Post by Ed Brown on Mar 15, 2023 12:52:01 GMT
It has come to my notice that the website dedicated to the Radio 4 series Saturday Night Theatre (saturday-night-theatre.co.uk) is now defunct, in that only the home page still works. I have no idea when it became defunct, but for all I know this may have occured several years ago.
Anyone who is looking for information as to which editions of that series are known to be missing/lost might be interested to know that the site's defunct database can still be accessed.
If you go onto the Internet Archive's website (at archive.org/web/) the Wayback Machine can serve up an archived copy of that database. At present there are several stored copies of the database held within the Wayback Machine, any of which you can open manually. They each store a copy of the database as it existed at a particular point in time.
At least for the present, here is one working link (opening the database as it was in 2016):
web.archive.org/web/20160111181141/http://saturday-night-theatre.co.uk/broadcasts.php
I don't believe it was ever possible to access any recordings through the defunct site, but it stores the details of all editions of Saturday Night Theatre aired since 1943, so provides a comprehensive episode guide to the series, at a glance, as well as indicating all those editions known to be held by BBC Archives, and indicates (but without giving details) which editions are believed to survive in private collections.
Sorry if this information is already well known. Possibly, though, the details about the Internet Archive still retaining copies of the database might be of some help.
While I was looking into Saturday Night Theatre, I also discovered that the RadioListings.co.uk site had died.
This was more perturbing, as it was a gigantic resource, of considerable value for research purposes. However, again I found a solution in the Internet Archive, where the dead site's database still survives. At present the following link will open one of the stored copies preserved in the Wayback Machine:
web.archive.org/web/20151125015303/http://www.radiolistings.co.uk/programmes/Index-S.html
I shudder to think what becomes of us if anything bad happens to the Internet Archive!
Anyone who is looking for information as to which editions of that series are known to be missing/lost might be interested to know that the site's defunct database can still be accessed.
If you go onto the Internet Archive's website (at archive.org/web/) the Wayback Machine can serve up an archived copy of that database. At present there are several stored copies of the database held within the Wayback Machine, any of which you can open manually. They each store a copy of the database as it existed at a particular point in time.
At least for the present, here is one working link (opening the database as it was in 2016):
web.archive.org/web/20160111181141/http://saturday-night-theatre.co.uk/broadcasts.php
I don't believe it was ever possible to access any recordings through the defunct site, but it stores the details of all editions of Saturday Night Theatre aired since 1943, so provides a comprehensive episode guide to the series, at a glance, as well as indicating all those editions known to be held by BBC Archives, and indicates (but without giving details) which editions are believed to survive in private collections.
Sorry if this information is already well known. Possibly, though, the details about the Internet Archive still retaining copies of the database might be of some help.
While I was looking into Saturday Night Theatre, I also discovered that the RadioListings.co.uk site had died.
This was more perturbing, as it was a gigantic resource, of considerable value for research purposes. However, again I found a solution in the Internet Archive, where the dead site's database still survives. At present the following link will open one of the stored copies preserved in the Wayback Machine:
web.archive.org/web/20151125015303/http://www.radiolistings.co.uk/programmes/Index-S.html
I shudder to think what becomes of us if anything bad happens to the Internet Archive!