The 50th anniversary, on 2 September, of the first transmission of The Morecambe And Wise Show on the BBC led to a review of the images in the archive.

Many had already been scanned in, however we found several that had never been seen before and this was the focus of a project to scan and to re-scan them to new high definition and to consistent standards.

A stroke of luck took us to our favourite photos hiding amongst the colour negatives. These are a sequence of images from 1969, which show Peter Cushing as King Arthur in a play that Ernie wrote: 

This sketch started a long running gag that Peter Cushing had never been paid for this appearance.

We already had photographs scanned of his subsequent appearances begging to be paid, but never had the original one from his first appearance.

Other favourite pictures include Eric Morecambe as a not very frightening Dick Turpin:

It’s been wonderful to discover such a collection that brings to life so many great sketches.

On 27 June the BBC launched an archive featuring a host of programmes from a 1980s project that helped make Britain the most computer-literate country in the world.

In 1978 the BBC began to look at the potential impact of microelectronics on jobs, education, industrial competitiveness and new products – and what emerged was Britain’s relative unpreparedness and the need for public awareness.

Back then, even university students’ interaction with computers was still occasional and distanced, with programs typed onto punched cards and mainframe computers hidden away.

By the early 1980s though the BBC had started to plan a national computer literacy campaign with television and radio, books, courses, advice services, software and controversially its own microcomputer, also known as the BBC Micro.

All together this became the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project (CLP), to encourage people to get their hands on a computer and have a go, and based on a successful BBC adult literacy campaign from a few years earlier.

In 1981 the company chosen for the machine was Cambridge-based Acorn, and the BBC Micro was launched before a major government initiative to introduce computer literacy in schools the following year.

So successful was the CLP that the whole of a Sunday morning on BBC One was taken up with what turned out to be the first of the Micro Live programmes. A mix of feedback, news and phone-ins, with contributors including Bill Gates and Douglas Adams, there was even a notorious incident where our demonstration of email was hacked live on air.

Decades later, the CLP seemed to have helped inspire a generation of coders. However, when researching talks and presentations it proved difficult to find good quality television clips, and the idea of an archive was born.

Collected from different sources and at various qualities the programmes were slowly found, although sadly the radio material seems to have been lost.

Those programmes from the 1980s still stand up to scrutiny today - even 30 years ago there was debate about the effects of computers on employment, and how digital technology could influence votes during elections.

Starting as an unofficial initiative, it has since been demonstrated to potential users at the Science Museum, in London; the Museum of Computer History, in Cambridge; and the National Museum of Computing, at Bletchley Park.

The archive has been a labour of love, for us and many others, with more than 2,700 items that you can search, find and play for their specific content.

Some things in IT have been with us for longer than we might remember, and without an archive to remind us, there is a danger that we will forget.

You can view the Computer Literacy Project archive here.

Radio Times is one of the country’s best-known magazine titles, and its pages hold records of a large proportion of the history of broadcasting in the UK - including virtually all BBC programme listings from 1923 onwards.

For the first time, we are now releasing the complete 1920s magazines online to the public, as part of the BBC Genome Project.
The BBC has in the last few years used the scanned and processed listings from the issues of Radio Times from 1923 to 2009 to create the BBC Genome database. This database containing more than five million programme listings is available to the world community. It is intended to become a comprehensive record of all BBC programmes, but it is not yet complete.

There are errors generated by the scanning process, which we have invited the audience to edit and improve from our launch in October 2014. We hope that in releasing the full 1920s magazines online, we will enable our crowd-sourcing editors to make great inroads into correcting the text of Genome in that decade. A new toggle functionality also means that editors can easily switch between the BBC Genome listings and the original magazine scan, to compare them and make correction easier.

The earliest issues of Radio Times were witness to great changes in the country. Britain was recovering from the most costly war it had ever fought, not least in terms of the number of deaths of combatants. Women had gained the vote (at age 30 in 1918, lowered to 21, in line with men, in 1928). Motor cars were gradually becoming more affordable and major road and house-building schemes increased mobility and improved living conditions for millions.

Broadcasting itself had a major social effect. Wireless could be received on a range of devices from the more expensive wooden cabinet models down to the crude crystal set, in which you hunted for a signal using a wire known as a 'cat’s whisker’. Even when things got a bit more sophisticated, many could and did build their own receivers (and wireless components were widely advertised in the 1920s issues).

