He owned a Sony CV-2000, one of the first video recorders, which was introduced in 1965 and he used it to capture many of his own television performances which would otherwise not exist today. Over the period from the late 1960s until his death, his collection grew to a vast library of over 150,000 hours of material. As television companies routinely wiped their own copies in those days, many shows in the Monkhouse collection are unique. Upon his death all this material, in addition to hundred of hours of personal audio copies of radio shows commencing in the 1940s, were passed to an archivist for transfer to a permanent digital record.
