400 box tapes

[ken garner]

Peel may of course have been joking! But, to be serious, all commercial radio stations and 
the BBC - were/are required to keep a record of transmissions for 28 days in case of 
complaints. But these were normally done back then by a very lo-fi, slow, one and a 
quarter inch per second reel to reel tape recording (or later on cassette), by engineers in a 
special (remote) department, and the which tapes were then recycled. They were just to 
have a record of what were said. I couldn't remember what these tapes were called, so I 
ran this past retired Radio 1 archivist Phil Lawton last night and he says: "The tapes of 
speech were commonly known as "snoop" tapes and held as you say in case of a listener's 
complaint. They were kept from 1-3 months before being wiped." So these tapes to the 
best of my knowledge were not kept, ever. Producers never saw them - unless there was a 
complaint they had to answer!

Listenable, better quality recordings of shows before the mid-90s (since when in theory 
every show has been recorded on a CD during transmission in the studio – although often 
this has not happened!)
 were only ever done selectively by (a) the BBC Sound Archives as 
an occasional sample of a show, (b) the national sound archive in Kensington, now part of 
the British Library, or (c) the individual show producer, who frequently had to keep such 
tapes at home to avoid the occasional visitations of the tape-wiping police to offices. 
Example: Sounds of the 70s producer (and good guy) Malcolm Brown, left R1 for an 
attachment at BBC TV in 75. He came back early in 77, unlocked his office on the third 
floor of Egton, and was shocked to find his shelves of all his great sessions he had 
produced himself (Thin Lizzy, Free, Hawkwind, etc etc) had been taken and wiped in his 
absence in compliance with policy, which valued blank tape a more worthy commodity 
than any live music recorded on it. 

Anyway, all this means that until recently, many years, especially from 1970-1990, only 
have half a dozen complete Peel shows each in the BBC archive. Others (2000, and 1996, 
for example) have dozens, almost all. The norm is anything between 10 and 30 shows 
surviving from each year.

That is, until recently. Example: a professional BBC sound engineer called Mike Dick 
recorded over 150 Peel shows complete in high quality reel to reel audio between 1979-
1985, and donated them a couple of years ago. Preservations found an example of the 
original tape machine Dick had used, and then at Maida Vale got Chris Lycett (Peel's old 
producer for the middle of that period) in as a consultant, to work his way through them 
trying to date them, using my old book and his own diaries. I came in half way through 
this project and helped a bit in clarifying some dates and a few muddles that had crept in. 
I think most of these shows are now fully digitised and in the system. It was thanks to the 
Dick collection that Chris, Roger Olive and I found and restored to the archive (and the 
band - one of them is now a producer at BBC Ulster!) the long lost Protex session from 
1979 (TX on show of 19/2/79, a lovely programme, they lent it to me, broadcast after Peel 
got home after a week in Ireland, to an England covered in snow), for example, originally 
recorded for the Jensen show and therefore almost certainly lost - i am guessing here - 
when the tape went back to that programme's office at Egton. I have the list somewhere as 
an excel spreadsheet, and suspect there is occasional overlap (but not much) with the 400 
project here, and Dick also taped the entire second series of Peel's Pleasures! Once the 
400 project is complete it would make sense for me to cross check with the Dick 
collection catalogue before we donate uncompressed files to BBC, to avoid unnecessary 
duplication. Phil also suggests the right person to give the recordings to is Roger Olive, 
who can be trusted to look after them,

k


--- In peel@yahoogroups.com, RobF <robfleay@...> wrote:
>
> Just sat down tonight to make a start on my second batch of 10 tapes from the 400 box 
and the first one I listen to has John saying words to the effect of:
> 
> "we tape all these programs so we can listen back to them in the event of me saying 
something unfortunate..."
> 
> I seem to remember at the start of the 400 box project Ken saying that he didn't think 
the BBC did tape the shows back then...could there already be copies of these shows in 
the archive?
> 
> Anyway - not uploaded yet but the 17th September show of which I previously shared 
the last 20 minutes - is now complete (bar a few missing minutes when the tapes were 
swapped)
> 
> Will post the link when it's done uploading
> 
> 
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