Archives for February 2011

Tim Davie, Director of Audio & Music talks about the announcement that Radio 3 will broadcast live concerts every weekday for 46 weeks of the year

"It is rare that passionate radio listeners overwhelmingly and immediately support the scheduling changes that we make to a well-loved BBC radio station. However, having just announced that Radio 3 will broadcast live concerts every weekday at 7.30 p.m. for 46 weeks of the year, the reaction has been almost universally positive. It is welcome news for UK performing groups and listeners who will enjoy an invitation to so many outstanding classical performances. What is perhaps less apparent is that it represents a deliberate move across BBC radio to keep building the percentage of live output that we air on our stations."

You can read the rest of Tim's post and comment on the Radio 3 blog.

Bridget Middleton is Editor of About the BBC

A new feature, launched today, will help you find programmes on BBC iPlayer from other broadcasters and on demand content providers.

Paul Clark, Executive Product Manager for BBC Future Media & Technology, says: "Given the popularity of BBC iPlayer, we hope this feature will support fellow broadcasters and boost the overall uptake of video on demand.

"Most importantly, by helping audiences uncover great digital services that exist elsewhere on the web, we believe we're performing an important public service."

You can read Paul's post in full and comment on the Internet Blog.

Elizabeth R hit the BBC airwaves 40 years ago on 17 Feb 1971. It followed of course the huge success of The Six Wives of Henry VIII a year earlier, and adopted the same prize-winning formula: six different screenwriters each taking a different slice of the monarch’s life and each writing a 90-minute drama. It capitalised on the new arrival of glorious colour TV, and it was of course graced at its centre by the towering performance of Glenda Jackson as The Virgin Queen (hear her talk about preparing for the role here).

In retrospect, her subsequent career in politics does not seem strange at all. She had after all learnt her script from one of its greatest exponents!

Elizabeth R consolidated too Britain’s enduring love affair with the Tudors: on TV, film, in museums and galleries, at the heart of the school curriculum. As if our nation history blazed only in a few moments of memorability: The Tudors, The Civil War, Victoria and the Empire, and WW2. The rest is a vague fog.

Surprising therefore that in a recent survey of TV costume drama by BBC History Magazine, readers voted the Tudors (in all its varied dramatic manifestations) surprisingly low in its poll. Top of the tree was Pride & Prejudice – Colin Firth (the non-stuttering version) bending out of surly Darcy pride to woo the independently spirited Lizzie Bennett (Jennifer Ehle) was a predictable number one (though not strictly historical drama). The Tudors (2007 version) came in at number 15, with Elizabeth R and Six Wives of Henry VIII at 18 and 17 respectively.

Ahead of them was the early 20th century cohort: Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs, and the late 19th century depiction of village life, Cranford. As if, faced by austerity Britain, we prefer to flee to a more ordered world of social hierarchy and bonnet dress codes. You know where you are in a good bonnet!

Not that the real world of costume drama is necessarily easy. In 1971 Glenda Jackson endured physical agonies with costumes that were so heavily padded she had trouble breathing and was unable to bend her arms. Some were also so heavy that she had to remain seated, others so big she had trouble walking through doors. And that was after she had already spent six hours in make up and prosthetics ageing herself up for the later programmes.

It makes a life in politics seem positively pain-free!

Robert Seatter is Head of BBC History

• The BBC Story

Phil Buckley, Portfolio and Product Manager for BBC Children's and BBC Future Media & Technology chronicles the history of the CBBC website since its inception in 1995.

"Last week, one section of the CBBC website was relaunched in a radically improved and more easily navigable format, so I'd like to explain what it is that we have done and how we got to where we are.

The first CBBC website

The first incarnation of the CBBC website appeared back in 1995: in this video you can see it being introduced by Toby Anstis. The world was a different place back then, and I should warn you that statistically 3.4 of you will actually die laughing while watching this, so please view with assistance nearby. "

You can read Phil's post in full and comment on the Internet Blog.

Something happened today that should interest anyone who thinks the BBC's archives should be more easily accessible.

Alongside the BBC Trust's announcements about the Service Licence reviews of Radio 3 and Radio 4 came a new approval: an amendment to those two networks' Service Licences – and that of BBC Four – that allows all three the ability to offer programming on-demand for an unlimited period after broadcast. There'll also be an amendment to BBC Online's licence to reflect the new permissions.

What it means is that BBC for the first time has a clear, defined remit to start building a 'permanent collection' of some of its best programmes for free online access by anyone in the UK now and in the future.

That word 'defined' is important: this isn't about all programmes, on all channels. Many of the BBC's most commercially popular titles and archive classics are of course available on DVD, or via pay-TV channels or paid downloads, and long may they continue to be so.

But today's announcement confirms that in the online age the task of making more of the wealth of its fantastic archives easily accessible to audiences is an inseparable part of the BBC's mission as a public service broadcaster. That's why the new vision for BBC Online which we announced last week put archive discovery at the heart of its design.

