Broadcast Fri 30 Oct 2009, 11:00, Radio 7
Celebrating Maida Vale at 75, Peter Reed discovers how the BBC's mammoth tape archive arrives on Radio 7, via the former home of the Radiophonic Workshop.
Amongst the interviewees are Dick Mills (previously of the Radiophonic Workshop), Lucy Cooke (Programme Transfer Team) and David Lortal (Radio 7 Archive Assistant) and Mary Kalemkerian (Head of Programmes at Radio 7). Do listen out for the sound of copulating tortoises.
160/44; 18.2 MB; sound quality excellent
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:35:42 +0100 (BST)
From: owner-bbc7@lists.bbc.co.uk
Subject: BBC Radio 7 Newsletter - Friday 23rd October
Hello again
In less than two months' time, we'll be celebrating the 7th anniversary of the launch of Radio 7 (or Network Z as it was referred to pre-launch).
Some of us in the office were discussing the opportunities and also the challenges we had in creating an entertainment speech network consisting of "old" programmes, all to be delivered within the short time span of 9 months.
We were all buzzing with ideas for this new radio station, the last of the BBC digital radio family to be launched.
There were certainly plenty of programmes to consider from the BBC's vast archive of over 750,000 recorded items, but unfortunately, not all of those were available to us, as of course the copyright in most programmes does not belong to the BBC, but to authors/dramatists/abridgers etc. Gaining permissions for works we wanted to schedule was a priority, but there was something else essential to getting the network up and running - and that was the digitisation of the material.
Programmes had been retained in allsorts of formats; some were on scratchy shellac or vinyl discs, many were recorded on quarter inch tape on cumbersome 12 inch reels and some had been recorded on what was then the advanced DAT system.
All of these had to be technically processed for broadcast on a digital station, and this is where the studio managers in the Programme Transfer Team, based at Maida Vale came into their own.
The BBC had already wisely embarked on an archive preservation scheme in 2000, to preserve recordings considered "at risk" because of deterioration. The first programmes to be digitised were the classic Radio 1 sessions, but the preservation work was to continue across all BBC radio networks.
With the launch of a digital archive speech network announced, we were fortunate enough at Radio 7 to be treated as priority as our selection of programmes were considered "broadcast critical".
Starting in Spring 2002, we were sending off between 50 and 100 hours of programming to be digitised each week. The pristine, digitised programmes were returned to us on CD, and we were beginning to amass a fairly large library of comedy and drama.
The programmes are now delivered to us via Wav files, and programmes which would previously have filled an entire basement, now take up as much space as a small supermarket trolley. The technical wizards who make this happen, the Programme Transfer Team, are actually based in the old Radiophonic Workshop Studios .
Producers Peter Reed and Liz Jaynes came up with the idea of making an informative little programme, The Digitisation of a Radio Station, which Peter assures me is a "behind-the-scenes expos‚" revealing the secrets of how we get your favourite programmes on air.
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