FAQ

 

1. Do Mick and Tone work together anymore?

 

Mick and Tony have parted comedic ways unfortunately. This sadly comes down to the fall out after Mick's failure to release Boy Town Confidential as an extra on the Boy Town DVD. Neither has there been a possibility of the featurette's release. The characters in Boy Town were the creation of the Molloy Brothers and therefore they own the intellectual copyright over them. This means that without their permission Tony can't release Boy Town Confidential on his own even if he wanted to. Tony still often speaks fondly of the antics the two of them got up to on Martin-Molloy. Tony's had to console himself by knowing that although he can't release the mockumentary, he can show it to as many of his friends as possible in the world of comedy and know that his reputation didn't get tattered as he feared, which was the sole reason he went public with the matter. We're sure he wouldn't have wanted to deal with the legalities involved in a legal resolution to the matter and neither would Mick, this remains a stumbling block that means that if they were ever so inclined to work together again, that would most likely have to be resolved first. Let's hope time heals all wounds.

 

2. How did you keep your recordings audible after all these years?

 

We wish we could say that it's due to sensible precautions and storage methods, but for the bulk of the collection it has survived purely out of good luck. The majority of them were originally recorded on VHS from  the radio and then mixed down to cassettes. Ironically cassettes have  seemed the most stable storage medium in most cases compared to the ones on VHS tapes.

 

3. How many episodes do you guys have?

 

There is somewhere around 800 episodes in total that went to air. We would estimate that there is possibly between 65-75% of those in the archive.

 

4. How often will new releases appear on the site?

 

I have a life guys!! This stuff is analog. No, one of the good things is that for while there'll be a release pretty quickly in terms of the 1995 episodes at least, and to keep people who've heard the 1995 ones happy, I'll also be putting up 1996 episodes.

 

There are problems  with some tapes so that means that times may vary but there will be  others where I'll just have to skip them. If anyone's reading this who  has the earlier episodes, there a few months of a jump but I might go  back and patch that up next.

 

If you're new to the recordings entirely you'll also have 1995 to listen to shortly as well, and I hope that what represents what I have of the quarter of the year, from mid 1996 to the break in the 3rd quart of the year keeps people who've heard the other episodes busy while I sort out the 1995 ones and the earlier 1996 ones.

 

Then to be honest the tapes head of me 1997 will be a little unknown but should be a mixture of very easy and possibly difficult episodes, I really don't know but some of those I will be able to partially rely on  another contributors donation of tapes for 1997. The 1998 tapes have a  gap near the start of the year but should be pretty simple for me to do  from what condition they look they were recorded in. There are three significant gaps in the archive. That's one, the other was in April-May 1996 and of course from the very start of the show until I started  taping mid July 1995.

 

In short, there should be at least 5 episodes available per week.

 

5. Do you have an rss feed?

 

There are RSS feeds on every thread in the forum and we will post on there  when new episodes are available for release which can be grabbed by RSS. The twitter feed will also have announcements of the new episodes.

 

6. Were the admin of the site involved in Martin-Molloy?

 

The people involved with the site and its hosting and creation are entirely fan based and in no way profit from this content in the form of any monetary gain. This site is for archival purposes solely and we werent involved in any way with the show.

 

7. Did you release some episodes elsewhere, and if so why aren't these on the site already?

 

I had gone through a long period of time of thinking that the tapes were not considered valuable by anyone. When I finally did realise  there were fans out there who did want to hear the show again, I finally got hold of a proper cassette player about a year later. Before that I started to use a second hand one. This is the principal reason these episodes had to be remastered. Other than over time as I worked on furthering the archive I at first had not paid any attention to audio restoration, and learnt a lot about how to restore the audio to the point that that the end result was much clearer than the recordings and have put a lot of time into figuring out how to restore them.

 

Due to the artificial appearance of tape warp and playback speed issues - there is nothing wrong with the cassettes it was due to the first cassette player that I played them with, I realized there was a problem, and upgraded to a new cassette player.

 

By the time I'd realized how to clean them up, and that there were artificial problems with the digitization of the earlier tapes, I decided that after they had long been in some degree of circulation already that if these shows were to be preserved and widely downloaded by people, it would be better that they were of the best possible quality. For that reason I started to re-digitize all of the tapes from the start. I have digitized all the episodes I have of 1995 again from the original tapes. I am luckily only going to have to put them through some slight hiss reduction and some possible noise restoration processes and will have them replaced and up on the site very quickly.

 

What we wanted to do was start to get something up online with the rush of having Tony put his recordings in the NFSA archives, unfortunately leaving them just as locked away from the public as if they were still  in the boot of his car (obviously a joke T. Martin likes to  make as he's recently said that he made sure to keep them out of sunlight to prevent their decay), they are now also locked away unavailable to the public, which is why we have have made our own personal recordings of the show available.

There is no commercial or financial gain in this, it is merely to preserve the show which Tony or  Mick simply could not release themselves due to legal clearance issues. These tapes are for the majority recorded by me personally, others are special for example the first 2 episodes which were kindly provided by Mason Hell-Cat of the Champagne Comedy forum. And PeteTheClown has provided a source for a gap in 1997, as well as back ups for several months during that year.

 

8.Did you make the site yourself?

 

We collaborated early on with ontos and l00p also of Champagne Comedy, but because we were so set in our ways on how we wanted the site to look and feel, we decided to do it  ourselves in the end. Dan [aka Snatto] was heavily involved while Casey dealt with getting his recordings ready as well as helping with the site.The site is always a work in progress as im sure you can see and will become more complete over the coming months, as will the forum.

 

On  a personal note: If it wasn't for the work of Dan and his enthusiasm and passion for the show, he also recorded almost as many episodes as are in the main collection, and provided the good kick in the pants I needed to finally get the recordings together, this site would not  exist.