Treasure trove of weird and wonderful footage in RTÉ archives
Broadcast by Newsbeat in January 1967, Tim Hayes’ ‘Underground Endurance Test’ began on Christmas Day 1966 in Ballymore in Cork when the local man broke a world record which many would not take on.
It’s just one of the many odd releases from the RTÉ archives which features as part of its ‘Weird and Wonderful’ collection to mark the UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage today .
Tim’s feat will be joined by videoes featuring opera singing dogs, weather forecasting goats, the seventh son of a seventh son, a fairy tree, a hunt for monsters in the lakes of Connemara, a UFO in Mullinahone, travelling by steamroller from Longford to Dublin, a pub crawl, a stretcher race, and magician priest who balances his niece on a sword.
RTÉ Archives, the largest audiovisual archive collection in Ireland, has decided to mark the day by delving into the vaults to bring audiences a unique ‘Weird and Wonderful’ collection of 15 videos of Irish life in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
Curator at RTÉ Archives Liam Wylie said the videos would reflect some of the more odd aspects of Irish life. “It is a presentation of some of the more offbeat or bizarre stories of Irish life captured by RTÉ that will make you smile. We also hope it will make you think about the value of preserving audiovisual content for the future,” he said.
Ireland’s largest audio visual collection, with more than 650,000 thousand hours of moving image and sound recordings together with significant collections of photographs, manuscripts and administrative documents, RTÉ Archives maintains and preserves a unique record of Irish life in the interest of the Irish public.
rte.ie/archives/weirdandwonderful