Radios for public use were also provided in pubs and village halls, and for the first time a direct method of instant communication became widespread. From the outset, there were radio stations in all the major population centres of the UK, meaning almost the whole country could hear the same talk, music-hall turn or piece of music at the same time, and there was BBC programming generated in all the regions, as well as from London.

The new service was a great and popular novelty. At first the separate stations had their own programmes for the greater part of the time, especially because the low power of early transmitters made it hard to share programmes. As the powers-that-be were reassured that the BBC signals would not interfere with other users, particularly the armed forces, it gradually became the norm for the greater part of broadcast programming to be networked.

The content of those early Radio Times had many similarities to the magazine now, with the listings pages, previews of forthcoming programmes, letters pages and advertisements. There were columnists too, with the BBC’s General Manager (later Director-General), Lord Reith, writing regularly (though not in issue one).

Many other prominent people wrote for Radio Times, as they also flocked to broadcast over the airwaves, and there are articles by literary men like Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett, and politicians such as Ramsay MacDonald and Lord Balfour, as well as experts in music, current affairs and radio engineering.

The design of the magazine has changed considerably over the years. At first it was not particularly adventurous and had a rigid layout. For a good while the cover consisted of the large masthead, a list of the BBC stations, and an editorial article. The masthead also depicted the BBC regional stations, indicating the BBC’s intention to be a nationwide organisation from the start.
By the end of the decade the magazine’s design had loosened up, with more illustrative matter – photographs and drawings, and even some modernist art creeping in, such as the 1929 cover promoting the National Radio Exhibition.

Radio Times had been founded in response to the newspaper industry’s refusal to print BBC radio listings for free. Once set up, the magazine was a success and appeared without fail during the 1920s, missing only one week during the General Strike of May 1926. No national newspapers were printed during that period, except for the government-published British Gazette, which was set up to provide basic news during the strike period.

The BBC itself came into its own meanwhile, as the sole independent provider of agency-compiled news for 14 days, fending off the possibility of being taken over by the government, as Radio Times acknowledged when it published again. At the start of the next year the BBC, at that point a company became a corporation under Royal Charter, but retained its independence. Radio Times didn’t miss another issue until the fuel crisis of 1947.

Readers can access the magazines by searching for individual listings and clicking on the link which says "view listing in magazine", or by clicking on the "issues" tab at the top right of the website. This will give a list of all Radio Times magazines by year, and you will be able to scroll through complete 1920s issues this way. 

Andrew Martin is Specialist Researcher, BBC Archive

• Discover the earliest editions of Radio Times and edit the listings on the BBC Genome Project

In May 2016, during Dementia Awareness Week, and as part of the BBC Living With Dementia Season we launched the first version of BBC RemArc - the BBC Reminiscence Archive - which is designed to trigger memories and reminiscences in people with dementia. Today we have launched an updated, improved version of RemArc. This blog explains why we built RemArc, how the project came about, and what we have learned in the process.

Dementia effects memory, and in particular, short-term or ‘working’ memory. In the later stages of dementia, the memory can be wiped every 10 seconds, yet memories from earlier years (typically ages 14-40) often remain intact. 

Triggering these intact memories and stimulating conversations about them can improve the relationship between people with dementia and their families and carers, which in turn can improve the level of care they receive and their quality of life. This is the principle of 'reminiscence work', which is increasingly used in care homes, hospital dementia wards and other dementia support services.

A few years ago, my team in BBC Archive Development were approached by Dr Norman Alm from the Computing department of the University Of Dundee. Dr Alm’s team had spent years researching how technology could be used to support people with dementia.  As Dr Alm explained the concept of 'reminiscence work' and its benefits, we realised that the BBC’s archives could be put to good use in this area, as stimuli for triggering memories, if delivered through an appropriate medium. We agreed to work with Dr Alm to design and build an online reminiscence archive, using material from the BBC Archives.

We wanted to achieve a number of things with RemArc. Firstly, and most importantly, to use BBC archive material to benefit those of our audience members who have dementia, their families and their carers. We are confident that amongst the 1,500 items from our archives that are available on RemArc, there will be something that triggers a reminiscence for everyone.

Secondly, we wanted to demonstrate that it is not only the famous shows and well known historical events captured in the BBC’s archives that are of interest and value – a very bland-looking film clip, or the most obscure or minor detail captured in a photograph from the Forties, can mean something significant to someone out there.  Dr Alm and his colleagues’ work had demonstrated that generic material, rather than personal material, tended to elicit the strongest reminiscences.

