Those of us — we few, we happy few — still in possession of DVD players were rocked last month by the sudden collapse of Network Distributing. The company, which specialised in excavating forgotten British film and TV treats from the archives, had recently marked both its 25th birthday and the loss of its founder Tim Beddows (who died last November, aged 59), before reportedly being plunged into administration. There are more rumours than details at this point. The website vanished overnight, and the business is yet to make an official statement on any future.

The collapse of a company dedicated to physical media is hardly headline news. The end of Network threatens the loss of a vital cultural archive, however. Whilst other distributors might continue to release boutique editions of British film and TV classics — the visual equivalent of those overpriced vinyl box sets for rock fans — it’s hard to imagine anyone else bothering to preserve the sort of weird and ancient telly that Network rediscovered.

Watching archive telly was like peering through a glass darkly

A catholic approach to television meant the distributor’s broad catalogue not only embraced critically acclaimed works of drama and documentary but also (once) populist fare such as gameshows and soaps. Its demise is mourned equally by fans of Supermarionation, On The Buses and Eurotrash. Would any other label dare release a 41-disc set containing surviving episodes of motel-bound soap Crossroads? Unlikely. Not for Netflix such fare as Children of the Stones, Ace of Wands or The Strange World of Gurney Slade. With Network gone, how will a future generation ever enjoy the slow motion cinéma verité of The Flower of Gloster?

Network is neither the first nor the last distributor to be capsized by the streaming boom. Even the BBC seems to be stepping away from releasing titles on disc — its current home entertainment schedules look decidedly stark. As physical media becomes a niche and unprofitable pursuit, there will likely be big chunks of our TV culture that will remain forever inaccessible.

Our streaming age promised abundance, more content than ever: all of your favourite shows ready to revisit, whenever it suited you. Instead, television is at risk of becoming unprecedentedly ephemeral. Streamers such as Netflix and Disney+ have been enthusiastically junking their own content, meaning shows they produced are likely to remain forever lost to the canon.

Both companies have been reluctant to make their shows available for purchase, and the days of home recording (bootlegs that preserved many binned programmes of old including Doctor Who and Dad’s Army) are long gone. Indeed, this current enthusiastic deletion echoes the BBC’s great purge of the 1960s and 70s, when it decided it needed shelf space more than it needed the master tapes of its programming.

Network’s unique gift was the idea that televisual ephemera — much of it unseen for decades — was not just worth preserving for the archive but deserving of a modern audience. In recent years, they had dabbled with high definition blu-ray releases of seminal — or, at least, much-loved — shows including The Adventures of Black Beauty, The Prisoner, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Intruder, Robin of Sherwood and The Owl Service.

Once, watching archive telly was like peering through a glass darkly, where the action played out behind a drizzled patina of greys and beiges. Network’s high definition releases made ancient treasures accessible for modern viewers spoiled by static-free spectacle. In the case of The Owl Service, it prompted a reassessment of the show’s place in the broader cultural canon. Defiantly strange and wilfully obscure, it is the very definition of the sort of kids’ TV that no network would pay to make today.

This kind of reevaluation matters not just for the window it offers to the past, but also for the light that window casts on today’s culture. Much of the appeal of Network’s stock wasn’t simple nostalgia, but a timely reminder that other kinds of storytelling are possible. In our streaming age, television has become big business, with Amazon spending billions on epic shows such as The Wheel of Time, The Lord of the Rings and whatever it is Phoebe Waller-Bridge hasn’t been making for the past four years.

Despite a much-touted focus on diverse voices, the new wave of corporate telly has often led to products that feels anything but, reworking the same small clutch of (typically American) stories whilst only changing the faces. It’s understandable why, with so much money at stake, streamers have chosen to chase the market — and the algorithm — rather than create an audience for something truly different.

It can be hard to know where you are if you can’t see where you’ve been

There are other reasons to mourn the loss of the physical. Whilst many of Network’s shows will survive on streaming services — Britbox, in the UK at least, has made a home for some of the better remembered titles — chances are they won’t quite be the shows you remember.

Streamers and broadcasters have long shown a fondness for the sort of bowdlerisation Penguin recently attempted on Roald Dahl. At times, this amounts to a simple pre-credits warning of outdated attitudes or, God forbid, smoking. At other times, it means lines, scenes and entire episodes have been gutted.

Knowing that their audience were perhaps more familiar with evolving social mores, Network tended to present shows as broadcast. In the case of dusty comedies such as The Goodies — the entire series was granted a Network box set back in 2019 — this meant leaving in elements that, not unfairly, date it as being a programme produced in the 1970s.

In 2023, some of these elements — particularly those involving race, sex or sexuality — arrive like a slap in the face. Britbox has followed the BBC’s example in editing Little Britain for iPlayer and, for their presentation of The Goodies, removed a shot of Graeme Garden in blackface from the opening titles (other episodes have either been similarly edited or omitted entirely.)

Some will argue this sanitisation doesn’t matter — or is laudably progressive. It can be hard to know where you are if you can’t see where you’ve been, though. This is, perhaps, the point of the sort of canon Network assembled over the past quarter century. This canon, in all its frequent strangeness and occasional ugliness, remembered not only the television that has stood the test of time, but also those shows that haven’t.

With Network’s loss, we risk losing access to an archive that didn’t just show us what we once watched, but who we once were. We happy few, at least, will know what we’re missing.