HISTORIC archive footage is the stuff of a new TV service, as DAVID WHETSTONE explains.
Weegee, they reckoned, must use a ouija board because he was so often in the right place at the right time.
Amber holds one of the largest collections of Weegee’s photographs outside New York. It was given to Side Gallery by his widow, Wilma Wilcox, to support its work after it organised the first UK tour of Weegee’s work.
This month Amber is putting a selection of Weegee prints up for sale on its website and screening a new 27-minute documentary based on interviews with Wilma and legendary New York printer Sid Kaplan, who knew the photographer.
Elsewhere, Channel 1 offers Double Vision: Boxing for Hartlepool, a 60-minute film made in 1986 with the help of George Bowes’ gym.
Bowes, a face worker at Blackhall Colliery and a pro boxer in the 1950s and 60s, is a key figure in the history of North East boxing.
The late Ray Stubbs and Sammy Johnson respectively play a cynical journalist and an ex-boxer in the drama documentary.
Channel 2 shows It’s Not All Peachy, a 13-minute documentary about Rosie, a young homeless woman on Tyneside. It was made last year by Newcastle film-maker Emer McCourt.
Channel 3 shows Ship Hotel, a 1967 documentary by Philip Trevelyan, which Amber call one of the best films ever made on Tyneside.
It captures Sunday lunchtime at the Gateshead pub with singing, dominoes and a lot of carry-on.
In the revelling crowd you might spot young Tyneside poets Tom and Connie Pickard, founders of the Morden Tower poetry venue.
On Channel 4 you can see footage filmed in the run-up to the 1984 national miners’ strike designed to prompt discussion.
South Shields artist and photographer Laurie Wheatley features on Channel 5.
Wheatley was an extraordinary character who became a model-maker at Pinewood Studios.
This 25-minute film, made in 1978, follows him as he makes the life-sized sculpture of a welder which still stands above the stairs at Side Gallery.
Channel 6 features episode six of Mouth of the Tyne, a 12-part serialisation of Amber’s filmed interviews with T Dan Smith, one-time Newcastle City Council leader and self-appointed ‘Mr Newcastle’.
Last but not least, sausages are the stars of Channel 8 and the latest episode of Bosnian Kitchen.
Over the first five episodes, Amber’s Graeme Rigby has watched Tyneside resident Irena Carlton prepare a selection of delicacies from her native land.
Sausages follow cornbread, squid in red wine and more mouth-watering fare.
See all of this by ‘tuning’ your computer to www.sidetv.net.
He attained his famous nickname because of his knack of appearing at crime scenes shortly after the corpse hit the deck.