Here's the description that I hammered out on Vimeo late last night, while the video was uploading...

This video is beautifully odd and needs explaining.

Sometime in the early 1990s - I forget quite when - I stumbled across this late one night on BBC2. It was playing on a loop, and I was mesmerised. I knew it was inherently cool, so I recorded it on a VHS tape I had to hand on my mum's already quite aged VCR.

Several years back I found out what the hell it was - BBC Engineering were testing analogue scrambling of terrestrial signals for the short-lived (1992-1994) BBC Select. The scrambling was very similar to what was used by Sky for analogue satellite transmissions, but needed modifying for terrestrial where there was the possibility of ghosting and things. Back then things couldn't be hidden off the EPG - if you were testing something, you were doing it out in the wild, and curious teenagers could watch what you were doing. This curious teenager stumbled across the signals being broadcast without scrambling.

Anyway, I found the tape in the attic, and knew what I had to do - hook the VCR back up (first time in about 7 years) and dump it onto my hard drive recorder, so that I could share my nerdiest thing ever with other nerds. YAY!

I should make a point of mentioning the awesome music and that it's not just tedious test cards; there's mental video footage that feels like a proto-Adam Curtis documentary. It seems to be on a 20-ish minute loop, which is good because the video broke up so badly after 23 minutes I couldn't dump it any further.