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.

Dad's Army and Me

I've been working on a little collection of archive treats to mark the 40th anniversary of Dad's Army, and it seems to have been leapt upon by the press.

The Telegraph did a nice piece about the background to the series last week, and I was interviewed on BBC Radio Kent and BBC Southern Counties on Wednesday. The Today programme did a two-minute piece too, and there was a news item on BBC News online too. All in all, the press rather eclipsed the main events on BBC1 and BBC2 this weekend, unfortunately. But I'm just glad to see the show being championed once a again.

Da dah da, dadada da da

After nearly two months, nothing comes to mind here. Actually - not true! Except I'm about to start blogging as part of my job, so a lot of my thoughts are focused on that there weekly panic instead of an occasional free-form Jazz brain-dump on here.

This week, I accompanied a work colleague to visit a lady who once worked at the BBC and had accumulated an attic full of old scripts and paperwork, which we offered to take off her hands. Some of it's quite dry and of very limited interest to be honest, but the scripts of Z Cars episodes now lost from the archives are a real treat. Best thing she gave us though was a prop walkie talkie - complete with pop-up aerial - that had once served the good men of Newtown prison about 30 years ago. Either that, or the tomahawk that had somehow featured in an adaptation of Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask. We might take that along to meetings from now on, as a means of persuasion...

One other fun thing about this woman's collection is, she seems to have been an unstoppable hoarder, so she's kept some amazing scraps of paper. One Z Cars folder contained little notes about various crimes - a theft from a scrapyard, a house burglary resulting in the loss of £3000-worth of silver - which I couldn't at first work out. Then I had the idea of reading the script and there they were: these little slips of paper were prop telexes that the police officer would have read from to brief his superior officer about recent cases that have been opened, along with the character's scripted asides, like 'I bet he did it himself for the insurance'. So if you've ever wondered if there's actually anything written on those pieces of paper actors shuffle in drama, well, there is. Their script, usually.

Oh no... not again...

So, my new job involves working with archive material. I started on 2 January and I'm with a very lovely team of people who all want to work hard and do their best. It's amazing how being placed on a project with funding, purpose, future direction and a lot of love can do wonders for the sense of self-worth. I still get very down about the usual relationship issues but generally my work-mood has been up-up-UP!

Except...

We've discovered something that's a teensy bit upsetting about the past. See, people were racist - openly so - none of your coded could-be-just-institutional-racism that we saw in recent weeks with Big Brother. No, this is open sneering from a travelogue reporter about the locals. It's marginalised stereotyping. It's..

BLACKING UP!

I'm old enough to remember The Black & White Minstrel Show from the 1970s, just before Bill Cotton took it off, and to be honest, I was more concerned by how boring it was, and I still am. Still, it's history and as Spike Lee's film Bamboozled shows, there's still a lot of talent involved in those minstrel shows, even if the stereotypes we saw weren't hardworking 'Negro' entertainers but fat Welshmen with sponge wigs and cole-face makeup.

But some of my colleagues do get very worried by the fact that archive TV can be seen as 'A History of People Blacking Up', and it's easy to see why. It's partly guilt that our forefathers let this kind of thing happen for so long, it's partly because anything naughty can trigger inappropriate giggles in ourslves and it's partly because the Great British Public likes nothing better than a good moan at our expense. Moan because we show this kind of stuff. Moan because we don't show it at all any more. Moan because there are too many repeats. Moan because the TV's not as good as it used to be.

We're taking the approach that this is how TV was and that such material will receive suitable warnings before it's made available to the public, but we're still on edge.

And then yesterday, I watched a programme starring a much-loved fox-shaped puppet. First gag - 'What has 22 yellow legs and four wings? - A Chinese football team.

Oh, Basil - how could you?!