BBC Archives

[ken garner]

Happy new year all. A lot of bits and pieces to try and answer.

First, Bill, on this one, Rocker is probably right: if Peel sounded like he meant he was 
listening back immediately to that night;s show, then, yes, it must have been a cassette 
made during broadcast by the studio engineer for him. Neither Sheila nor John ever 
mentioned these to me and knowing Peel I doubt he kept them. For the general picture on 
complete show tapes, see my long post on the topic from summer 08, pasted below.

Martin is right to be cautious - but I think Roger and the Preservations department will be 
happy to be offered the lossless versions of all we have achieved, though what they decide 
to do with them I don't know. If we added in offers of the 500 project, my own (I am 
already doing a checklist for them), and others, with a short statement of our collective 
policy (which I think we all know - no money, our only intent is to help broaden and 
deepen the Peel archive in any way we can, and are sharing files in compressed form at 
this archiving stage mainly to check errors, reconstruct gaps and glitches), I think that 
would look good. If I might be excused a moment of vanity - but it does support my 
analysis of the politics here - my brother in law coincidentally met an in law on his side of 
the family over Christmas who had just joined that department at Maida Vale, who said 
something like 'we all think Ken's book is great and keep telling him so whenever he gets 
stuff our way'. I think he was refering to lost sessions, but the point holds for anything 
and everything, I suspect.

[Alan - by the bye - i think I have TWO more of the Peel-for-Radcliffe shows from that 
week in March 96 somewhere and will see what I can do sometime. I have none from the 
other two weeks.]

On another matter, I've evidently been thinking something similar to Steve over the 
holidays. The wiki is blossoming into a glorious thing. And when I eventually got round to 
looking seriously at Phil's database a few weeks ago I realised how astounding that was 
too. A good resolution for 09 therefore might be as follows....

.... if all those on this list who are not otherwise generally involved in the 400 /500 / etc 
box ripping project(s) made an effort to complete a single show tracklisting for the wiki 
once a month, then in theory within 2 or 3 years there would be a wiki entry of some form 
for almost every Peel show. You could start with ones that obviously need doing -as new 
tapes emerge week by week and the archivists do not have the time to do all that - and 
then move on to others, working from (for example) my shows index, your diaries, the 
sessionography, other documents, etc. This would mean that it could even be a realisable 
prospect that in the not too distant future the (not very) mythical request Peel used to get 
in the post - "one night ten years ago in the summer of 84 you played a long reggae 
record with the word Jah in it. Can you now tell me what this was, because I wish to get it 
- you'll know what it was because you played a Smiths session track straight afterwards" - 
could actually be answered!

k


~~~~~~~~~~~

"...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
1999, for example) have dozens, almost all, or at least well over 100 complete. The norm 
is anything between 10 and 30 shows surviving from each year. Until the test BBC archive 
catalogue pages were taken down from the web, anyone could search these privately!

But more shows have been emerging since 2005. 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..."

--- In peel@yahoogroups.com, "billfromnorthwales" <billfromnorthwales@...> wrote:
>
> I have a couple of questions about the BBC and Peel tapes. Someone like 
> Ken may know this, I guess?
> 
> 1. On one of the recent 400 box shows, Peel says he often listened to a 
> tape of the show on his way home. So we can assume that there must be 
> many complete shows either in the BBC archives or at Peel Acres
> 
> 2. If these tapes were shortlived, and not archived, are they 
> interested in what we are doing here? 
> 
> Just wondering.....
>