Archives for August 2010

On the morning of 28 May 1982, an Alitalia 727 aircraft touched down at London Gatwick airport. Minutes later Pope John Paul II knelt down and kissed the tarmac.



What followed was an historic and demanding six-day tour of the UK that gripped the nation, and dominated the news both in the UK and around the globe.



I was a football-mad boy just about to turn thirteen and residing in Bolton when I watched his arrival in 1982. I - like others of around my age - remember being enthralled by Blue Peter and Newsround features about the visit - and who can forget marveling at the all-important Pope mobile.



I had little concept of what the Pope's visit to our shores really meant to the millions of Catholics in the UK. I just knew that this man was causing a bit of a stir when he turned up in his very different looking car. Like all things when you are a child, the fascination passed quickly, but my memory of his visit remains, and what really sticks in my mind especially is the sheer size of the crowds who came to see him in Heaton Park in Manchester.



Today - as a forty-one year-old man - I am now preparing for the first visit of a Pontiff for 28 years (and the first ever State visit) and I am in a very different place. I am obviously a lot older, I hope wiser, a father myself, and I am very proud to now be the BBC's Head of Religion and Ethics and the Commissioning Editor for Religion TV. And this papal visit by the current pope - Benedict XVI - rather than being a passing fascination, is on my mind every minute of every day, morning, noon and night. Why? Because I, along with many of my colleagues across BBC TV, radio and online, are getting ready to cover this historic State occasion with a myriad of eclectic programming.



The Pope's visit from 16 -19 September is being organised and paid for by the Catholic Church (in England and in Scotland) and by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It has polarised public opinion like no other before and you only have to open a paper to see that it has got the nation talking. What will happen when he gets here and, more importantly, what he may say, is sure to dominate the news agenda. His arrival on the 16 September will also mark - and be the culmination of - many months of planning and organisation (not to mention sleepless nights) for our BBC teams working on all the aspects of covering the Pope's Visit 2010.



From the production crews working on all the live events, to the news teams across the BBC, down to the documentary producers finalising programmes giving an important insight into some of the wider issues that surround the papacy of Joseph Ratzinger, this has been an extremely busy, fraught but entirely fascinating few months.



The UK has changed a lot in those 28 years since the last time we greeted a Pontiff, and the Britain that awaits Pope Benedict XVI as he ascends to the tarmac is a very different place than the Britain that awaited Pope John Paul II. It is more multicultural, secular and, thanks to the recent controversies that have rocked the Catholic Church, the current Pope will no doubt be met by some very vocal groups who are against him being here altogether. However, for the majority of the many millions of Catholics in the UK, the Pope's arrival will be much looked forward to and also celebrated.



One thing is for sure, this is a State event, that will be both newsworthy and of national interest and significance, and, as the nation's broadcaster, it is appropriate that we cover it in the best way we can - with the scale, depth and overall balance of programming across all our platforms - TV, radio and online - that only the BBC can deliver.



I hope you manage to watch some of the coverage, and you find it as fascinating as I undoubtedly will.



You can find details of all the programmes to coincide with the Pope's Visit 2010 by following the below link.



Aaqil Ahmed is Commissioning Editor for Television. Head of Religion and Ethics

• BBC announces event coverage of the Pope's Visit 2010

Tomorrow morning Mark will be answering questions in a post-MacTaggart Q&A.

You can follow the @bbcpress and @AboutTheBBCTwitter feeds for updates from the event.

Laura Murray is Editor of About the BBC Blog

John Millner is Learning Executive for 5-19 Learning

A warm balmy afternoon in July 2007 had erupted into a fierce-some thunderstorm. Looking out across West London from a 3rd floor window in the Broadcasting Centre, the doom-mongerers were in full force. "Not looking good out to the West", said one and then embroidered his forecast by musing "I reckon that lightening storm is right over Brentford".

Spot on.



My phone rang "We've got another flood at Windmill Road" came the call from Paul, our Logistics Manager on site.