Thirdly, we wanted to make sure that our work can be of benefit to the greatest number of people. To that end, we are making the RemArc software available for free under an open source license, so that people can build their own reminiscence archives, either in the UK or reversion RemArc with new languages for use abroad. We are also making the archive material featured in RemArc available for personal and educational use, via the Research And Education Space platform, or via direct download of individual items from the website, under the terms of the RemArc License. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that the BBC has open sourced a complete user-facing product, the first time that the BBC has published archive metadata as linked open data, and the first time the BBC has made archive material available to download for non-commercial re-use under such a permissive license.

User Research

Following the launch, we wanted to see how RemArc worked in practice, so, supported by the Alzheimer’s Society, I visited a number of groups of people with dementia. Over the summer of 2016, I spent time with 53 people with dementia, letting them try out RemArc, listening to their ideas, observing their responses, and noting down their ideas and suggestions.

This was a hugely valuable and informative process:  it is impossible to know how any product or service is actually going to be received by its intended users, whether it does what you hoped it would, and whether people respond to it and interact with it as you had expected. 

What did we learn from our test users?

Firstly, we learned that using archive material to trigger memories and reminiscences really does work.  During the sessions many memories were triggered, sparking great reminiscences and conversations, and seemingly enhancing the relationships between people with dementia, others in the groups and their carers.  It was also notable that a large number of people said that they remembered more about their past than they thought they would.

Secondly, we learned that the online, tablet based approach and the interaction design we used seems to work well for people with dementia.  However, several improvements were suggested, which are outlined in more detail later in this blog.

Thirdly, we learned that reminiscence can be very enjoyable, engaging and, quite simply, fun. During most of the testing sessions, which were initially to last around 20 minutes, I had to ask the groups to return the tablets after an hour, as they were so engaged with RemArc, and having so many great reminiscences!

To illustrate, here are some quotes from the sessions:

 "It takes you back to what you used to do"

 "Makes you realise how much you thought you’d forgotten"

 "We remembered so much about the past yet we are here because we have failing memories"

"I could sit here all day"

"It's amazing that this resource is there, forever"

What has changed in the new version of RemArc?

As a direct result of the user research, we have made a number of changes to RemArc: adding a button to display information about the archive material; increasing contrasts, font sizes and button sizes; changing the ‘Home’ button to ‘Start Again’; and making it easier to load a refreshed set of content.

What Next?

With the updated version of RemArc we are confident that the interface design and interaction model is fit-for-purpose, so we do not expect to be making any further changes to its ‘look and feel’ in the near future.  We hope to run some additional trials in conjunction with other dementia-related organisations, and we are waiting feedback from a current trial in a dementia ward in a hospital in Scotland. We hope that the content we have made available gets reused, and that people find other uses for the RemArc software that we have open-sourced.

To try the new version of RemArc, simply select a 'Theme' (such as Sport, Events etc.) or a 'Decade' (1930s, 1940s etc.) and choose whether you wish to have 'Image, Audio or Video' content. The results are randomised each visit, however items can be 'favourited' to return to later.

You can try RemArc here.  There is also a version without the page header and footer.

If you want to find out more, please contact jake.berger@bbc.co.uk

 Jake Berger is Programme Manager, BBC Archive Development

• Read more about how RemArc was made on the BBC's R&D blog.
• Discover video, audio and imagery on RemArc published on BBC Taster.

This seemingly small change to a programme page can lead you down interesting little alleyways to fascinating places you never expected to visit. For example, starting off at Ada Lovelace can take you all the way to a programme on Julius Caesar via ‘the Byron family’ followed by ‘Fellows of the Royal Society’ then ‘Captain James Cook’ and finally the ‘Deaths by stabbing’ topic tags. Give it a try here and see where you end up.

Some programmes like Desert Island Discs, which have a lot of programmes available, have navigation which is tailored very carefully to the brand. This makes it easy to find programmes but also means the system cannot be re-used across other BBC brands or programmes.

Most programmes do not have any way of browsing by subject though, especially one off documentaries and short series. They can be found by searching, but only if you already know what you are looking for and what it is called. Even then it’s very hard to find something new or surprising, even though there are so many programmes available.

Some attempts have been made to bring these hidden gems to light, but these have always involved a lot of manual curation of content by editors to find and keep the collections updated, which simply isn’t sustainable.

What we wanted to do was to find a way of connecting up all of these programmes in an automated way, and make it easier for our producers so they could spend all their time on creating the programmes we love. The BBC News and Sport websites use linked data to populate their pages, so with the infrastructure already set up to create and add tags, it seemed like this would be useful in connecting programmes.

