by Trevor Dann
Trevor Dann and his first tape recorder
Do you remember all those warnings about home taping? Did you ignore them and furtively record some of your favourite radio shows anyway? Do you have an attic or a garage or even an old cardboard box under the spare bed full of tapes or cassettes of Pick of the Pops, Saturday Club, Easy Beat, Top Gear or Housewives’ Choice?
Well the good news is you got away with it!
Not only that, but the BBC would love to recover some of the great shows it broadcast and didn’t archive. And as part of the Corporation’s brilliant 90th anniversary celebrations, it’s declaring a radio amnesty, and asking you to help.
That’s me above with my first tape recorder. My Dad bought it for me as a present for passing the 11 Plus (it was like Year 6 SATs kids!) and it set me on the road to a lifetime in radio including spells as head of music at Radio 1 and chief exec of the Radio Academy.
These days I work as an independent producer and it was while my colleague Heather Davies and I were working on our mammoth 50-part series, Sounds of the 20th Century for Radio 2, that we realised the need for a project like this.
The BBC’s sound archive is a terrific resource for (more...)
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