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Originally Posted by Paul@TheOverlook  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! |
Interesting. Britannia. Use to buy tapes from them. Do you remember Bensonworld based in London. Back in the early days they use to sell brand new rental tapes for 60-80 pounds a pop. Then they went to selling retail and finally DVD. I think the company went bust. You were lucky enough to work in the VHS industry.
I ended up working in HMV in Truro when it opened in 2003. Now it's downsized and ended up in Pydar Street in Truro. It's the closest I got to working with physical media again. There's tapes I still have in my collection from those days when I use to travel to HMV in Guildford back in the 1980's.
The prices of tapes in HMV in the mid-1980's was crazy. They often had those Warner big box tapes that were re-issues for £14.99 and then quite a few ex-rental titles that had only been used three times, then they would be sold in HMV or Virgin. I remember buying Return of the Jedi Crocodile Dundee and the first RCA/Columbia release of Krull. Some of those tapes cost about 35 to 50 pounds each. Insane days, considering back then there was no retail market for VHS tapes until 1986.