It was the third flood in the same summer and the 10th of the decade. The heart sank, yet more rain-water overwhelming the fragile gutters and penetrating the porous roofing of the proud old building. Internal drain manholes blasted out of their mountings and swept along by the torrents of rainwater backing up from the nearby roads as the local drains failed to cope.

More and more chaos and upheaval for the dedicated on-site team to manage. And so they swept into action, moving hundreds of tapes to safer higher areas in the archive, laying out wet and decaying material in dry rooms, wading through inches of water to save the archive, transporting damaged film to specialist recovery outfits and mopping up the sodden floors...

Windmill Road had taken another hit. The home of the BBC archive, housed in aged, inadequate conditions and surroundings, staggered and reeled..but coped.



Wind on 3 years and reach the summer of 2010....



A new purpose-built archive is close to completion at Perivale. Housing 13 archival controlled vaults to maintain and preserve the physical content plus the construction of new technical areas designed to deliver the various preservation and digitisation programmes that will enable the BBC to deliver priceless programmes back to our audience in new ways. 

A fantastic commitment, both in terms of intent and design, that underlines the importance of the BBC's output for the past 80 years and keeps it alive for future audiences, enhanced by new technologies.

The new BBC Archive Centre - Perivale

• Watch a tour of the BBC archive in Windmill Road
  
  
• BBC Archive at Windmill Road photo gallery
• Read about the BBC Genome project
• Read a recent post from Roly Keating, Director of BBC Archive
• Listen to The Guardian podcast: In the BCB Archive
  
  

Most people know that the BBC does not have a copy of every programme it has ever broadcast. The main reason for this is that when broadcasting began it was seen as an ephemeral medium, and there was no way to record and store what was being transmitted.

Although it became possible to record programmes in the 1950s, magnetic tape was very expensive and recording equipment bulky and complicated, and until relatively recently only those programmes that were considered worth the cost and effort of recording and archiving for posterity were retained. The head of BBC Information and Archives, Sarah Hayes, has already written about this in detail for the Internet blog back in September 2009.

However, even though we may not have a copy of each programme in the BBC's vast archive, there may still be something related to or derived from the original programme: stills, non-broadcast footage, music, documentation, props or other material connected with what was broadcast.

The skilled researchers who work with programme-makers inside the BBC and independent production companies are used to hunting for additional material and know where to look, but on the whole the public don't even know where to start. BBC Genome is our attempt to solve that problem, by creating a comprehensive, easy-to-use online catalogue of all of the BBC's programmes so that people can discover which programmes we have, which we don't have, when and where they were broadcast and even what else we've got that might interest them.

We're working on the basis that "full or near-full public access to archives is both achievable and the right ultimate goal" and, sitting at the heart of a reshaped BBC Online, BBC Genome is the first step towards that goal. It will provide a timeline from the foundation of the British Broadcasting Company in 1922 and provide details of the programmes, channels and services which map on to that timeline, bringing the broadcast history of the BBC to life.

What BBC Genome does

The BBC stores information about the programmes we make and broadcast in many different ways, each one designed to support a specific task or function, but none of these are comprehensive nor in a publicly accessible or searchable form. We want to ensure that our broadcast history becomes and remains a working asset for audiences, and at the end of last year we set about finding a way to reconstruct the BBC's broadcast history all the way back to 1922.

We needed to create a central core, or spine, for the catalogue of broadcast records and there was one source in particular that provided a comprehensive record of the BBC's broadcast history going back to 1923: Radio Times.

It is an ideal place to begin because we have easy access to it, it contains a record of everything we intended to broadcast - even if what actually went on air wasn't what we planned to show - and it is in a structure and format that people readily recognise, with basic but consistent details for all programmes, along with regional variations. It even lists radio frequencies!

We started with a pilot project to scan two years' worth of Radio Times and extract the programme listings details from the scanned pages, in order to establish the approach and processes. Working with experts at a UK firm which specialises in projects like ours and with the British Library, every page of the 1948 and 1977 editions of Radio Times was scanned.

