[peel] Re: any interest in an early nineties cassette collection?

[Martin Wheatley]

>
>agreed on all that mate. Let's get 'em in!
>
>You're right, when I last looked at the complete show tape listings 
>on BBC INFAX, there were no more than 20 or 25 shows from any one 
>year of the Peel show (some years have less than 10, and there are 
>very few from before 1980), UNTIL you get to about 97/98/99, when 
>the full force of the new digitalising policy, recording of each 
>show onto CD during transmission, gradually became real practice.
>
>So I wonder who it was you spoke to in Archives, Steve? Can you dish 
>the dirt? He may have meant, of course, that they think they have 
>all the session tracks, which is probably true... but then it is 
>only a very few people in BBC Information & Archives who truly 
>understand what they have and have not really got! The really 
>enlightened ones are those who realise how much they are missing...
>
>ken


A few thoughts on this

There is a very different situation between the preserving of sessions
and live performances on the one hand and complete progs on the other
as far as the BBC is concerned
Sessions and live performances have a use - 6Music relies on them and
record companies part own some of them and want to use them

Leaving aside documentary series to my knowledge none of the
complete music progs on Radio 1 have ever been rebroadcast nor has anybody
got any plans to do so.  Only the BBC could do it because only they
don't have any copyright problems regarding the music played.

We have to remember that BBC's purpose in recording these shows was not
because of the value of the content or for archival purposes - it was to meet
their requirement to have them available for a month or two so they 
could listen
back in case of complaints of libel.     They had no other use for them.
Persuading people at the BBC that they should keep many thousands hours of
recordings  that would never be used might have been difficult  (remember it
was all progs not just Peel).   I suspect what the BBC have from the
pre-digitised period is just what was hanging about or what individual people
secreted away.   There were space and finance considerations
It's similar to the session situation in the 60s that Ken is very 
familiar with.
Nowadays keeping copies of complete progs is not a problem but it is 
only fairly
recently this has become so

I think the BBC's difficulties in this are quite understandable if 
not very welcome to us


martinw