Yes, the rumours are true, Curious British Telly has finally invested in a Betamax player. It's something I've wanted to get hold of for years, ever since I first started trawling through old VHS tapes. But the price of a fully functioning, excellent condition model had always been a little prohibitive. Okay, £175-ish wasn't exactly going to send me into a financial meltdown, but it was difficult to justify in the grand scheme of things. Luckily, the Substack I set up a while back has managed to secure a few paid subscribers and their funds have made this possible. Eternal thanks, once again, to them.
Anyway, yes, I've now got a Sanyo VTC-5000 machine and it's in excellent condition. You can find out more about the whole experience on the Substack by clicking here. In the next few weeks, assuming no disasters occur, I should have some early to mid-80s Betamax tapes to put the player through it's paces. And this is very exciting, as I've barely done any tape trawling in the last year. So, hopefully, I'll be digging up some interesting footage very soon.
And, of course, if you have any old Betamax tapes with 1970s/80s recordings on, please get in touch!