BBC Wiping Material as late as 1993?

[Ken Griffin]

Sept 17, 2011 8:55:33 GMT @laurencepiper said:

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.

I am looking into it as part of my research into the UTV archive. It's a very complex area - because of all the individual companies - but I should hopefully be able to provide a decent snapshot of television archiving in ITV in the 1960s when I am done.

[markboulton]

Sept 17, 2011 12:56:17 GMT Rob Moss said:

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.

Gosh Rob, you seem to keep inferring that for a company to be proud of its assets and want to safeguard them, is in someway something they need to feel guilty about because in your book there's absolutely no good reason why they should do such a bizarre thing.

If any institution in this country should have taken an altruistic view of the cultural, aswell as merely the commercial, value of its assets, then surely that should have been the BBC - not Granada. Yet a purely commercial company was willing to do so. And I don't see it as something that someone should apologise for on their behalf. It seems, Rob, that you are completely blind to the possibility that people at Granada and Anglia were well aware that what appeared to have no value "today" would doubtless be of interest "tomorrow" for all sorts of reasons. On this very board a newspaper cutting talking about TV companies stockpiling shows on "Ampex" as it was so cutely referred to back then rather than "VT" was shown from when was it, 1959? That proved that the foresight was there - and if the BBC refused to believe there was value in that foresight, no-one can turn round and say "hindsight is a wonderful thing", because I'm sure these things were pointed out by enough people within the BBC, who didn't have the clout to overturn the pig-headed refusal to look facts in the face just to save a buck or two whilst strangely, throwing ever increasing amounts of money at productions that would not get added to a permanent inventory of production assets, but disappear after one outing. Surely very poor value for money whichever way you look at it. If the cost of VT or storage was really such an issue, then surely the cost of the productions themselves would have been called into question - or why the outlay spent on such productions would be given no chance to produce a return in the future. And don't say "no-one knew about home video then", there have been countless other newspaper cuttings showing that the promise was anticipated by many in the industry, just that no-one knew the form it would take.

If the will is there, the money, and the space, and the tapes, will be found. The question shouldn't be "why bother when there's no commercial reason". Only the commercial television companies should have a right to that excuse. The BBC is not, at its core, a commercial operation - or at least, it shouldn't be. That's not its job. The fact that it is allowed to trade in such arenas, given its hallowed status, is something it should see as a great bonus, but it should never be the be-all-and-end-all.

[Rob Moss]

I think it's more to do with the fact that the BBC had to be seen to be making better use of licence fee payers' money. Let's not forget that the BBC did retain a lot of stuff, and although what was kept may seem a bit random, much stuff that was viewed as "culturally valuable" did survive. However, to retain everything, when there was no commercial reason to do so, and when the money spent on preserving it could be put back in to making new programmes, would have opened the BBC up to accusations of money wasting.

Granada and Anglia, as independent companies, were not bound by the restrictions of being under such public scrutiny, so would not have felt under such pressure to save the money.

Quite what excuse Thames or ATV would have, I have no idea.

Sept 17, 2011 21:05:31 GMT markboulton said:

If the will is there, the money, and the space, and the tapes, will be found.

But if losing the space and reusing the tapes is what saves the money, then your equation doesn't work.

[Robert Belford]

I've just posted a new thread linking to an interview with Michael Crick in The Independent today:

www.independent.co.uk/news/media/tv-radio/michael-crick-cuts-are-hurting-newsnight-the-bbc-lacks-cando-spirit-2356855.html

Crick says that the BBC is junking master tapes of news material and often only keeps what ends up in a "cut story". So a journalist spends 30 minutes interviewing a politician, ten seconds of that ends up on the news and the other 29 mins 50 secs is junked.

"Crick says he raised the matter with the BBC director-general, Mark Thompson, and the director of news, Helen Boaden. "Nothing ever happened about it."

[Tim Linnell]

In defence of the BBC, archiving material isn't just a question of putting tapes into a box and putting them in the proverbial attic. It's a long term commitment., potentially over hundreds of years You've got to maintain the media and the means of accessing it, and you have to ensure you have backup copies of digital media in a usable format over very long periods, bearing in mind it will be ever increasing.

The example given for news is interesting - if the unused massively dominates the used, there will be enormous quantities of unused material generated - every time the record button is pressed. Yes, for an interview with major figures around major events there's an argument for archiving the lot and probably this is done, but for 30 minutes of spin and politicking around a planning dispute in Basildon multiplied up by the thousands of similar interviews there's no real case to be made for keeping it.

So if you establish there is a judgement to be made on what to keep, then you have to exercise judgement, and there will always be difficulties at the margin.

Anyway, what's done is done, and with hindsight what looked like junk 30 or 50 years ago is now valued. Such is life. I didn't keep all my old VHS cassettes either. If everything was archived, where would be the enjoyment of finding things that aren't?

I'd far rather spend time and money finding ways to allow public access to the BBC archives, which currently are impossibly difficult to work with, than maintain a bottomless pit. I have after all helped pay for them. Ultimately, an archive only available at the whim of the owners, which is what we currently have more or less, is only of very questionable usefulness.

