Well, I DVRed the inaugural offering of The New Yankee Workshop on DIY this morning (Jigs, Part One) and just finished watching it. I think I'm going to be sick.
Most of you know that I've put a fair amount of time into chronicling the tools Norm has used in 19 years of TNYW. That has entailed watching (and timing) a lot of TNYW episodes (243, so far). I didn't start video taping episodes until around 1999--ten years into the show--so I had to rely on HGTV rebroadcasts for all of the early years.
As I viewed all of the episodes I learned that while the original PBS content totalled 24 minutes and 18 seconds (I'm not sure why the odd number, but it's been consistent over roughly eight years of actual PBS content that I have), HGTV edited their airings down to 21 minutes and 45 seconds--also consistent over twelve years worth of programming, or 156 episodes (all that HGTV ever aired). I had an overlap of a few episodes in the late '90s for which I had both PBS and HGTV versions and it was interesting to see what they cut out--it wasn't a lot, mostly setups and an occasional orientation shot--but generally not a lot of meat. Of course I can't really say how much had been cut from the earlier years because I had no comparison recordings.
This morning marked the return of supplemental (to PBS) airings of TNYW since HGTV ended their contract several years ago. I eagerly anticipated it, since I've been transferring all of my VHS recordings over to DVD. Although the VCR tapes were done from fresh, SP recordings of either original PBS broadcasts or HGTV broadcasts of the earlier years, I had to re-record them in EP in order to get all 13 episodes of a season onto a single two hour tape. Consequently, there's a lot of noise (and jitter, due to different VCR machines involved) on my archive tapes. I was hoping to be able to get pristine transfers from my DVR to the DVDs with the new DIY offering. Here's what happened:
The DIY version (at least for this first program) totalled 19 minutes and 43 seconds of content. That's 4½ minutes out of the original 24+ minutes. I don't think it possible to find enough non-critical material to take out of a 24½ program to get to where DIY apprently feels they need to be, but I thought I'd at least check against the PBS version I have. So I pulled out my archive and watched. Quelle horror! Sure, there were a couple of minor cuts that I noticed at first, but after building the panel cutter, panel raising jig, and circle cutting jig, they stopped. They cut out one of the items entirely--the finger boards. I was shocked enough when I looked at my stopwatch on the first viewing and saw 19:43, but as I viewed the original and found one fourth of the projects missing I was simply stunned.
I think I'm going to be sick. I know I said that already. I don't think I can say it too much. If that's the standard to which DIY is going to air TNYW episodes, I'll recommend you not bother to watch. In order to make that number, there will simply have to be significant content excised which will render the program virtually useless. And I'm stuck with putting my noisy, jittery, EP recordings onto DVD. Or, I can buy 200+ episodes from TNYW at $15 a pop...probably not.
What a disappointment.