However, it’s not as simple as just adding tags; you need to provide journeys between the tagged things. In Sport they have a structure which describes the relationship between things, which is used to power their website, so they know that a person belongs to a team which is part of a league which is part of a sport, therefore they only need to tag a story with a person and it will pop up on all of the relevant pages on the sport site.

In programmes there is no clear structure that can be added to the tags to create links between programmes, and with the subject of programmes being as diverse as the A470, Munch's “The Scream”, the cronut, Canada geese, existentialism and the Battle of Bosworth Field, it was clear that creating our own would be an enormous and maybe even impossible task.

We did look at using a variety of existing systems and approaches, such as Dewey Decimal found in libraries, and crowdsourcing where enthusiasts can help tag programmes, but none quite fitted the bill. After a great deal of searching and trial and error we found that the categories in Wikipedia looked very promising.

Categories are added by Wikipedians because they believe them to be important facets of the subject of the page, so they are likely to be more interesting than a dry statement of fact about each subject. They are also checked by other Wikipedians and will be removed if they disagree, so there’s a certain amount of quality control built in as well.

Using these categories, we built a beta system where we simply tagged each programme with its subject, gathered the Wikipedia categories for that subject automatically and matched them up, providing links between the programmes. This automatically created the navigation architecture that we needed, without us having to spend hours designing and updating it.

We needed to test it and put it through its paces so we looked at In Our Time, which has a rich archive of over 700 programmes with a wide range of subjects including people, places, events and philosophical terms. We felt if it worked for In Our Time it would work with anything.

The beta was launched in spring of last year and we promoted it on BBC Taster so we could get as much feedback as possible. We got a great response, with an overall rating of 4.15 stars (out of 5) which was really encouraging. Even better though, was the feedback we got through the beta itself, where people could actually tell us what they thought. This was brilliant because, given that most of them were positive about the experience and we were looking at rolling it out across all programmes, we needed to know what people liked and didn’t like so we could improve the whole experience.

Some people preferred navigating topics in other ways, such as by date or A-Z, and these will still be available in the programme pages for those who prefer that, alongside the additional topic journeys. Some thought a hierarchical structure for the topics would be better, so they could look at a broader subject and refine such as choosing ‘history’ then ‘19th century’. The difficulty with that sort of navigation is that it requires a lot of man hours inputting things into categories and also removes much of the serendipity of finding new links between things, which people told us they really liked.

Interestingly, some people realised that manually tagging all of these topics would be incredibly time-consuming, assumed that’s what we’d done and felt we shouldn’t have spent so much time doing it. But of course that was exactly the problem ADA was solving. And another user commented that they found they were learning about the subjects of the programmes just through the journeys and the tags, even before they had listened to them.

Many people commented on the fact that once they’d found new programmes they couldn’t download them in our stripped-down beta. This won’t be a problem in the new version as it will be integrated with the existing programme pages. Others asked for things we hadn’t thought of, like the ability to subscribe to the podcasts by topic and to favourite topics so they could be updated with new programmes of interest automatically. They seem like great ideas, and although we’re still working on perfecting this, they’re definitely on our list to look at when we’re done.

Lots more asked whether we could roll this out to other programmes, which is what we will be doing, so you should be able to find everything on social philosophy, for example, not just for one programme but across a variety of them.

We’re starting out small with a handful of programmes, including In Our Time of course, and will continue to expand over the coming months. We really hope that you enjoy finding new programmes and discovering more hidden gems in the archive, and we’d love to hear about the fascinating journeys you find yourself on.

Jo Kent, Business Analyst, BBC Radio & Music Multiplatform.

Forty one years ago, in 1975, residents of the United Kingdom were asked to vote on whether the country should join the European Economic Community, in the country’s first ever nationwide referendum. To mark the occasion BBC Parliament presented a series of programmes on 5 June, 75: Not Out.

Legendary BBC newsreader and journalist Angela Rippon presented the evening’s programmes from the BBC archives, returning to the story she covered as a young reporter.But don’t worry if you missed the programmes on BBC Parliament on 5 June, they are all still available on iPlayer.

You can watch key moments in the 1975 campaign including the tense Panorama head-to-head between Tony Benn and Roy Jenkins and the riotous Oxford Union debate between Barbara Castle, Ted Heath, Jeremy Thorpe and Peter Shore.

Newly-crowned Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher pops up in her striking European flag jumper and to give her support to the ‘In’ campaign on Newsday. There’s also a turn from the young David Dimbleby presenting his first national results programme, when 67 percent of British voters said ‘Yes’ to the UK's membership of the European Economic Community (EEC).

