, but no collection of clips from a whole performance.

This historic concert remains one of Lehrer's last full concert appearances. He retired into a more quiet life as a lecturer and professor, teaching mathematics at different universities.

Although you can not buy this complete performance, there are plenty of good audio CD's available. And the audio quality on Tom Lehrer's CD's is far superior to the low-fi sound you will hear on YouTube. Use the menu and read the music page.