The Genome pilot: Metadata, OCR and outputs 

The images were then converted into computer-readable text using optical character recognition (OCR) software before being divided into separate channel and programme listings so that we could identify details including the programme title, channel name, date and time of broadcast and a synopsis of the show. All of this information was stored in a database that we used to support an experimental website that presented the information in a form similar to BBC Programmes pages.

These are a couple of the early pages complementing the BBC Programmes services that we created from the XML files.

During the process we learned an awful lot and collaborated with several BBC departments as we worked out how to make the process accurate and repeatable. As you would expect, we set a very tough and exacting technical specification for the scanning, partly to optimise the accuracy of the OCR process, but just as importantly for long-term preservation purposes. We didn't want anyone in the BBC to have to come back and pay to scan the pages again in five, ten or even thirty years' time if we could avoid it.

At the end of the trial we knew we could extract programme records from Radio Times, but the other important part of the project was to create a BBC channel and service history. There are records for when channels and services began, ended or were rebranded, just not in a single accessible place, and we quickly discovered how complicated the BBC's broadcast history is. For example, in order to work out when regional opt-outs started we needed to search Radio Times and a host of other sources at the BBC Written Archives Centre.

The picture below shows over 20 different editions of Radio Times all for the same week in 1971. 

What's next for BBC Genome?

In September we will begin the full-scale project of digitising over 80 years' worth of broadcast records. That's approximately 400,000 pages of Radio Times, 3 million programmes and 300 million words to recognise through OCR.

In less than a year we expect the Radio Times digitisation project to be completed and for the first time there will be, in one place, a comprehensive record of every programme.

What you'll be able to search and discover

Initially, you will be able to search by programme title, by year, day and time. Once we fully populate the database with contributors, programme synopses and other sources of data, you'll be able to find people and places and all the programme records they feature in.

You might well discover during your searches that the programme schedules are not entirely correct. They were, of course, correct when each issue of Radio Times was published, but in the early days of radio and television technical hitches sometimes affected the schedules. Similarly, throughout the BBC's broadcast history, changes in live broadcasts and major events at home and abroad will have meant that the published schedules in Radio Times were not always accurate.

What you'll be able to access

Radio Times is owned by the BBC's commercial arm BBC Worldwide and we currently do not have the rights to show the scanned pages themselves, although we hope we may be able to in the future. However, you will be able to take a journey back in time and rediscover how the BBC's networks and programmes reflect Britain's social history. You can already access some archive materials via the collections featured on the BBC Archive site, and Genome will provide access to additional archive information.

Although the BBC only has about 20-25% of the programmes in its physical archive, this still amounts to more than a million hours of output. Radio Times will provide the programme listing and, once that's done, we will start to provide access to the programmes themselves along with other material such as scripts or photos - which will be especially useful where physical programmes no longer exist or where we don't have the rights to make the programme itself available - and begin to make it all visible from BBC Online.

Making everything available will take time, but the Radio Times programme records will soon create the spine for Genome and are a vital first step in bringing the BBC's broadcast history to life.

One last note: Radio Times was first published on 28 September 1923 and I have referred to the foundation of the BBC in 1922. Using other sources, we do plan to make programme records available from the first ever BBC broadcast on 14 November 1922 when the Marconi transmitting station 2LO was taken over by the BBC. It truly will be a complete broadcast history of the BBC!

Helen Papadopoulos is the Project Manager of BBC Genome

This week we've published the latest of our archive collections, In their own words: British Novelists, a selection of interviews with modern writers drawn from the BBC's archive.

The collection includes a radio interview with Virginia Woolf from 1937, an astonishingly erudite encounter between Iris Murdoch and Frank Kermode from 1965 and a 2009 interview with Zadie Smith, and offers a remarkable insight into the way writers think and the ways they have been represented by the BBC over the years.