Catch up with BBC Parliament’s 75: Not Out on iPlayer.

Our request for your help has surpassed our expectations. Just today we’ve accepted more than 100,000 user generated edits since we launched ten months ago. You’ve definitely helped turn project Genome into one of the biggest BBC crowd sourcing projects ever.

Our army of volunteer editors is made up of people who were involved in particular programmes, occasional users who can’t resist the urge to remove extra commas and correct misspelled names, and the very methodical ones who will go from listing to listing, rearranging the format of the entry, to make it look neater. All this work even prompted us to develop a style guide for the editors, to help standardise the format of entries.

Some of the listings have have triggered wonderful memories for people involved with the BBC in various ways. 99-year-old Helen Clare, a wartime singing star and 1940s Radio Times cover, featured in a Radio Times article and was interviewed by the BBC after her neighbour, Simon Robinson, wrote to us here at BBC Genome to tell us about her past. We were also able to play her some of her old recordings we found in the BBC archive.

We also received a request from someone who sent a story to Listen with Mother in the 1960s, when she was 12 years old; the story was read on the programme and we were able to find a copy of her story in the BBC Written Archives Centre and send it to her. And a cast member of radio drama, Mrs Dale’s Diary, who found his own first appearances in the programmes, was able to read the script again, 60 years later, after we found a copy in the archive. Not to mention the dozens of times we’ve finally been able to put people out of their misery by answering the question “what was the song that was playing…” that had been nagging them for years.

To celebrate the 100,000 milestone, we’ve interviewed one of our or most prolific editors to discover why he felt moved to correct BBC Genome listings.“When I found out you could edit the listings, I was really determined to be an editor”, he said. We're hoping this will inspire some of our other enthusiastic editors to share their stories with us.

We’d like to say a big THANK YOU to all of the people who are generously giving their time to make this database better every day comprehensive and searchable. News about further improvements to the Genome site are published in the Genome blog.

* The programme was Liza Tarbuck's Christmas.

Ana Lucía González is Senior Producer, Archive Development

• Discover the BBC's TV and radio listings archive on the BBC Genome website. 

You’ll also be able to filter your search terms with ones which have “programme available” in the Advanced search. And better still, if you want to find all of the programmes which can be played, then you can run an empty search and filter the results on the Advanced tab by “programme available”.

We’re also celebrating by launching our very own BBC Genome blog which we will use to highlight archive gems, remind you of historical firsts, enjoy some banter and tell you all about the exciting developments in the pipeline. We’re really looking forward to hearing from you.

On our first blog post, the person in charge of linking to those 8,500 programmes available online will reveal how she did it – and share some of her favourite findings.

We also want the blog to become the place where you share your memories about participating or watching a particular programme. So do drop by and help us find those unusual listings or archive treasures you find while exploring BBC Genome.

Ana Lucía González is Senior Producer, Archive Development

• Visit the BBC Genome blog
• and BBC Genome project online
• Read Hilary Bishop's blog 'Genome – Radio Times archive now live'

Genome – the BBC project to digitise the Radio Times magazines between 1923 and 2009 is now live.  On the site you can find BBC broadcast information – ‘listings’ - extracted from those editions. You can also search individual programme titles, contributors and synopsis information.

Our aim on this project is to curate a comprehensive history of every radio and TV programme ever broadcast by the corporation, and make that available to the public. Our first step has been this digitisation of the BBC radio and TV programme schedules from the Radio Times magazine; the next phase of the project is to incorporate what was actually broadcast, as well as the regional and national variations.  It’s one of the most important steps we’re taking to begin unlocking the BBC’s archive, as Genome is the closest we currently have to a comprehensive broadcast history of the BBC.

We’re really pleased to get the site live, not least because so many of you have been asking “when”, “how soon” and telling us “how useful it would be”. The challenges in making available the 4.42 million programme records so far have been significant - you can read about some of the recent ones on the Internet blog.

We need your help too though. We’re looking to you to help us to clean up the data. The scanning process - known as ‘Optical Character Recognition’ - has produced plenty of errors: punctuation in the wrong places, spaces where there shouldn’t be any or no spaces where there should, as well as fundamental misunderstandings about who did what.

We’ve made it possible for you to submit an edit to us, as you use the site. We’ll validate your suggested changes and publish the ones which are approved.

We’ve also included a ‘Tell Us More’ form, at the bottom of each programme listing, so we can tap into the collective memory, insight and knowledge of our users, making use of the wealth of experience out there about our programmes, something we’d like to capture.

