In April 2002, Alys Hayes and I, then running the now retired Avengers on the Radio website, were contacted by John Wright, who introduced himself as an old-time radio enthusiast living in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. John had initially contacted Mike Noon's Noon: Doomsday website regarding his late friend, the Avengers author Douglas Enefer. When Mike learned that John had recorded the Avengers radio series off-air in the 1970s, he suggested John contact us.

Before long, it became abundantly clear that, although John scoffed good-humouredly at the suggestion, without his endeavours there would have been no Avengers on the Radio website and Donald Monat's fine radio portrayal of John Steed would have been almost entirely lost forever in the ether.

Starting in the 1960s, John — an avid listener of Springbok Radio — began recording several programmes off-air on ¼" reel-to-reel tape. Among these were series such as Address Unknown, The Creaking Door, SF-68, Consider Your Verdict, Taxi, Lux Radio Theatre, Medical File and the South African adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes adventures... and The Avengers. Nineteen complete serials of The Avengers! This number included the thirteen that were already known to exist (offered by various OTR dealers in their catalogues) plus another six that had been unheard since 1972-1973. Six serials — representing an additional eight weeks of daily Avengers broadcasts — that were previously thought missing by fans of the series and of Springbok Radio.

These serials — A Deadly Gift, Dial A Deadly Number, The Quick-Quick-Slow Death, The Fantasy Game, From Venus With Love, Train of Events, The Joker, The Super Secret Cypher Snatch, Not to Be Sneezed At, Who Shot Poor George / XR40?, All Done By Mirrors, Stop Me If You've Heard This, Too Many Olés, A Case of Interrogation, The Morning After, Love All, Get-A-Way!, Straight from the Shoulder and A Grave Charge — were all recorded off-air on quarter-inch reel-to-reel tape in South Africa by John Wright. Eighteen of these serials of these hail from Dennis Folbigge's tenure as adaptor/director with the exception being The Fantasy Game, which appears to be the sole surviving example of Tony Jay's work on the series. The overwhelming majority of these recordings include the original Springbok Radio jingles and commercial breaks.

There is clear evidence that the thirteen serials that were previously available were, in fact, sourced from John's recordings. His tapes proffer many clues which lead one to this conclusion — episodes on the OTR retail tapes feature introductory voice-overs on exactly the same episodes, and several recording glitches are carried across from one to the other. To add weight to the argument, John recalls making his Avengers recordings for the benefit of Ron Baron, a partially-sighted radio enthusiast living in America. Ron — "a truly nice guy," as John recalled — was the only person that he ever copied his Avengers tapes for. Clearly Ron made copies for others that he exchanged tapes with — and thank goodness he did! He is very much part of the train of events that led to the Avengers radio series coming to the attention of fans of the series like myself.

When questioned on the subject, John could not say quite why he recorded so much of Springbok Radio's output. He professed to a long love affair with radio and the desire to capture some of it for posterity, fearing — with great foresight — that the heyday of radio drama would not last forever. His recordings of The Avengers and other South African productions are all the more valuable when you consider the sorry state of South African radio archiving.

So why does so little remain from the output of one of South Africa's most popular radio stations? The answer is straightforward. Sonovision were supplied the blank recording media by the series' sponsors, Lever Brothers, and due to the high cost of tape — and the SABC's strict policy of airing programmes just the once — it was very common that new programmes would be recorded over previous productions. This was a very common practice, and for the most part, preservation of the programmes was not considered. "Most programme tapes were wiped after broadcast. The reason was simply economic. They could be re-used and the cost of the blank tape was a significant factor in the production company's budget," Donald Monat explained in an email to the author of this piece.

The South African Broadcasting Corporation Sound (Radio) Archives had been in existence since 1964, after the SABC had identified a need to preserve South African broadcast history. The collection focuses mainly on news and current affairs, sport, drama and music from South Africa, in all South African languages, although some international material is archived. The Avengers unfortunately slipped the net, along with huge swathes of South African radio drama. The Radio Sound Archive is keen to fill in gaps in its collection, and regularly benefits from donations from private collections.

John Wright generously donated his recordings to Alys and myself as owners of the Avengers on the Radio website (the precursor to The Avengers Declassified) and mailed the tapes to us in England in May 2002. This would no doubt have happened earlier had the recipients not fretted over the possibility of the tapes becoming lost in the post, and the best way to get them from South Africa and avoid this nightmarish eventuality.