It is the latest in a series of collections that includes stories from survivors of the sinking of the Titanic, the moon landings, British steam trains and the documents behind the creation of Doctor Who.



Some of the archive selections we publish are linked to significant anniversaries, like the loss of the Titanic, but this collection was triggered by the research done for In Their Own Words, the BBC series on writers that is being broadcast this week on BBC Four.



It offers viewers an opportunity to listen to the full versions of the interviews used in the programmes, something that would have been impossible for us to do before the advent of the internet, and shows very clearly how linear programming and non-linear access to material can complement each other, with well-chosen extracts used on air while the full-length originals are made available on the web.



I think it also offers an excellent model for how the BBC can ensure that the archive material we publish reaches its intended audience, with BBC Four curating the raw material that goes into its programmes, offering a context and providing - through the programme itself - an excellent introduction to the material that is available to be explored online.



Putting historically important material online is one of the most significant things that we're offering as we open up the BBC archive, but even that is scratching the surface.



The BBC's record doesn't just include programmes or the raw material that went to make programmes. There are photographs, props, costumes and millions of documents ranging from scripts to contracts to letters from the many people who have worked with the BBC over the years. Some are historically significant, and we want to curate them and make them available. Others may matter only to one person or one family, but they should still be discoverable.



And of course the BBC archive, rich and wonderful though it is, is only one way of looking at our shared history. We are working closely with other cultural institutions like the British Library, British Museum, Arts Council England and of course the British Film Institute in order to harness emerging digital technologies and ensure that as we all make material available online we do so in ways that work together.



We want to make sure that a search for 'Kingsley Amis' finds the material from many different archives and collections, not just the interviews on 'In Their Own Words', and we are working with our partners to ensure that we can all discover, access and engage with archive material, important collections and contemporary culture in a digital public space that is open to everyone.



This will make the internet more valuable for every one of us, and may motivate more people to go online as they realise what is out there for them. We also think that it will create opportunities for commercial development and help to fuel the creative economy, just as the invention of videotape and then DVD created a new market for BBC programmes, one that was not envisaged when television was invented.



If you want to find out more about the BBC Archive, my colleagues Adrian Williams and Richard Wright have been blogging about their work and all three of us have been interviewed for this week's Guardian Technology podcast.



Roly Keating is Director of Archive Content

The video above shows Imran Khan performing 'Amplifier' on stage

BBC Asian Network has reached more than 500,000 British-Asians in the past 12 weeks as part of our 'A Summer Of Melas' season.

I'm pleased at those figures. That's a significant proportion of the entire British-Asian population reached by BBC Asian Network - and we still hope to build on last year's Red Button TV audience of 810,000 with a second programme starting this Monday.

This special season showcasing the very best in Asian music reached its grand finale last Sunday evening at the London Mela in Gunnersbury Park, Ealing, with Asian Network playing host to a record audience of 92,000. I was backstage late on Sunday evening with Sonia Deol as our Live Broadcast team fired up the audio highlights of an amazing day from the studio of Outside Broadcast vehicle Sound 4, whilst across to my left the Tommy Sandhu hosted Asian Network Main Stage was illuminated by the glow of a West London sunset and a memorable closing performance from The Raghu Dixit Project.

Watch a performance of 'Hey Bhagwan' from The Raghu Dixit Project below

I'm often surprised that London Mela ('Mela' is an ancient Sanskrit word for 'gathering' or 'fair') doesn't register more loudly on the Summer Festival radar. 2010 marks the 8th year (and 5th year of BBC involvement) for what is undoubtedly the biggest Asian cultural event in Britain.


There is nothing else quite like it.

London Mela is an annual event where British-Asians of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Afghani and Nepali origin celebrate shared heritage and cultural DNA through music, arts, discussion and cuisine alongside a sizeable non-Asian audience interested in discovering more about a community that three-generations on is deeply woven into the fabric of Britain.

And the thread of commonality that runs through this audience is plain to see.

