Quote:
Originally Posted by hivemind  Blinking hell!
Tapes played a major part of your working life. When I moved to Cornwall in 1988, I ended up during my school holiday's working in a blasted fish & chip shop in Truro. Hated every damn minute of it. About 1991, I did a stint at a video shop in Truro, located at Lemon Quay. The bloke who had the VHS rental shop had just over 1000 titles, and a load of Medusa tapes, plus quite a few Palace tapes that would've gone for good money now. A treasure trove of VHS goodness. Just wished I had the money back in the day to buy up some of those tapes. Miss it lots. |
Yeah, I ended up working for Apollo for 12 years before segueing into buying for Video Island, Britannia and Prism Leisure - 15 years in total and 14 of those were during the days of tape. I continued to work in the video industry for another five years after that before moving here.
All those old independents are gone now. My pal here in Tavistock finally closed his doors last year - I don’t know of any other rental shops now apart from one in Bristol that became the focus of the media a few years ago.
I’m sure, like me, you’d travel far and wide collecting tapes back in the day - video shops, newsagents, off licences, boot fairs and charity shops. I was still acquiring stuff to sell well into the 00s (and wrote a regular column about collectible bits for a trade mag) but it’s pretty much dried up now. You seldom see tapes around and if you do they’re the sell-thru releases of common variety titles.
Still, I have happy memories and I love chatting about it!