COLUMN
Stories from GG’s Toy Box
By Grahame Grassby
Story 9 — Thomas in Trouble
One morning back before the internet was invented and videos were watched on video cassettes, an ABC Shop manager received a phone call from a customer claiming that the Thomas the Tank Engine video that they had purchased from the ABC Shop in Miranda contained pornography of a very explicit nature and they they wished to lodge their complaint with the ABC.
The ABC Shop manager asked the woman to send the video into ABC Enterprises but she said this was not acceptable and she wanted the matter to be dealt with in person.
A meeting was organised at the ABC Enterprises offices between the woman with the complaint, her husband and the head of ABC Video Janine Burdeu.
Janine met with the couple in the Enterprises boardroom and sat through a video containing very sexually explicit content, which Janine said was excruciatingly embarrassing to watch with the complainants and, once the video finished, Janine undertook to find out how this material had come to be on the Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends video that they had purchased.
The couple agreed to give the video to Janine who forwarded it to Chris Chard, the Managing Director of Roadshow Entertainment, the ABC’s home video distributor.
Now when your biggest client sends you a home video containing pornographic content you have supplied to the market on a video meant to contain content from one of the world’s highest selling preschool properties you take it very seriously and accordingly after viewing the content, Chris sent it on to Noel Price, the Managing Director of Roadshow’s video cassette duplicator Southern Star Duplitex.
Having verified the nature of the content himself, Noel sent the cassette down to his production manager, Geoff Thurstan with an urgent note to please explain.
Let the forensics begin – and after careful examination of the tape, it was concluded that the video cassette could only have been tampered with after it had left the duplicator, as the tape had clearly been recorded over and it was not a case of a wrong tape containing pornography being inserted onto a video cassette meant to contain Thomas the Tank Engine TV episodes.
There were also faint markings on the video cassette that indicated where the cassette had been tampered with in order to record over the Thomas content.
The final point made by Southern Star Duplitex was that as they did not duplicate any X rated content whatsoever on their premises even if it was the wrong tape it couldn’t have happened in their duplication plant.
Their conclusion was that it was not the duplicator at fault, and if the ABC Shop had sold the video as a new product with its cellophane wrapper around the cassette intact, which it had, then the sex tape was not recorded over by the ABC Shop either.
Janine met with the couple for a second time, once again in the Enterprises boardroom and she went through the explanation in detail, returning the video cassette containing the sexually explicit content to the complainants.
Janine said that as it dawned on the woman who had made the complaint that, in fact it was her husband who was the guilty party, she became very agitated, grabbed the video, barked at her husband, “We’re leaving” and was never heard from again.
The video was called Thomas in Trouble and we’ve always hoped that the husband’s name was in fact Thomas.
