"Why on Earth do you collect old video machines?"
TOTAL REWIND is based on my collection of 'antique' video recorders. There are collectors for all sorts of things, from matchboxes to motorcycles, but most people are startled to hear that someone actually collects obsolete VCRs! But to me, they are not only interesting from a technological and design perspective, they are also important cultural artifacts.

It's hard to remember now how amazing the first VCRs seemed to us, and how much they changed our lives. In the era of £20 DVD players and 100-channel cable & satellite TV, it seems amazing that people would pay the equivalent of a month's wages to own one, and even more amazing how huge, complicated and fragile they were.

To understand just how revolutionary the video recorder seemed, you have to imagine a world where there were only three TV channels, and no way to own or rent films or classic TV. We were entirely at the mercy of the programme planners and cinema companies.
If you had to go out when your favourite show or film was on, that was it - you'd missed it. You'd also be left out of the inevitable next-day discussion at school or work - when there were only three channels, most people watched the same things!

You were also at the mercy of the censors, since all films had to be given a rating before they were allowed to be shown in cinemas - and many horror or 'adult' titles weren't deemed suitable to be seen at all.
The VCR changed all that, allowing us to watch what we wanted to see - including the famous Video Nasties and hard-core porn - whenever we wanted to see it, in the comfort of our own front rooms.

For the first time, too, we could also record and keep the films or series that we liked the most, building up a personal collection of classic TV and cinema.

The humble VCR was responsible for a complete revolution in the way we watched TV.
But, the earliest machines became victims of their own success. By the mid 1980's, VCRs (though still expensive) were taken for granted, and the original generation - the old top-loaders and Betamax machines - were relegated to the attic, forgotten and ignored. About ten years after the great Format War was over, it seems that the nation had a mass clear-out, and all kinds of strange machines started to appear in junk-shops, at car-boot sales and even discarded in skips.
And so it was that, while on holiday in 1993, I noticed an odd-looking machine in a junk-shop window. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before (in fact it was a Philips LaserVision player), and I bought it just to find out what the hell it was. Soon after, some friends gave me a couple of old Betamax machines, and I was struck by how different they were from the VHS players that I was used to - some features or ways of working that I'd taken for granted had apparently not yet been developed. There seemed to be a whole history which I was completely unaware of.
I realised that these dinosaurs of the technological age were in danger of being lost forever, and I decided to excavate them from the geological layers of junk which are dubious heritage of our modern world.

As I collected more and more machines, I saw that there were certain machines which were important in some way -- the first of a new format, the first with an important technological development, or the last of an evolutionary dead-end. I decided to try to track down an example of all these key machines, to build a definitive collection.
At first people thought I was crazy; these old machines were treated as junk - worse than that, an embarassment, an expensive mistake made by your parents. But, as these memories faded, gradually they began to seem like artifacts from a lost era, and with the current fashion for 70's retro style, it seems much more reasonable to see them as collectibles.

Unwittingly I had stumbled on the 'Holy Grail' of collecting - something that no-one else had thought to collect, which was easy and cheap to find but which would later become rare and valuable.
Along the way I had gathered a great deal of information, and tried to find some way to do something with it. At first I thought about writing a book, but then it occurred to me that a website would be a much better way of arranging the information. TOTAL REWIND was born in 1996, and has become a well-known site for the small number of vintage VCR enthusiasts around the world. It has been featured in newspaper articles and on the BBC (television, radio and online), appeared in several business, internet and science magazines, won a website award, and was even quoted in a government report.
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Today, old video recorders may still be junk, but tomorrow they will be curiosities, and one day they may be rarities. I firmly expect the Antiques Roadshow of, say, 2025 to feature an early Betamax machine, lovingly restored and polished daily, like some classic car or Chippendale chair. There's a fair chance that it will be me doing the polishing...