Launched in 2000, Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive spans from 1897 to the present day and currently contains an ever-expanding catalogue of 13,000 items. It comprises material from a variety of depositors including feature films, sport, documentaries, animation, amateur footage, light entertainment, and a significant proportion of broadcast material from the UTV Archive.
Buried Alive World Record Part 1
(Kelly)
Meet the pub landlord who goes underground for fun and glory.
Chat show presenter Gerry Kelly welcomes viewers and explains that a man is trying to break a world record of 141 days for being entombed underground. Geoff Smith, a pub landlord from Mansfield, wants to add another nine days to the record.
Gerry is able to speak to Geoff via a camera which has been set up in his underground chamber seven feet beneath the surface. He explains he is on the 42nd day and that the chamber is only two and a half feet wide and high and seven feet long. He also discusses how he is fed, breathes and goes to the toilet.
Geoff says that his mother was a previous holder of the record but when an American took the record away from her he set out to win it back. Geoff has a mini TV, CD player and a phone to entertain him on his long stint. Guinness had said that they wouldn't recognise the record (in order to discourage people from endangering themselves) but that he was happy to do it anyway.
Kelly was the flagship chat show on Ulster Television from 1989 to 2005. Its host, Gerry Kelly, had a long career in local television dating back to the late 1970s presenting segments for the nightly news programme, Good Evening Ulster. After the Kelly show ended he went onto have a long career on BBC Radio Ulster.
The extraordinary, the absurd and the downright weird combine in this collection of reports from UTV’s nightly Good Evening Ulster news programme.
Despite the often bleak aspect of local news in Northern Ireland during the decades relating to The Troubles, ordinary - and sometimes extraordinary - life continued on. This series of some of the more off-the-wall reports from the UTV news archives shows the citizens of Northern Ireland engaging in unusual schemes, fundraisers, pastimes and humorous events.
From Earl Bird attempting to set a new world record for non-stop yodelling to a nuclear bunker disco, from a pub with no beer to a canine snooker referee, you’ll find this collection full to the brim with the odd, the eccentric and the full-on weird.