We also know that the schedule changed considerably on occasion, because of events in the real world and we need that information too.

Additionally, during the process of building Genome, we’ve identified a few ‘chunks’ of data that are missing from the database, but due to the way in which OCR works, didn’t get picked up in the original scans. So, we will be adding this in. 

The Radio Times has been published with regional variations since 1926. The magazines we scanned and the data sets which have been included in Genome are not exhaustive, rather they represent the ones which we could access and which covered the greatest areas and variations.  In the future, we will look into the implications of attempting provide a more complete set of regional data.

We won’t be able to reflect what you send us straight away, but as we build on BBC’s Genome, it will come in to its own.

Now that we have published the planned broadcast schedule, our next step is to match the records in our archive catalogue (the programmes that we have a copy of in our physical archives) with the Genome programme listings.  This helps us identify what proportion of the broadcasts exist in a potentially ‘playable’ form, and highlights the gaps in our archive.  

It is highly likely that somewhere out there, in lofts, sheds and basements across the world, many of these ‘missing’ programmes will have been recorded and kept by generations of TV and radio fans.  So we’re hoping to use Genome as a way of bringing copies of those lost programmes back in to the BBC archives too.

But, even if we don’t have an actual copy of the programme, we’ll also look to publish related items in our archives, such as scripts, photographs and associated paper-work.  We’re looking in to the logistics of making some of these items available via Genome.   Clearly, this will in some cases be a long and painstaking task. The BBC’s various archives contain millions of items spread over 23 archive centres across the UK, most of them in analogue form. It’s a big job, one we’re looking forward to reporting back on in the future.

What happens after 2009 when the Genome data “stops”?  Well the information held at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes starts in 2007 (the birth of the iPlayer) and as the Genome data is improved and corrected (by you!), we expect to start ‘backfilling’ the bbc.co.uk/programme pages with the Genome data.

Hilary Bishop is Editor, Archive Development, BBC Archive, and Jake Berger is Programme Manager, Digital Public Space

• Visit project Genome online

Jack Nicholson lights a cigarette and the first post of the Arena Gazette is published. It’s 1980 and Nicholson takes a long walk down a series of corridors strewn with camera equipment. He passes Stanley Kubrick, enters a bedroom, grabs an axe from the bed and works himself up into a frenzy. 33 years later in 2013, Stephen King is on BBC Breakfast talking to Will Gompertz about his recently published sequel to The Shining and how he disliked Kubrick’s interpretation of the original.

Hardly a day goes by without there being a story in the news that relates to a story from the Arena archive. On Friday 20^th September it was Stephen King promoting his latest book, in the following weeks it has been the death of Carolyn Cassady, the privatisation of the Royal Mail, the Edward Snowden spy leaks and Alex Ferguson’s memoirs. For these news item there have been rare interviews and moments from the archive that provide a unique perspective to the story, such as interviews with Carolyn Cassady in 1988 on her love for both Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac, Alex Ferguson in 1997 recalling the inspiration of his mentor Jock Stein, the film-makers from the Post Office Film Unit discussing in 1983 how they made their masterpiece The Night Mail and Kim Philby, former head of MI6, recounting in 1993 how he had recruited the author, Graham Greene, for the Secret Service.

The Arena archive, encompassing around 600 films, is a one-off record of the cultural life of the planet over the last 75 years. The Gazette is fed from this archive, bringing the past into the present into the future - that’s become our motto for Arena Online. The Gazette repositions the stories from their original context into today’s rolling news agenda.

Until recently it would have been fair to regard archive as primarily a record of past phenomena of use for historical research or the illustration of those phenomena. In this case it carried a halo of academe. The concomitant is to see archive as a ready source of nostalgia comfortable or uncomfortable, the provenance not only of the past but of those who live in it. Either view suggests images of piles of dusty, forgotten cans and tapes with the musty ambience of a bygone age.

But the notion of archive and our relation to it is changing rapidly. Anthony Wall, Arena series editor, outlined why in a document who wrote early on in Arena Online’s life:

“With the multiplicity of contemporary media and its ever more various capacity not only to capture but to record, transmit and cross refer material, the opportunity is here to reinterpret the very meaning of ‘archive’ and put it at the centre of a new kind of creative endeavour.

There are virtually no people in the UK at least below the age of 50, who do not have a comprehensive experience of life recorded in moving word and image, ubiquitously available through the television. There is no-one in the UK who has not been exposed to that experience at least through radio and cinema.

