[James2001]

A shame BBC Parliament don't repeat old elections any more, the 70, 79 and 97 ones are currently up on iPlayer (and more were on there in the past), but it would be good to see more shown again. Would be good to see historic ITN election coverage as well- also notable as they have at least some of 59, 64 and 66 surviving on video, when the BBC only has theirs as telerecordings.

Also, whenever the 97 election has been shown, it's been the "clean" version without the results graphics or any other captions (though you can see them on some of the monitors in the studio), which makes things somewhat harder to follow. Is that the only version that exists, or just that it was the first version they pulled out and they've used every time since? Every other election they showed had the original graphics, but when they showed 2001 election, the picture quality wasn't great, looked like it was from a composite source and with a fair amount of analogue tape drop-outs (so presumably recorded to Beta SP rather than a digital format), I'm guessing that might be the only way the "dirty" version was recorded as it wasn't seen as a priority to archive (I presume the clean version survives in higher quality), the first few minutes of the post-breakfast coverage were from a clean version as well until the graphics suddenly cut in.

And speaking of Breakfast, we didn't tend to get that either, I think the 1979 one was the only one where it was shown in full. I think in earlier elections, it likely wasn't even recorded (as there wouldn't be any results coming in), though one of the 74 elections (I think the October one) we did get some of it, the 1970 one on the iPlayer starts at 9:03 just as the breakfast presenter hands over to Cliff Michelmore (I guess possibly more was recorded, but not enough for them to consider it worthwhole to include). 83 and later it would have been covered as part of Breakfast Time/Breakfast News which I imagine they treat separately (but I presume was still archived).

As I've highlighted before, the BBC clearly have both clean and dirty versions of the 1987 election, as the infamous clip of David Dimbleby caught with a mars bar has been shown at different times both with and without the results strap:

up.metropol247.co.uk