Video Killed the Radio Star

I'm watching Video Killed the Radio Star, a UK TV program about the making of a series of MTV videos from the beginning and the eighties. Fun to see, but what also strikes me, watching this show in HD, is how huge the difference is between Broadcast Quality then and Broadcast Quality now. Every time they cut from today's interviews to one of the music videos, you'd think somebody had thrown a bowl of pea soup over your nice big TV. They look just awful compared to what they shoot and broadcast today. And I must assume that since it's all of them looking like that, that it is how they looked, not just a result of being copied via a home video camera off somebody's 14-inch TV.

You'd also think that somebody had saved those videos somewhere in some format (film?) which had a higher quality than could be shown on TV back then. But it seems not, otherwise surely a big TV production like this could get hold of them.