BBC Wiping Material as late as 1993?

[Deleted]

Well, what she did was just as a normal employee in the course of her job. What Adam Lee did, as head of the archive in a position of knowledge, was far worse. No one who did what he did should ever be in charge of an archive.

[Richard Bignell]

Sept 1, 2011 9:29:59 GMT Simon Smith said:

I have always been rather sceptical of the "surplus sales material" explanation. People in Enterprises were surely aware that Engineering wiped the master videotapes as a matter of routine? Even if not, there surely would have been a point when someone in Enterprises signed off for tapes to be telerecorded for overseas sale, only to discover that the tapes had already been wiped?

Not when the vast majority of them were telerecorded on transmission. It was fairly rare for them to be made post-tx as it tied up the valuable Quad machines that were often needed elsewhere.

Then , there's the idea that prints had fully exhausted their sales potential...

Okay. You have to bear in mind that BBC Enterprises "vault" was a fairly smallish room at Villers House, filled with Dexion racking. They simply didn't have the room to keep things ad infinitum on the vague hope that they might be useful in the future - especially when they were attracting minimal or non-existant sales. The business dictated that you got rid of that stock that was no longer selling and replace it with that which was. Just to take one three month period in 1972, Enterprises sold and supplied over 3500 episodes from some 360 different series. Doctor Who was just one of those and primarily, that involved VT sales of the Pertwee episodes to the US. There really was pretty much no business justification for them hanging onto lots of telerecordings that weren't selling and were taking up valuable shelf space in their small storage area.

[Rob Moss]

Sept 8, 2011 23:23:16 GMT @laurencepiper said:

Well, what she did was just as a normal employee in the course of her job.

Interesting - I seem to remember you closing a thread because I made that very point.

[Deleted]

I don't think I did, Rob! If a thread was closed, it was for something else. I've always personally held the view that Nash was not a monster (the monster was BBC archiving policy at that time) and was just doing her job. If she was the top bod and knew full well that the archive did not also have material she was getting rid of (i.e. as with Adam Lee), that would be a different matter.

[Simon Smith]

Ah. It is easy to forget that the "vault" was just one room with lots of shelves. I think the other thing we forget is the way the BBC people viewed their programmes at the time. I suppose in 1969 if you'd said that people in 2011 would still want to watch series 2 of Dad's Army, they"d have locked you in a padded cell! It is also strange today with the way shows get repeated ad nauseam, and with all the cable and satellite channels, to remember there was a time when shows were never repeated, and there were far fewer channels.

I wasn't attacking Pamela Nash, just pointing out that what seemed like(and in fact was) an everyday business decision has had such a horrible longterm effect.

One thing I have often been unsure about is "what the producers knew". Engineering have stated countless times that "nothing was ever wiped without the knowledge of the producer in question". Yet from what I've read/heard, many people were genuinely surprised to later discover that few(or no) tapes of their work had survived. Then others state that it was such an everyday thing to wipe tapes for reuse that it would have been utterly redudndant to even bother informing anyone of the practice.

[Richard Bignell]

Sept 15, 2011 7:42:49 GMT Simon Smith said:

One thing I have often been unsure about is "what the producers knew". Engineering have stated countless times that "nothing was ever wiped without the knowledge of the producer in question".

Wiping of the master tapes was authorised by the department Organiser rather than at producer level. I would guess that some organisers were more consultative than others. Barry Letts certainly knew that old Doctor Who VTs were being wiped, but as as any out-of-time repeats were expensive to negotiate, he wasn't concerned that it was happening. To quote from Barry's email to me about the subject from five years ago, "I was far too busy getting the current programmes out!"

[Charles Norton]

Philip Hinchcliffe was also aware that wipings were going on. Not that there was very much he could do about it. As Richard suggests, they had enough to worry about with the production of the current series.

[richardmarson]

Hmmm...although it is undoubtedly true that many producers regarded themselves as too busy doing the day job to get involved in the issue of retention of old material, the shining example of Biddy Baxter's actions with Blue Peter proves that they could have done so, had they felt so inclined and motivated. This isn't to say it was easy - Biddy fought all kinds of battles within her department and with engineering who all tried to get her to agree to release material for junking (but then Biddy relished a battle!) - but it was possible.

[Robert Belford]

This is true. It was a huge thing when the BBC repeated some episodes of Doctor Who in 1981, Monty Python a few years later and Man About the House and Rising Damp appeared on Channel 4 at about the same time.

Sept 15, 2011 7:42:49 GMT Simon Smith said:

It is also strange today with the way shows get repeated ad nauseam, and with all the cable and satellite channels, to remember there was a time when shows were never repeated, and there were far fewer channels.

[Ian Watlington]

Sept 15, 2011 20:46:27 GMT richardmarson said:

Biddy Baxter's actions with Blue Peter proves that they could have done so, had they felt so inclined and motivated

Biddy had a better justification than most though, she could argue that BP made regular on-air use of its own archive material. If she hadn't had this justification, which was a strong one, would she have won her battles or would Engineering have prevailed?

Shows like Doctor Who couldn't really make the same argument. The only obvious reason to retain the tapes was to allow overseas sales, and once they had dried up and given that the cost of relicensing was so high, how could any producer justify keeping all those old B&W stories? The occasional very rare use of clips to show old monsters like in The War Games wouldn't have been good enough I don't think.

[richardmarson]

That's certainly the reason she gave - but in fact it was a pretty tenuous argument for retaining 80 plus 2" spools per year!!!

I think she simply had the will and the backing of her various heads of dept.

I seem to recall that Ronnie Marsh (in charge of drama) was a notorious advocate of wiping. Departments did get cash back for recycling tapes.

However, it was possible for drama and LE material to be retained by specific request of producers - just unusual for them to actually think that way...

[John Fleming]

Once again the usual suspect tries to defend the indefensible. I happen to live in NW England where my local ITV station (Granada) did a superb job of archiving from the 60s onwards. If they could do it then there is absolutely no justification for the BBC not doing the same.

[richardmarson]

Oh yes, it was always entirely feasible to have a robust archiving policy - as in countries like Sweden. It was more a matter of internal cultures/politics and policy - and a lack of foresight

[Deleted]

Sept 16, 2011 17:06:11 GMT John Fleming said:

Once again the usual suspect tries to defend the indefensible. I happen to live in NW England where my local ITV station (Granada) did a superb job of archiving from the 60s onwards. If they could do it then there is absolutely no justification for the BBC not doing the same.

That's my view as well. It has never been looked into what the policies of individual ITV companies were though and why certain companies (e.g. Granada, Anglia) had very good archiving from early on. It would make a fascinating read to learn more about the hows and whys.

[Rob Moss]

Sept 16, 2011 17:06:11 GMT John Fleming said:

Once again the usual suspect tries to defend the indefensible. I happen to live in NW England where my local ITV station (Granada) did a superb job of archiving from the 60s onwards. If they could do it then there is absolutely no justification for the BBC not doing the same.

But it all boils down to money. Money that could be saved by reusing tapes, money that could be saved by not providing so much storage. You have to accept that the repeat potential of old shows was limited in those days, so it was about finding a balance between the savings and needing to keep stuff, and the economic default setting would have been to reuse. The real question is why companies such Granada were so prepared to keep everything.