The result is a sensibility without precedent in recorded human history. The possibility exists of making film, out of archive (in its broadest sense), that would provide an experience of time travel through one’s own life and times, and the lives and times of others.

With the ready availability of camera phones etc. on which anyone can record their lives it goes so far as to disrupt any supplier/viewer relationships. The distinction between the two is no longer a reliable index. It’s now feasible to go beyond Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame, life on screen is now virtually a matter of course.

I believe the amalgamation of these propositions provides the ground framework for a new kind of creative endeavour in which archive will be the raw material. And is the term archive any longer adequate to describe what it has become?” 

Our most ambitious venture to date seeks to create a new virtual world constructed exclusively and uniquely from the Arena archive. Its ambition is to reimagine the characters and moments that have informed the cultures of the last century as residents in a virtual hotel. The Arena Hotel substitutes the conventional categories of artistic and cultural aesthetics - music, film, politics, literature etc. with the peculiar (and equally rigid) codes of the ‘hotel’ with its bars, dining facilities, spa complex, ballrooms and nightclubs. So William Burroughs finds himself in the tearoom alongside Ozzy Osbourne and the creators of Spitting Image, Fluck and Law. Anita Ekberg, Robert Crumb and Pavarotti, in their unique way, relax in the spa and the ballroom is filled with the ANC party of 1994, the George Formby Appreciation Society and the entire town of Luckenbach, Texas.

The experience is informed by graphic adventure games (Myst in particular) which enables each visitor’s experience to differ from one another depending on the floors and characters they come across. The ambition is to develop the Hotel with an even greater array of facilities and accommodate more guests and their stories. The result we hope will be to inform, educate and entertain in a virtual world. Above all we want it to be fun, so we invite you to log on, check in and enjoy the five star facilities.

Coming up we have a films featuring 50 years of the National Theatre, Spitting Image, Martin Scorsese on the New York Review Of Books and American Epic, a the 3 part film about how US roots music came to be recorded and changed the course of history.

The Arena Hotel is a resting place for rare individuals.

The Arena Team:

 

• Anthony Wall – Series Editor
• Alex Jones – Online producer
• James Leeds – Software Developer
• Issabelle Goodrich – Researcher
• Andrew Wright – Archive Producer
• Guro Eide – Production Manager

 

 

Alex Jones is Online Producer, Arena.

 

• For more information and to accept clips visit the Arena website. 
• The Gazette – Arena Online’s new blog – is updated regularly.
• The first episode of a two-part documentary Arena: The National Theatre will be broadcast on BBC Four at 9pm on Thursday 24 October.
• Watch uncut anecdotes from actors who feature in the documentary.
• Follow @BBC_Arena on twitter.

Quiz teams still argue about the first Saturday morning show; although viewers in ATV land could watch Tiswas from 1974, the first to be shown nationally was the BBC’s Swap Shop in 1975. The Multicoloured Swap Shop, to use its full title, was the first live TV show where viewers could regularly phone in and speak to their heroes and other stars of the day. Producer Rose Gill, who created the show, and presenter Noel Edmonds brought the first real interactivity to our screens, 20 years before the Internet appeared in people’s homes.

After 146 editions, Swap Shop became Saturday Superstore, which was the same sort of thing; a Radio 1 DJ presenter and pop stars of the day and other guests answering questions on the phone, all set in the format of a department store. Mike Read was the General Manager, Keith Chegwin was the delivery boy and Sarah Greene from Blue Peter joined as the Saturday Girl.

When the Superstore shut its door for the last time in 1987, the third, and many say the best, incarnation of the 3-hour pop, chat and prizes format was born – Going Live. Phillip Schofield moved over from the CBBC Broom cupboard with his trusty sidekick Gordon T Gopher, and Sarah Greene was promoted from Superstore’s Saturday Girl to co presenter. Trevor and Simon provided the comedy. Over six series, Going Live entertained and delighted millions of viewers – not all of them children!

The presenters, Trevor and Simon, and guests including Cher, Les Dawson, Phil Collins and even Sir Georg Solti, meant the show appealed just as much to mums and dads, and anyone else who didn’t fancy going down the shops or washing the car. Having grown up obsessed with Swap Shop, I was proud and thrilled to be a member of the production team.

In those days, BBC One and ITV on a Saturday morning were watched by huge numbers of people – which meant that things that happened on these shows were talked about on Monday at school or at work.

Live and Kicking followed, but the sleeping beast of ITV Saturday mornings was beginning to stir in the form of Ant and Dec and SMTV Live! This would eventually steal the BBC’s long held Saturday crown and mark the beginning of the end of the “classic” three hour Saturday morning show.

