‘The cultural memory of the UK’: unearthing the hidden treasures of the BBC archive
Deep inside a giant shed in a business park in west London, Dean Cripps is preparing to digitise some old film. It came up in a canister from one of the vaults downstairs, at the BBC Archive Centre in Perivale. A second reel carries the magnetic track, or sound. Cripps, who is 61 and has worked in the archive for 43 years, feeds the reels through an old telecine machine, lining up the sync marks at the start of each film.
Soon the machine is whirring away, spooling through another piece of broadcasting history. Cripps controls the speed with a mechanical lever, watching images flicker across the screen in front of him. He looks as if he’s driving an old tube train.
The film is an episode of The Camera & the Song, a music show that aired on BBC Two in the early 1970s. 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. 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.”
The machine scans the film as it is played, so that it can be converted into a digital video file. Metadata will be added, including the programme’s original Radio Times listing. 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
