Wood & Picketts on BBC footage, including '50 MAR'

This lovely little video from the BBC archives, shows some rather outrageous Minis. The most interesting ones, if you ask me, are the two Wood & Pickett Mini Margraves at the start. And they are two very well known cars, too. The blue one is a car used at the Earl's Court Motor Show of 1978 of which we now can see its registration: 'WOE 951T' (which was last taxed in 1989, or so it seems). 

The other car is least as interesting: it's the infamous '50 MAR' built for in 1974 for Al Sharif Omar Almandily. W&P boss Eddie Colins told me about that: "One of the novel things in his car was that he had not one but two telephones. He was a crazy man who rang up himself asking how he was doing!" Although several people doubted the survival of this lavish W&P Mini, it was believed to survive in an underground parking in Cannes, France, but modified with a rather ugly Mercedes grille, white painted roof and different registration (III UN). With the BBC footage unearthed we can now confirm it is indeed the same car: on the video it is seen with the later modifications, but still wearing the '50 MAR' plate.