BBC Radio Archives
poppickers2345
Posts: 162 Forum Member
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I am wondering if anyone else thinks its time that BBC Radio had a station dedicated to old BBC Radio 1 shows, I know that BBC 6 broadcasts old documentaries, but maybe its time to broadcast old shows like Simon Bates etc from the past?
Be great to hear your thoughts.
Thank you
Be great to hear your thoughts.
Thank you
0
Comments
Simon Bates would be good as well as Adrian Juste and Kenny Everett and possibly Radio 1 Roadshows although a complication would be that if there are timings such as with the Radio 1 Roadshow where they say we are here live in Margate for example then you could have some idiot racing to Margate only to find the seafront empty and complaining to the BBC.
The same can be said for if programmes include competitions or news bulletins, some would be bound to try to ring the number or go on Facebook to comment on a news item which happened say in 1979.
But I have said before how nice it would be but in times of the BBC cutting back it could be some years before anything happens, I have also commented and sort of put down in the past when I have suggested that the BBC could sell some shows both television and radio as it would a least generate much needed money for them.
Having said that if the BBC were to charge crazy prices such as £50 or £100 then I do not agree but I would not mind paying between £1 and £10 for something I really wanted, I can not understand why in times of cuts instead of making cuts the BBC were to think sense and release shows from their archives as MP3s etc.
At least they would have caught up with the times but sadly that is not too likely to happen but here's hoping.
Hi Lee,
I am just wondering do you still have that amazing collection of shows you listed on a previous posting?
thanks
It's any content of an archive nature as the rights were for broadcast only ...
So the writer etc will need his/her contribution to be rewarded.
And moralrghts as well..... Whch can stop a lot of use...
Its documentaries and specials were, on the whole, kept but the general day to day strip shows were never considered 'special' enough to archive.
I worked with a former assistant controller of Radio 1 (sic!) who said the BBC was always atrocious at archiving its newtwork radio.
But maintaining an archive costs money ..
Even more so in the digital age .......
So you cannot keep every thing for ever. Only its metadata
Radio is ethereal !
And you need a library..... Like www.ina.fr
Which costs mega euros
If you take Simon Bates, as an example, the format was the same day in, day out - it was really only the music that changed. I'm not having a "go" at Simon Bates but that really is the case for all daily programmes on Radio 1 over the years. Why record everything?
BBC network radio generally only archived sample programmes from Radio 1 from different presenters.
Landmark programmes from Kenny Everett were never kept by the BBC. I could be wrong but I think his last programme only exists because someone had the foresight to rescue it from a slightly dodgy recording.
You can't blame them, archiving every programme is an expensive operation. Apart from someone starting and stopping the tape, it has to be stored, periodically checked, perhaps transferred to a new tape. Very few are interested in listening to just those odd samples that were kept and they would not realise just how talented Everett was and how he would die young.
No it is NOT archived .. It as emitted signals recorded
ARCHIVING mean that it is fully curated .. Redux is just recording and indexing.
Redux is archiving the programmes from the Freesat/Freeview feeds and making them available for anyone involved in programme making in the BBC. True it is not holding "clean feed" tx tapes, BBC Archives actually stores those, but it does give access to full transmissions on all BBC channels.
"ARCHIVING" = manually curated, expensively managed, destroy most of it after five years, or
"just recording and indexing" = automatically grabbing every broadcast, automatically indexing it from the EPG, and keeping it for as long as someone is happy to throw £30/day of storage at the problem
...I'll go for the latter.
The biggest problem being that, due to low bitrates, dynamic range compression, and DOGs, the SD broadcasts aren't a great source for re-use. But if it's that or nothing, I'll take that. You could put an undogged slightly higher bitrate less processed HD version into Redux if you really wanted to. Or you could just broadcast that way in the first place
A year's worth of uncompressed CD quality audio is 5.5TB. That's really not a big deal in 2015, and it's going to seem less and less of an issue as the years go by. The answer to the cost of expensive human curation is: don't use expensive human curation. BBC Redux already shows one way to automate the process.
In a few decades, when a storage device capable of holding the entire BBC output from 1922 to now costs an hour's wages and is the size of your thumbnail, the BBC is, yet again, going to look very short-sighted for throwing so much stuff away.
Cheers,
David.