Imagine, if you will, the thought of what may well be the only surviving off-air recordings of The Avengers ending up in some postal Bermuda Triangle. This was a very real concern, and it was therefore a great relief when the four packages that John sent arrived safely! Fingernails had been bitten down to the quick while the consignment was in transit, but fortunately, all nine tapes survived the journey very well, with no appreciable damage to either the reels, boxes or the recordings themselves.

Alys and I then set about transferring the tapes to the digital domain and slowly restored the nineteen serials (and Escape in Time: Remake 1-3) over a ten year period, completing the project on 28th July 2012. We couldn't be accused of hurrying things... though we transferred and restored the serials twice during this period, taking advantage of improvements in audio restoration software.

John Wright's tapes — which remain in Declassified's private collection — are mostly 1800' reels, with some 1200' and 2400' in the mix. Each tape is divided into four separate monaural tracks (two on each side), each of which are recorded at 3¾ inches per second. Originally, John recorded these tapes in two-track mode only (giving the possibility of recording from stereo sources and a marginally better recording quality), but the scarcity and expense of reels of blank tape — this at a time when compact cassette was making a significant impression on the home recording market — meant that he eventually recorded over the inner tracks on many of his tapes.

This practice preserved the original recording as a single rather than double track recording, and allowed the taping of another programme over the other track. The great majority of John's off-airs of The Avengers serials were recorded in this way, taping over the inside tracks of earlier recordings.

John made his recordings on Sony equipment — most regularly on a Sony-O-Matic with the remainder on a Sony 260 stereo recorder, which John still had in working order in 2002. An example of the 260 is shown on the right.

Most recordings were achieved with a direct patch connection to the radio, giving an excellent frequency response and a warm sound (and thankfully lacking, therefore, the cries of "dinner's on the table!" and "who's a pretty boy, then?" that were preserved forever on many a fan's home-made soundtrack recordings!). Occasionally, out of necessity when away from home, some recordings were made by placing a telephone (suction-cup style) microphone over the speaker of a portable radio. Even in these latter instances, while obviously not being of a studio quality, the results were perfectly acceptable.

Audio restoration is a time consuming process, regardless of the quality of the source material. When you have something in the region of thirty hours of material to transfer from one format to another — before you can even think of commencing clean-up work — then it is very time consuming! This is, of course, exactly the situation we faced with The Avengers.

In mid-May 2002, using a borrowed Revox A77 — a quarter-track ¼" recorder capable of replaying all four tracks of each tape independently — we commenced the process of transferring to a compact disc recorder. While now we would import direct to computer, in 2002 our setup was not sufficiently powerful to perform such a task without falling down on the job. At this stage, only minimal graphic equalisation was applied: the signal was otherwise untreated on its initial journey from analogue to digital. The amount of taped material necessitated the burning of in excess of thirty CDR discs at this early stage.

As the tapes were replayed, we began to realise that the majority of the tapes had survived the thirty years since recording remarkably well, particularly considering the high humidity levels in the Port Elizabeth area. Inevitably, the recordings had developed drop outs, with some tape reels exhibiting this wear and tear more than others. However, the overall quality on replay was excellent, with minimal background noise, good frequency response and clear sound. The fact that the tapes were recorded using a direct connection to the radio means that these are as near in quality to the original master recordings as fans of South African radio and The Avengers are ever likely to hear today, the low recording speed being the fly in the ointment, if one is ultra-critical. The recordings are very impressive, with a few exceptions, and represent a marked improvement over the multi-generational copies previously in circulation. We made rough notes as we ran the tapes and the  listing below reveals that a small proportion of the recordings would present challenges during restoration. All serials would require restoration work. Each of those marked "Excellent Quality" required a degree of noise reduction and minor graphic equalisation, plus a detailed pass for clicks and pops. The others clearly needed additional work.

