Trolleys carry reels for processing, their modern cataloguing barcodes stuck next to old labels in a palimpsest of yellowing paper and tape. “Luckily we had a backup.”Ĭlose to the edit … footage of Tony Blackburn at Radio 1 is digitised ready to be uploaded to the cloud. “We’d open them and just get silvery dust falling out,” says Nick Ashcroft, as he shows me a ruined recording of Radio 3’s Private Passions. In some cases, the sticky labels applied to discs had corroded the data layer. In another office, technicians are digitising more than 200,000 CDs used for archiving radio in the late 1990s. After digitisation, files are screened for “ingest faults”, or glitches. In one dimly lit booth, Deepak Mahil is doing a quality control check on an episode of EastEnders from 1993, featuring two smooth-faced Mitchell brothers. There are moon landings, encounters with gorillas, Live Aid, the EastEnders theme on an infinite loop, and Del Boy falling through a bar. All the big moments are here, including the Queen’s coronation – and, a few weeks after my visit – her funeral. The building is the biggest facility run by BBC Archive, which employs more than 200 people. Further inside, more than 12m tapes, vinyl records, CDs and other redundant formats sit on 60 miles of shelving in nine climate-controlled vaults.
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It will join a digital archive that is becoming so vast and accessible that it is beginning to operate as a kind of parallel internet – a constantly growing chronicle of a century that technology is only now opening up.Ī Dalek stands guard in the entrance to the building, which opened next to a bus depot in 2010. The new digital version of a young Victoria Wood will go up to the cloud. The film canisters will be sent back down to the vaults, where they are stored at low temperatures that require the archivists working on them to wear fleeces. A powerful speech-to-text system introduced by the BBC in 2015 will then create a searchable transcript of the episode, adding that to the file, too. Metadata will be added, including the programme’s original Radio Times listing. The machine scans the film as it is played, so that it can be converted into a digital video file. She plays piano while singing about a young woman in suburbia: “Children be nice to your father / He is still alive at 35 / While your eyes get brighter / His trousers get tighter.” A crackly, familiar voice fills the room – a rarely seen early performance by Victoria Wood, who made it into an episode of the show in 1976, aged 22. The film is an episode of The Camera & the Song, a music show that aired on BBC Two in the early 1970s.
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