The Mystery of the Lost and Found Episodes of The Adventures of Gerry Gee

Do you remember The Adventures of Gerry Gee — the serial on the Tarax Show in which Gerry Gee solved crimes, saved maidens in distress or rescued his friend Ron Blaskett? They were innovative and imaginative and would be regarded as historical treasures today. But whatever happened to them? In this blog post I want to dig a bit deeper into the fate of those films.

Note: This blog post was updated with new information in September 2020.

The series was produced on 16mm film and originally broadcast in the Tarax Show, circa 1960–1961. When Denzil Howson left GTV9 to work at AMV4 Albury, he arranged for the reels of film to be sent to Albury and the series to be shown on the daily children’s program. And when he joined STW9 in Perth in 1966, he arranged for The Adventures of Gerry Gee films to be sent to the West and shown there also, after which the films were packaged up and returned to GTV9.

Then the series was forgotten for a long time…

However, in 1991 some reels were re-discovered in the GTV9 archives. In 2001 Ron Blaskett wrote in his autobiography “You, Me and Gerry Gee”:

“Denzil and I were called to GTV9 in October 1991, as some old film had been found in the archives — and here was the series that had been missing for 25 years — what treasures! Now we’ve had them transferred to videotape.”

The “videotape” Ron refers to was VHS cassettes. Exactly who made these copies is not stated. However I questioned Ron about this a number of times in the years prior to his passing in 2018. His recollections were:

• The episodes were found by Wally Ritter, a long time member of staff and former colleague of Denzil’s at GTV9. Wally had become the de-facto archivist at GTV9.
• The films were probably loaned to Denzil for copying.

This fits with the fact that there are indeed VHS copies of some episodes in Denzil’s collection, with an accompanying typed inventory of episodes as follows:

So these treasures were preserved after all? Not quite. The VHS copies were made using a crude home-grown “telecine” system. The quality of the copies is frankly terrible — washed out shadows, blown out highlights, out of focus, poor sound quality — plus they suffer from the serious shortcomings so characteristic of “home video” systems of that era — all a far cry from the excellent image and sound quality on the 16mm originals. In fact these VHS copies do very poor service to these pioneering children’s productions — other than proving that they had been produced.

Which leads us back to the a search for the 16mm originals, because nowadays film can be copied on digital film scanners that preserve all the detail and subtleties on the film — and digital restoration can improve the result even more.

Why Were The Films Returned to GTV9?

So what happened to the films after they were “transferred to videotape” circa 1991? If Denzil was indeed loaned them for copying, why did he not simply keep them? He had always regretted sending the films back to GTV9 after showing them in Perth in the 1960s — later realising that nobody else would value them as he did. So the temptation to keep them would have been difficult to resist. We can only assume that whoever found them at GTV9 insisted that they be returned to the archives. And this suggests that some value was placed on them and that there was an intention to preserve them in the archives. After all, why would you insist on getting them back if you were planning to throw them away?

Ron Blaskett told me that the films went back to Fremantle International, the distribution arm of the Nine organisation and that he and Denzil had tried to follow this up through Fremantle International without success. Ron thought they “lost or threw out most stuff” and that “Packer said they were not running a museum”.

It’s at this point that the trail goes cold (apart from a tiny handful of copies in private collections — see below).

Could They Be In the Nine Archives?

I have made a couple of attempts in the past decade to contact the TCN9 archives by email and on each occasion was given a rather unhelpful response by an anonymous respondent. They claimed that their holdings prior to the 1980s were not cataloged in their computer database and that hence they had no idea what was in their collection prior to that date.

Recently Peter Smith has made enquiries through his contacts in the Nine organisation in Sydney. Something may come of this.

In the mean time, we can imagine that there may be a pile of rusty film cans somewhere containing these lost episodes. And there may be some episodes which made their way into private collections, yet to await discovery.

If anyone reading this has any useful information to add to this investigation, please contact me at paul@tdgq.com.au.