[Deleted]

Trouble is, I don't think that what's existing now IS is valued properly (certainly not by those with the power to wipe - material is only valued by outsiders like ourselves who can see moving image history for it's true worth). It's still very sadly viewed as a commodity to exploit by the TV companies. And as long as that is the prime motivation, things will carry on being dispensed with as they are considered to be of "no further value".

As Mark says though, some countries had a better archiving policy from way back than any in the UK, whether we like it or not. The statistics of who kept what speak for themselves. The BBC, with it's non-commercial remit, should have done much better.

[Robert Belford]

Personally I think it's bonkers and they've learnt nothing. Michael Crick is talking about interviews with major people which will be of obvious interest 25 years from now and in demand for history programmes. Not only will the BBC lose out in terms of sales of that footage to other broadcasters. But it will have to pay ITN or Sky for their footage to be included in BBC programmes.

If this is what happens nationally, then goodness knows what the policy is with local news. Surely the BBC should be one of the best at preserving what is local history?

[Tim Linnell]

Not really bonkers. Michael Crick doesn't have to deal with the practicalities of archiving material, he's really just playing the role of disgruntled ex employee. The idea of legal deposits is bonkers if anything is, unless you can figure out a way of paying for the storage needed.

Any archivist will tell you that archiving is always about choices, and the criteria are usually arbitrary because you can't usually predict what posterity will be interested in. Ultimately any material that's archived needs to be preserved and catalogued, and the amount of material the BBC news organisation can generate is immense. So it's really not a question about whether to draw a line, it's the point at which lines are drawn.

Could they archive more? Quite possibly. Who makes the choice? Interesting question. How do you make the choice when there is say 7 hours of material per camera per day to work through? How do you catalogue it? I suspect the choice is to keep broadcast material, which is reasonable, and further material on discretion. I doubt many interviews with cabinet ministers are junked. And we don't as a rule ask for newspapers to preserve their sources and tapes, so what is special about the BBC?

I've used proper historical archives, and I understand the dynamics of researching. I understand that sources can be reduced and redacted, and I've searched through masses of material for scraps of interest. I've often wished more had been preserved, and you are forever encountering frustrating disposals of material, but unless there is a usable catalogue (or time is not an issue) then the biggest most comprehensive archive is just a pointless waste of real estate.

And that's the nub of this issue. The BBC archive is not usable for research, because the full catalogue isn't accessible, even in it's current form.

Adding gigabytes of data from interview rushes daily to the archive doesn't solve this problem, and until it's actually available as a resource to external researchers, all it is is a store of potential broadcast material. Fix problem A before proceeding to problem B, which ultimately is a resource issue and can be fixed only to the extent of the resources you're prepared to allocate to it.

Let's not be too downhearted though. We may have junked a bit of Rentaghost but we're still better documented than any society in recorded history, and as we can store more and propagate formats automatically, we will record more and more. You can see already that companies like Google are seeing the commercial value in indexing everything (as well as some of the rights issues that throws up).

[Ken Griffin]

If what Crick states is true then it is both shocking and scandalous. One of the most striking things about my research at UTV is the fact that the station now keeps everything including interview rushes. I think that's down to the fact that modern tape formats are so small and inexpensive that wiping them probably seems like a waste of time and effort.

If a small commercial station can manage to do so, it raises questions as to why the BBC with its far greater resources and public sector remit can't.

[Tim Linnell]

Sorry to labour this point, but the BBC is a massively bigger than UTV and generates probably a couple of orders of magnitude more rushes. They could probably put the material into a box, but what use is it there? If it's in an archive it becomes subject to preservation policy and cataloguing, which means keeping it and propagating formats potentially for hundreds of years while generating yet more content daily. It's a stupendous commitment, and in any resource constrained environment what will ultimately suffer in a keep all environment is the quality of the archiving of the genuinely valuable material. Unless you can persuade the viewing public to add exponential increases to license fees to pay for it all.

It's almost certainly not a question of media costs anyway, nor storage space, it's about ongoing committment. As I said, archival is about making choices ultimately, and you can't keep everything. Nor is it indisputably valuable to try: otherwise we'd all be walking round with 24 hour webcams.

It's very easy to bash the BBC about archival policy, and certainly they did take what look with hindsight to be shortsighted decisions at a time when they had differing priorities. But we're not struggling with budgets, nor are we trying to use constrained budgets to make programmes that justify the license fee, which ultimately is the BBC remit under a hail of political and populist cross fire.

[Robert Belford]

While taking onboard what you say Tim, I'm sure the BBC also has massively more archivists than UTV does. Plus a system in place that is already transferring hundreds of thousands of tapes onto data tape as they convert the existing archive.

I make videos, I'm a one-person operation and wouldn't dream of discarding footage in that way. The time spent archiving is nothing compared to the time, effort and money involved in filming the stuff and the benefits to be had from it in the future. And I'm not filming cabinet ministers.

