It's hard to believe now, but at that time if you wanted to watch Monty Python or The Good Life, you just had to stay in and watch it live. You had a simple choice: go out, or watch TV. Then we began to hear about strange machines, tape recorders for TV programs. I remember wondering why you couldn't just plug the aerial lead into a normal cassette recorder. Of course it wasn't that simple, and there were many problems to overcome before a practical home recorder could be produced. Not all of these problems had been completely solved when the first machines went on sale...

The first home video cassette recorders were fiendishly expensive items, of interest only to the wealthy gadget freak. But by the early eighties, less than ten years later, we had taken them to our hearts and the UK had more video recorders per person than anywhere else in the world. This site is a celebration of this remarkable time, and of those strange beasts which clanked away under the TV sets in thousands and then millions of homes.

It is also a showcase for a collection of these early machines, dinosaurs of the technological age, excavated from the geological layers of junk which are the dubious heritage of our modern world. Today, old video recorders may still be junk, but tomorrow they will be curiosities and the day after they may be rarities. I firmly expect the Antiques Roadshow of, say, 2025 to feature an early Betamax machine, lovingly restored and polished daily like a classic car or Chippendale chair.

Click on the museum to enter...