What's On These Scotch VHS Tapes?

It's not often I buy VHS tapes off Ebay, or indeed anywhere, as more often than not you're on a hiding to nothing. However, I couldn't resist these four Scotch tapes which recently popped up on Ebay. It's a classic case design, one which is almost certainly in my top three of all time, and also the earliest VHS tape I remember knocking about our house in the mid-1980s. Including postage, they cost £10.00 and they were just about worth it in terms of harvesting footage. But what exactly did I find?

Thameside TV: The Broadcasts of London's First Pirate TV Station

In the last year or so, I've written fairly extensively about Pirate TV in the UK. First, there was my interview with one of the founders of NeTWork 21, next up was my article on the history of Pirate TV in the UK and, finally, there was a brief look at some of the channels in my piece on lesser known TV stations. Footage of these channels is, understandably, scarce - aside from NeTWork 21's content - and this was particularly frustrating when it came to researching them. I was especially irked by the lack of footage from Thameside TV, London's first pirate TV station who took to the illicit airwaves in 1984. But it turns out most of their content was already online.