However recently I filmed the riots and the BBC were there too. Isn't it extraordinary to think that 20 years from now the BBC may contact me to ask for my footage because they deleted any of theirs which didn't make it into an onscreen news report?

[Deleted]

People seem to be under that impression too that if somebody criticises an archive for not keeping more, it automatically means they are suggesting EVERYTHING should be kept. There was / is a middle ground between the meagre amount kept in the past and total archiving! Thoughtful and comprehensive (not total) retention is what is desirable.

[markboulton]

Sept 19, 2011 18:22:13 GMT @laurencepiper said:

People seem to be under that impression too that if somebody criticises an archive for not keeping more, it automatically means they are suggesting EVERYTHING should be kept. There was / is a middle ground between the meagre amount kept in the past and total archiving! Thoughtful and comprehensive (not total) retention is what is desirable.

Hear hear. I don't think I was advocating keeping all complete rushes either. BUT I think one CAN decide on cutting-room-floor stuff that is worth keeping, and interviews with key figures, whether political or creative, are obvious examples. We're not asking for all vox pops filmed on the streets of Solihull for Midlands Today to be kept, besides what actually ends up being shown.

That doesn't excuse the idea of not keeping what's actually transmitted, because as has been said storage media is dirt cheap these days. Where I think the 'ongoing commitment' is falling down is that it places too much emphasis on spending lots of time and money on converting from one tape format to another. If indeed that's an effort the BBC wishes it could do without, perhaps it could save money converting D3 to LTO and use that money to extend storage facilities or find others.

Accepting that, whatever measures are taken, storage space is still going to give at some stage, and the volume of old tapes is going to present a mammoth task to transfer, what I still don't understand is the view that, if the BBC can't afford to transfer, or find the space for keeping, certain chunks of VT spools, why a little bit more effort can't be found to place them with the BFI or a similar institution that can hold onto them 'in trust' should the money/will/need transpire in the future. And I think that's what the main gripe about the past is - not so much that the BBC got rid of stuff - for Rob and Tim's reasons no doubt a lot of it had to be push come to shove - BUT I think what rankles with some of us here is the lack of regard for the act and the total disinterest in finding other ways to divest the material other than skipping (for film) or bulk erasing and skipping (for VT - even for tapes that couldn't be recycled anyway because they'd had too many splices or 'machine passes'). To say there's nothing more that could have been done just shows a total lack of imagination and initiative. Where no space existed in London, batches could have been sent to other BBC studio centres. OK, there's no guarantee even they could hold on to them for more than a decade or two (take Pebble Mill for example), at least UNTIL a closure or move is on the cards, the tapes are given a means of continuing to exist for a substantially longer amount of time - during which time, anything could happen. And still, a tape required in the future may turn out to be discarded if that other studio centre ran out of space or decamped. But until then, there would be a much better chance that the stuff DID still survive. Batches of tapes (again, for which there was no plan to recycle but were bulk erased anyway for no good reason) could simply have been placed in rusty lockups or ordinary public storage facilities. After all, no-one would be likely to be able to play them - and it's not as if such tapes could be sneaked to another broadcaster to make money from - another TV station wouldn't take a tape from some stranger and agree to play it on their network, infringing the BBC's copyright. Then again, if the BBC (or indeed any broadcaster) was so worried about being ripped off that they needed to bulk erase a tape before skipping it, then they must think there is some value in the material - making the decision to go ahead skipping it all the more bizarre, because it's the "lack of value"/"lack of interest" argument that decides such a tape's fate.

[Ken Griffin]

Sept 19, 2011 18:22:13 GMT @laurencepiper said:

People seem to be under that impression too that if somebody criticises an archive for not keeping more, it automatically means they are suggesting EVERYTHING should be kept.

I am not arguing that everything should be kept - I am just highlighting the fact that the BBC doesn't necessarily have to adopt the approach it has taken to its news rushes.

I am also a bit concerned because the BBC has consistently focused on weeding out rather than preserving in its archival approach.

For instance, BBC Northern Ireland's film holdings consist of just 500 cans of film and I understand that this is because they junked a substantial amount of their holdings, including footage from the early years of the Troubles.

[Deleted]

I'm in total agreement with you, Ken (and Mark)! I was just really questioning the assertion that a lot of the stuff considered culturally important was in fact kept in the past (e.g. the '60s). There was no archive policy in the past to speak of though, save for a very narrow band of royal / sporting events and Shakespeare etc. Contrast this with the fact that, for example, many overseas archives have complete runs of "ephemeral" pop / rock shows right back to the '60s whereas the same isn't true of our own efforts in that field, despite the UK being at the cultural centre of the universe at that time. It's shameful that many UK artists of that time are not represented by home territory recordings and we have to rely on overseas archives for their foresight and care.

Certainly a lot of important material will be contained in unused rushes. As Mark says, it takes far less space to store material these days (storage totally on hard drives is just around the corner too, taking even less space). If potentially important material is still being disposed of now for reasons of "storage space", it's wanton destruction.