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Post by Simon B Kelly on Sept 11, 2011 22:54:04 GMT
Of course, with today's technology, recordings no longer need "shelf space" - just a few megabytes on a hard drive somewhere - and even that can be stored "in the cloud". In fact, there are already two full episodes of Mrs. Dale's Diary available on YouTube! |
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Post by Charles Norton on Sept 12, 2011 9:05:32 GMT
Well, there are things that really do need to kept as hard-copies and need the physical shelf space.
However, you are right to say that there are lots of things that can be stored digitally (and often are). Generally speaking, I think that the BBC Sound Archives accession policy is deeply out of date and should be broadened considerably. However, there doesn't seem to be any sign of that happening any time soon.
All the various BBC collections also need to be unified on one central catalogue as well. That's another mess that needs fixing.
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Post by Dean Williams on Sept 12, 2011 9:59:40 GMT
I think that you may need to remember that the BBC Sound Archive is highly selective when it comes to what it will give shelf-space to. There are a lot of things held at the British Library that are not held in the BBC Sound Archive. The BBC Sound Archive knows what's there, but don't feel that there is any need to provide a home for them within the BBC itself. 'Lost' audio material turns up all the time. Copies are routinely offered to Simon Rooks at the BBC Sound Archive. However, most of the time he turns down the material. The British Library is much more open when it comes to this sort of thing and is far more likely to give lost recordings an official home. The problem with that policy is the owner of said material might think after trying the BBC "sod it, if they don't want it I'll just keep it myself" and then when that person dies the collection may be thrown out. I think at the very least the BBC should take everything and pass it on to the BL, ORCA, or some other Sane organisation!  Although I understand that maybe excerpts arren't as valuable as complete shows, especially where a handful of complete examples survive, but everything has some value! |
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Post by Charles Norton on Sept 12, 2011 10:29:51 GMT
I generally agree with what you say. The ideal situation is for the material to be given a permanent home (possibly at the British Library) and then the details recorded on the BBC's programme catalogue (INFAX). The BBC don't have to physically house the stuff themselves, just make sure it gets a proper home where everybody knows where it is and can access it.
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Post by Simon B Kelly on Sept 12, 2011 11:16:50 GMT
Perhaps there should be a website where people with off-air radio recordings could upload them so they could be shared with other collectors - a sort of YouTube for radio programmes? I know there are a couple of audio-only equivalents of YouTube - HoundBite has probably been around the longest. However, their "shows" category only has a few hundred uploads, most of which are just podcasts or local radio soundbites. What we need is a central repository where all these lost shows can be stored. The biggest problem, I guess, would be copyright infringement, as the BBC presumably still own the copyright on all their lost radio shows and may not want them shared universally, although they don't seem to be in any hurry to remove the programmes that are currently being shared on YouTube.  Having just listened to the first episode of Mrs. Dale's Diary this morning (thankyou, Google!), it seems such a shame that so little else exists. If someone had only had the foresight to archive every episode I can imagine them being re-issued for their 50th/60th anniversary as MP3 CDs. With each episode less than 15 minutes and in mono, it would need less than 3Mb per episode so a whole years worth of programmes could have been stored on a single CD with the entire 5431 episodes on 22CDs or just 2 dual-layers DVDs. It could also have been re-run on Radio 7. I don't suppose there's much hope in recovering those 5419 missing episodes? |
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Post by Dean Williams on Sept 12, 2011 11:50:41 GMT
They might be storable on 22 CDs now but that's with modern technology. Using technology available then they'd have needed 5431 large reels or 78rpm shellac records which would have taken up slightly more space!  We now know there are at least three episodes recorded off-air (two from 1964 and one from 1st April 1966) so that boosts the total to 15 complete episodes but the problem with soaps is you need a decent run of episodes to follow a story. At least the whole final week survives intact! Dsepite running 1969 - 1980 it's replacement Waggoners' Walk is also fairly depleted in the archives! |
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Post by Simon B Kelly on Sept 12, 2011 12:37:15 GMT
I'm not sure I want to know how many/few of the 2828 episodes of Waggoners' Walk still exist.  Considering it started in 1969 - 5 years after the introduction of the compact cassette, every episode should have been archived, even if only on low-fi cassettes. If the BBC had used C-90's they could have stored 6 episodes per tape, so the entire collection would only need 472 cassettes. I've found six "off-airs" already by doing a quick Google search so there should be hundreds (thousands?) more out there somewhere. All we need is a way of bringing them all together. There seem to be plenty of sites offering American old time radio shows but none concentrating of British radio programmes. Presumably this is because they would all be under copyright by the BBC and our copyright laws differ from those in the U.S. We really should be doing something about collecting these shows, though, before the people who recorded them pass away and their prized collections end up as landfill. |
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Post by Dean Williams on Sept 12, 2011 13:28:02 GMT
Well as I understand British copyright it's 50 years after broadcast for the actual program and 70s years after the death of the author for the script (scripts are same as books) in which case anything pre-1961 should be outside of the BBCs copyright but likely still within authors!
