In message , Daniel Bowen
writes
"Aidan Stanger" wrote in message
...
Tim Roll-Pickering wrote:
Daniel Bowen wrote:
I've often thought it amusing that so much paperwork is still kept in
the
BBC archives about these shows, yet the shows themselves have been
lost/disposed of.
Yeah but from the perspective of the late 1960s/early 1970s the need for
paper trails was clear, the need to retain old programmes that were
almost
certainly never going to be screened again and which were no longer
sellable
was not.
Why were they no longer sellable?
At the time they didn't consider that they'd ever to be able to sell them
again to anybody.
Television at the time was regarded very much as "ephemeral". It would
be like asking why we don't record and keep every theatre performance.
Evidently nobody fore-saw home VHS, DVD,
It often surprises people to learn that a domestic method of playing
television programmes (on disc) was invented by John Logie Baird. They
were being sold in London before WWII but for whatever reason the system
never "caught on".
multitudes of
satellite/cable channels, and a fascination in TV nostalgia.
That, indeed, was utterly unforeseen until I would say the 1980s.
In those circumstances though, I'm still not clear on why there was a need
for paper-trails.
I suspect it may have been more a matter of the BBC paperwork and red-tape
department having unlimited budget and space for storage, and the department
looking after the old tapes/films not.
Remember that the BBC is (was) in many ways vice department, where
record keeping was regarded as Important "because that's the way we've
always done it"! The don't call it "Auntie" for nothing. (And I'm
sure Daniel you can think of at leas one other public broadcaster that
was made in the same image! I bet they kept all the same sort of
stuff. Indeed, at least some Doctor Who clips survive because they
were cut by the Australian censor but carefully retained by the ABC.)
--
Ian Jelf, MITG
Birmingham, UK
Registered Blue Badge Tourist Guide for London and the Heart of England
http://www.bluebadge.demon.co.uk