SMTV wasn’t the only new thing going on in British TV in 1998. That year Sky Digital launched, and within a few short years, the cosy duopoly of the BBC and “the other side”, was transformed into a world of wall-to-wall children’s television – all you could eat cartoons and comedy, anytime, any place. This huge explosion in choice meant that never again would any channel attain the huge audiences that Going Live and its forebears had seen. This also meant that children’s Saturday morning TV – on all channels – was no longer the national talking point it had once been. BBC and ITV children’s programmes now aimed more squarely at children, and less at the broad family audience they had once attracted. Dick and Dom in da Bungalow’s success epitomised this.

So what did happen to Saturday morning kids TV? Well, in some ways, nothing. It’s still thriving, just on channels adults may not watch. The CBBC channel has a packed schedule of shows every day of the week and live Saturday morning TV remains an important part of the mix. Last year, Blue Peter's Big Olympic Tour took to the road, bringing an action-packed look at all things Games-related to kids across the UK; and Live n Deadly let children and adults get up close and personal with a show–stealing cast of creatures as well as their favourite presenters. This week we're announcing another live interactive Saturday morning series which will go out and about throughout the UK and hopefully inspire our audience to get up and 'do something less boring instead', as the fondly remembered Why Don't You used to proclaim.

This 'family moment' telly isn't just confined to Saturday mornings either. Our Big Fab Fridays, including magazine show Friday Download and the ever-popular Sam and Mark's Big Friday Wind Up, have proven extremely popular and are real testament as to why these formats are still important to - and most importantly enjoyed by – our viewers.

Whilst children’s viewing habits and choices have changed, so have everyone else’s – so a bit like the children of the Victorian upper classes, Saturday morning TV is out of sight, and often out of mind. Unless you’re a child that is, in which case, it’s live and kicking.

 

Joe Godwin is Director of BBC Children's.

There's a selection of pictures and screenshots from Going Live at the About The BBC Flickr account.

As you can see from the picture, they have a special trolley on which the camera pod can be mounted, and this is carefully wheeled through much of the building, capturing the Foyer, the Stage Door with its renowned mural, the old scenery painting area, the studios and miles and miles of strangely similar corridor. Plus the newsroom, one or two offices and, we hope, the famous BBC canteen and its astonishing kitchens.

Studio S1, home of Today and PM for many years, is now an empty shell, and the sixth floor no longer reverberates to the sound of executive decision making, but it remains fascinating to walk through, either in real life or on a screen.

I think that anyone who wanders around the virtual corridors will get a sense of what life has been like for those of us who have worked there over the decades, and get a buzz from being allowed to look backstage in a building that has been so important to anyone who ever watched television.

The BBC’s archive is vast, but most people think of it in terms of a massive library of TV and radio programmes. In fact it’s much more than that – there are miles of paper documents, millions of photographs, vinyl LPs, sheet music and objects like the old BBC One globe and early cameras. Thanks to Google we’re now creating a "virtual tour" of the building that everyone can enjoy, and we’re also adding to the BBC’s store of memories.

 

Bill Thompson is Head of Partnership Development, Archive Development. He has written for the BBC Internet Blog, Radio Blog and regularly appears on Click on the World Service.  Follow him on Twitter @BBCBillT. 

Google have also mapped the new Radio 1 studios at New Broadcasting House. You can see inside on Google Maps. 

Earlier this week, the BBC announced that a 2 hour special 'Goodbye to Television Centre' will air on BBC Four in March. 

Watching with nan

In preparing to write this update on the project I also talked to our quality assessment team. They have spent the past few months poring over the data 8 hours a day and I wanted to know what thoughts the project might have stirred in them. Each of us will take different things out of the past when leafing through an old edition of the Radio Times. Hours and hours of checking the data, and for her, one of the many reminders of her childhood has been reading the listings information about 'Watch With Mother', not just the programmes she watched, but a time she spent being cared for by her grandmother and watching 'Watch With Mother', not with her mother, but her nan.

In the 1950s, the Radio Times regularly published BBC vacancies and I found this one which I sent to John Zubrzycki, BBC Research and Development. He commented: "That ad encapsulates why I wanted to become an engineer at the BBC. I wonder if it's too late to apply :-)"

As we progress on the project I'm sure we will find lots more gems such as these so I will be sure to share them with you next time I do a BBC Genome update.

Helen Papadopoulos is the Project Manager of BBC Genome