Since May we have taken BBC Asian Network out on the frontline to meet audiences that the BBC can find hard to reach, from our biggest Mela (105,000 Bengali's at the Baishakhi Mela in Tower Hamlets) to the smallest (15,000 predominantly Pakistani audience in Oldham). We have seen Sikh bagpipers in Glasgow and met Gujarati community groups in Leicester. We know this audience.

But it's London Mela which really embodies the purpose of the BBC Asian Network more than any other, and it's a truly stand-out event for the station and the BBC.

The idea behind our London Mela activity is a simple one. BBC Asian Network hosts and programmes a distinct zone in each quadrant across the site. The Main Stage features the best in popular Asian artists for a broad family audience (from Mumzy to Bollywood star Javed Ali) hosted by presenters including Murtz and Noreen Khan while the legendary Asian Network Mix Tent plays host to Nihal and our Specialist DJ line-up.

Asian Network's Mix Tent is a powerful magnet for young Asians and their non-Asian peers.

I watched from the sides as DJ Kayper and Panjabi Hit Squad cut-up Bhangra with Tinie Tempah's 'Pass Out' and was reminded of the importance of the BBC staying connected with this hardest to reach of audiences. We are the only radio station in the UK with a commitment to British-Asian music. And we do it so well that even Tim Westwood and Grime MC JME arrived to pay their respects alongside Panjabi MC in blessing our stage and the Asian audience.

I always take time to scan You Tube after an event to see our BBC activity as viewed from the smart-phone perspective of an audience member or DJ. This is a raw but incredible piece of footage showing the audience in a hot and rammed to capacity Mix Tent. I think it's a sight to behold.

But that's not all we do.

We raise the quality of BBC involvement through collaboration, teaming up with BBC London on the 'In Conversation Tent' featuring in depth interviews with musicians and politicians, and with the inaugural BBC Introducing stage. Bobby Friction hosted the first platform dedicated to new British-Asian talent, including several Artists pulled up through our Sony Award winning Friction show. Here's the evidence in action - by providing these platforms and spaces the BBC acts as a creative catalyst for young Asian talent.

We are also reminded that BBC Asian Network connects a national Asian community by our Planes, Trains & Rickshaws challenge. Our presenter Wax managed to attend three Melas in less than 12 hours as he joined London with station activity in Cardiff and Edinburgh (both Mela's happened on the same day) and our Live Broadcast tracked his journey throughout the day.

Almost every inch of this sophisticated platform is supported by our Interactive team - with a live webcast of the main stage, photo galleries updated and a #bbcasiannetwork twitter feed following the day as it happened. Highlights in all areas are filmed for next week's 'A Summer Of Melas' Red Button programme. Asian Network News are out in the field with the audience and backstage with the stars.

Rewind back to Sunday evening. I'm by the mixing desks at front of house as our nine-hour Live Broadcast comes to a close backstage and watch the crowds filter through the ranks of Samosa-walleh and Kulfi ice cream vendors towards the car park, hopefully switching on in-car DAB radios to catch BBC highlights of their day. I'm mindful of the fact that the majority of the 92,000 audience won't be able to listen.

British-Asians are less likely to own a DAB Radio than the rest of the UK population. And more than half of the British-Asian population live in London. Re-tuning analogue Asians into digital desis has been a major challenge since Asian Network launched as a digital station in 2002.

I reflect on the reality that this amazing day sits against a backdrop of strategic transition for BBC Asian Network which aims to tackle these platform issues. But I am incredibly encouraged by what I have witnessed this summer.

Watch live performances from Asian Network's London Mela and the rest of our 'A Summer Of Melas'.



Mark Strippel is Head of Music & Events, BBC Asian Network

•  Watch a summer of Mela highlights from 16 August
  
  

• Check out all the action from the London Mela at the Asian Network website

• What is a Mela?

• Read more about the BBC's 2010 RAJAR figures on the Press Office website
  
  

• Visit the RAJAR website