Toy Theatre on DVD - UPDATE

From Paul J. Weighell (Pollocks Toy Theatres Limited), posted recently on the Toy Theatre list:

After much playing about with spreadsheets and costs I am afraid that I have been forced to abandon my plans for a toy theatre play DVD. The idea was OK and several helpful people, to whom I am most grateful, helped to flesh it out towards a decent product thought. However, the time and cost seems large whilst the potential audience seems all too small so it could not be self financing as I had hoped. Sorry. It was just not practical.

The toy theatre archive we are creating (Pollocks, Hugo Brown and I) is slowly growing and this year may have all the sheets finally catalogued and filed for public access (viewing by arrangement only to protect the material).Adding footage of live or animated performances to the archive would increase its usefulness and I am sure some toy theatre people would like their work to be seen.

So, if anyone has photographs, film, video tape, CD, DVD or images in any format whatsoever of their own or other people's toy theatre performances then I would love to arrange to acquire a copy for the museum archives if you would care to give a copy to us for posterity (or as much posterity as we can provide anyway!)

My response:

Paul:

I was afraid cost would be the doom of such a project. Hopefully, those that have footage already will step forward, due to your request.

It's too bad no one thought of documenting Hugo and you as you've been doing this - filming you as you do the cataloguing, interviews, shots of the various sheets and theatres, the artifacts in the "bowels of Pollock's" (the plates, etc.) - the cost could have been covered by the BBC or similar organization. You guys are a national treasure in my book. Is it too late to do that, to approach them to cover the cost and capture some of this before it's too late...? [Maybe Peter Baldwin could be approached, use his contacts at the BBC, and have an influence to get this started...?]

What do you think?

Yes, everyone reading this - what do YOU think? If you can help make this happen, feel free to contact me, and I can put you in touch with Paul...