I think American copyright on radio programs is actually longer, a standard 95 years as I understand it but they likely don't care as the copyright owners don't see a big enough market in 30s/40s/50s radio shows?!
The BBC are likely in the same position of knowing there are 60s/70s/80s radio shows out there but most are in such poor quality as to be no use to them anyway even if they thought there was a market for releasing them commercially outside of Hancock, The Goons and The Navy Lark?!
There's certainly more than enough Canadian and America sites out there but nothing solely or substantially British outside of the big shows. There is a Channel on YouTube that puts out classic British radio and vinyl comedy, as well as those two episodes of Mrs Dales Diary, called ClassicRadioComedy that is trying to 'keep up the British end' with vintage comedy!
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Post by Charles Norton on Sept 12, 2011 13:28:10 GMT
May I draw your attention to this year's spectaularly badly publicised 'Lost Shows Appeal', which was covered on Radio 4's PM programme in June. We've already traced about 200 lost recordings and are still wading through stacks of tapes with a view to finding a home for the lost material both at the BBC and the British Library.
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Post by Dean Williams on Sept 12, 2011 13:56:42 GMT
Very badly publicised, I've never heard of it! Nice to know such a large haul came in, anything exciting? |
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Post by Simon B Kelly on Sept 12, 2011 15:45:45 GMT
Much as I applaud any appeal for lost shows, requesting collectors to send in their tapes, which may, or may not, contain material of interest, is going to create a massive drain on resources, as it requires someone to physically listen to and catalogue each item.
If the owner of the recording was able to upload and tag the item themselves, a lot more items of interest could be unearthed in a much shorter space of time. The beauty of a service such as YouTube is that it allows these often lost gems to be shared, and by viewing the hits the upload has received, it is easy to gauge what is, and isn't, popular.
The concept of sharing, which has now become so easy to do, also reduces the number of recordings that are being illegally sold. It makes previously unobtainable recordings, which the BBC obviously saw no commercial value in at the time, and which may never be heard again, even after being returned to the archives, available once more for all to enjoy.
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Post by Charles Norton on Sept 12, 2011 16:57:16 GMT
The actual man hours involved in going through the material and digitising it to a high standard isn't a big problem. It's time-consuming, but I think that it's been worth it so far. There are plenty of us anyway.
I'm afraid that illegal file-sharing isn't really a practical option. Firstly, these kind of torrents etc are usually horrible quality Mp3s that haven't been professionally transferred. Secondly, it's illegal.
As I say, a big problem has been publicity for the campaign. Following the Radio 4 piece in June, we've been waiting on the Radio Times to make good on an offer to help us, but have had nothing from them as yet.
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Post by Simon B Kelly on Sept 12, 2011 23:32:09 GMT
It's good to hear that the Lost Shows appeal is turning up hundreds of lost recordings, even with the lack of publicity! I hope the BBC continues to share some of the recoveries on it's website in due course. It's already made a great start at: www.bbc.co.uk/archive/ Getting back on topic, I was wondering how many/if any of the original scripts for Mrs. Dale's Diary still exist (I'm really curious to find out what happens in Episode 2). I guess multiple copies of every script must have been printed (typewritten) at the time - is there any chance of them being published? It would also be good to settle the argument of exactly how many episodes were recorded - 5431 or 5531? Assuming that the show was broadcast every weekday from Monday, 5 January 1948 until Friday, 25 April 1969 without a break then there would have been 5560 episodes. However... there were obviously going to be some days when it wasn't broadcast for one reason or another. If the BL episode numbers are correct then episode 1615 dated Friday, 9th April 1954 would actually have been episode 1625 so it had already slipped 10 episodes behind after 6 years. If it continued to miss just one or two episodes a year for the remaining 15 years, then 5531 would be correct. To reduce the figure to 5431 means we need to lose another 25 weeks worth of episodes at some point during the final 15 years. Was it off the air for a while, perhaps due to a strike? Did it go into hiatus before moving to Radio 2 or around the time of it's name change? Or did it start to have a couple of weeks holiday each year during the sixties? Is there anyone around who used to listen to it and can fill us in...? |
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Post by Dean Williams on Sept 13, 2011 9:53:49 GMT
The official archive tapes for the last five episodes are labelled as episodes 5427 - 5431 and there is no reason why they should have been 100 episodes out?!
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Post by Charles Norton on Sept 13, 2011 11:30:54 GMT
Technically, it would actually be 5432 episodes. Mrs. Dale and Dr. Dale also appeared in 'The Night of the 27th', a BBC Radio Christmas special for the Light Programme from December 1949. This would not have been included in the main episode count.
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