Back in the Archives

I recently completed work on a couple of collections for the BBC Archive site, which led to a brief period of media whoredom for me and a meet-up with a long-time heroine of mine, the lovely Janice Long.

Here are the two collections, first of all:

- The Genesis of Doctor Who: documents and images from the archives telling the story of the Time Lord's origins.

- Music from the Mersey: TV and radio programmes from the archives looking at Liverpool's place in the musical history books.

The Doctor Who stuff got picked up by the BBC News Magazine, who did a feature on the documents that was quite well received, even if my explanation of the archetypes that run through the series got a teensy bit garbled.

As a consequence of the Mersey collection, Janice Long was approached to stage a kind of reunion on Radio Merseyside with local hero Billy Butler. They plugged the collection like mad, so I emailed Janice and Billy to thank them both, Janice got back in touch and suggested I pop into her show to chat about the archives - which I did. Janice was every bit as warm and friendly as I'd always hoped, and we had to stop ourselves from gabbing too much before the recording. A brilliant plug for the site, and we're hoping we might be able to come up with ideas for a future collaboration.

A couple of weeks later, my flatmate and I were both asked to do some talking heads stuff for a documentary about 'The Perfect British TV Detective', which is on BBC 2 between Christmas and New Year. Radio Times says 29 December, so it must be then.