To mark 20 years since the broadcast of the first series of Fame Academy, here is the official VHS charting the story of David Sneddon's win.

In my view, Fame Academy was a severely underrated format, and it's a crying shame that it never really took off in the UK (not helped by a pretty dire second series, where almost all of the unique points of the format were stripped away).

It's also a strange quirk of the period of its broadcast that very few clips exist online of the show (with the exception of some superb long-form videos here on YouTube, recorded from the red button feed of the house). 2002 was just a few years before broadcasters put official clips up on YouTube, so there's nothing from the BBC on here (unlike some of their later talent show efforts). This upload is an attempt to rectify the lack of footage from this unfairly-forgotten show.

Apologies that some of this video is missing (it's supposed to be a 90 minute feature) including the moment that David's victory is actually announced! This is owing to some encoding errors when I digitised this VHS some years ago.

Original release: January 2003
All copyright remains BBC/Endemol