• Serials in Excellent Quality
  A Deadly Gift
  The Super Secret Cypher Snatch
  Dial A Deadly Number
  The Fantasy Game
  The Quick-Quick-Slow Death
  Love All
  The Joker
  Train of Events
  Get-A-Way!
  The Morning After
  Straight from the Shoulder
  Stop Me If You've Heard This
  From Venus With Love
  Too Many Olés
  A Case of Interrogation
   

• Serials in Poor or Mixed Quality
  Who Shot Poor George Oblique Stroke XR40? (quite muffled)
  All Done By Mirrors (1-3 quite muffled, 4-7 excellent)
  A Grave Charge (1-3, 5 excellent, 4, 6 quite muffled)
  Not To Be Sneezed At (quite muffled)

Train of Events presented a particular problem during its transfer... The serial was recorded on a very thin 2400' tape and we soon discovered that it had snapped at some point in the past. Three and a half minutes into the fourth episode, our hearts leapt into our mouths. A couple of splices went through the tape path (no material missing, so clearly these repairs had been made to the tape some time before The Avengers was recorded onto it) and we then noticed that a third had come apart and attached itself to the piece of tape it was in contact with. Two sections of tape were pulled through the capstans and somehow attached themselves to the other reel. Not sure what to do — and aware that we might get just the one chance to dub this tape — we let it play to the end, and Episodes 5 and 6 were dubbed without further incident.

We then turned the tape over and played it through to the trouble spot, fearing that fast forwarding or rewinding might cause further damage. When parked at the troublesome break, we took the reels off the player and spliced the two ends back together. Somehow, we were able to do this without losing any material whatsoever. Phew! All that was left was to take the tape back four minutes to the start of the episode, whereupon we were able to dub it without problems — not even a glitch at the splice point. Lady Luck was on our side after all, it seemed.

All nineteen recovered serials were dubbed successfully from John Wright's ¼" tapes, the transfer process being completed on Saturday 1st June 2002.

With the transfers done, the recordings were captured as uncompressed computer WAV files at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz (CD quality).

John Wright supplied nine ¼" reels, each one containing as many as 28 episodes. So, Rule One of the restoration of The Avengers was that it was never going to happen overnight. Amusingly, this wasn't the first time we'd gone through this process with the series — we had already made remasters from cassette tapes that we had been loaned in 2000. Those recordings were many generations down from the reel-to-reel tapes that providence and John's generosity had laid at our door, and indeed we soon realised that John's tapes were the original source of those cassettes.  However, when comparing the sound quality of John's recordings to our dubs of the cassettes, it was like a curtain was removed and suddenly the actors were in the room with us. For this reason, we were keen to start afresh.

Gentle noise reduction and graphic equalisation were applied using the Cool Edit Pro program (a great bit of software that was soon after bought up by Adobe and rebadged and developed as Adobe Audition) with custom settings tailored for each individual episode.

Two versions were then burned to final CDR masters — one with original commercials intact, one without — with the WAV files also backed up. Restored recordings were then placed with the SABC Radio Sound Archive.

In addition to the nineteen serials recorded by John Wright, the first three installments of the second version of Escape in Time (again from the Folbigge era), also survive (Episodes 1 and 2 as recordings taken from the original studio masters and 3 from an off-air cassette recording). This story remains incomplete, but Avengers fans should be grateful for small mercies, as some Springbok series are lost forever, or have a handful of episodes remaining from transmission runs far greater than that of The Avengers.

The off-air cassette recording of Episode 3 came to light soon after John Wright's tapes had arrived in England. Searching the web for information about The Avengers radio series, Barbara Peterson found Avengers on the Radio and dropped us a line to say that she too had recorded a single episode in the early 1970s. It transpired that the Escape in Time episode in question was one for which no other recording existed. Another result!

Barbara lived in South Africa as a child while her father flew food into famine-struck Mozambique. She made the recording on compact cassette shortly before moving to Lobatse, Botswana (and out of range of Springbok Radio transmissions, unfortunately!) in 1973. Barbara now lives in her native America.

In common with John Wright before her, Barbara was very kind and trusting in sending her original master recording to us. The episode is missing the very first few seconds, though this is simply a reprise from the end of Episode Two, patching was possible. We're very grateful for the generosity of both Barbara and John. They have both earned themselves places in the Avengers Hall of Fame!
 

There is a good chance that there are further Avengers serials waiting to be discovered in the private taped collections of South African radio enthusiasts. If you are a person who recorded any serials off-air in South Africa (or elsewhere), please contact us if you think you might be sitting on anything exciting. We'd be delighted to hear from anyone who has as much as a clip from a missing episode! Thank you.

Written by Alan Hayes
Based upon two features published in 2002 at Avengers on the Radio
Combined and rewritten for The Avengers Declassified in November 2025

With grateful thanks to John Wright, Barbara Peterson and Ron Baron

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