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.
Window Cleaning World Record
(Six Tonight)
The fastest window-cleaner in the west?
Ronan Kelly reports for the Six Tonight news programme from Lurgan where a local window cleaner is attempting a new world record for the fastest cleaning. A three-sided structure has been put up in a car park in the town centre with windows on each side and Gerald Follis hopes to clean all three windows quicker than the current world record of 14.9 seconds.
He tells Ronan that in practice ninety-nine times out of a hundred he would be under twelve seconds but is still wary about replicating this against the official stopwatch. We then see Gerald in action as the attempt gets under way and he is interviewed again afterwards. The piece ends with Ronan having a go in sped-up footage - only to find the crowds all gone when he has finished.
Six Tonight was the nightly early evening news programme for Ulster Television, starting in the late 1980s and was effectively a rebranding of the previous show, Good Evening 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.