It's also why we've chosen these three much-loved networks and channels to shape the offer. All three are well-known to their audiences for their intelligent use of material from the archives, whether it's Radio 4's Archive Hour linking past and present with topical acuity (can't wait to hear their Rupert Murdoch birthday celebration scheduled for 8th March), or BBC Four, with its smart scheduling of archive rarities alongside its highest-profile new shows. Who'd have imagined that a 1963 episode of This is Your Life with Hattie Jacques would grab 1.2 million viewers when it was shown last month?



So how would it all work? Luckily you don't have to look far or wait long to get a sense of the possibilities.

Tomorrow night BBC Four launch their Focus on Sculpture season, coinciding with a big new exhibition of British sculpture at the Royal Academy in London. It's a great example of how they're already experimenting with using collections of online and on-demand archive to support some of their theme seasons and big broadcast events. 

Press Red Button on digital TV any time during the season and you'll be offered a curated selection of relevant archive content, starting with BBC Two's 1998 Henry Moore biography Carving a Reputation. Go to BBC Online's Archive website and you'll find a collection of newly-cleared and digitised sculpture programming that's been put together to enhance the season. And if you go along in person to the Royal Academy itself any Friday evening for the next two months you can see BBC archive highlights on the big screen – a classic case of how a more open approach to the archive stimulates new kinds of partnerships, to everyone's benefit.

At the moment these are all relatively separate experiences, especially online – you have to put in quite a lot of work to make the connections. But as we build the new-look BBC Online you'll gradually see the currently separate websites for iPlayer, TV channels, programmes and archive coming together into a single environment that's simple to explore and enjoy. And on internet-connected TVs we intend to make it as easy as possible to switch from live viewing of BBC Four to a menu of relevant on-demand archive, ready to play on your main TV screen.

For the two radio networks the basic principles are the same but the editorial experience will be more focussed on favourite long-running strands. Radio 4's In Our Time has led the way – the whole back-catalogue of the series is already available on-demand and every new episode enriches the mix. Expect to see more on BBC Radio's archive plans from Tim Davie and his team in due course.

These channel and network brands will act as the gateway to the permanent collection and will bring all their editorial flair to the task of selecting what goes into it. But that's just the beginning of the story. 

Once published every one of these programmes will become part of a standing resource at the heart of BBC Online, linkable to by others inside and outside the BBC, re-usable by future producers and editors for new propositions as yet undreamt of, and discoverable through open search by anyone pursuing an interest in the topic of the programme. And as media becomes ever more social, individuals will find their own personal treasures in the collection, and popularise them among their friends and networks.

The current Archive website will remain live while content is migrated into the new TV & iPlayer and Radio & Music products on BBC Online. The wealth and range of what's already been built up over the last few years – cleared and selected within the limited permissions and rights frameworks we've had to date – is a tribute to the pioneering work of Julie Rowbotham and her team. They've laid the groundwork for the exciting possibilities that lie ahead.

In Putting Quality First last year we set out a vision of "opening the BBC's current and future programme library", with a permanent archive of BBC programming available online "as part of a large and growing set of public archives made available by UK institutions." As of today we have the green light to start making that vision a reality.

Roly Keating is the Director of Archive Content

I had the good fortune to be back in my home city of Bristol this week to see the launch of a new BBC outreach project Live In and Live On. We do many different projects across the country with young and older people but less common is combining the two. This is exactly what Live In and Live On is doing by bringing a group of elderly residents from the Easton area of the city into conversation with a group of twenty or so young people, most of whom have newly arrived in Easton, some the children of asylum seekers and all of whom do not have English as their main language.

It was particularly fascinating to hear some of the parallels between today’s generation arriving in a new country and the experiences of immigrants arriving in Bristol in the 1950’s & 60’s.

Communications abroad to relatives and friends was and is still very important. But whereas the older generation had to wait weeks for the post, today emails and the internet have transformed the time such contact takes. And the BBC of course is constantly seeking to helps all sorts of people make the most of changing technology.

At this opening session the young people showed a film that some of them had made about the problem of modern day racism. Sadly a not so different experience to the older people’s accounts of 50 years ago when hospital patients would sometimes ask a black nurse not to touch them or white people would move on the bus if a black person sat next to them.

This particular project has an extra ingredient. Local artists involved with sculpture, pottery, photography, painting and ceramics will be working with the children to interpret the older generation’s personal stories into pieces of art. It promises to be quite an experience and challenge for all involved.

This type of project gets the BBC right into the heart of local communities, getting to people that our broadcasts don’t easily reach. In turn projects also inform our own staff and often lead to great new content for online, radio or television. I’ll be watching closely to see how this works out and I’ll be returning to Bristol on Saturday 2 April to see the artwork exhibited at the Easton Community Centre.

Alec McGivan is the Head of BBC Outreach

More about BBC Outreach

Like many jobs in media, journalism can be difficult to break into, especially for young people who don’t have the advantage of having 'a foot in the door' of the industry. That's why the BBC's Connect & Create programme runs Step Up, an annual scheme that supports budding journalists by giving them skills in news production, right in the heart of BBC newsrooms. The scheme runs in London and Glasgow and just launched in Manchester at the end of last year. 

The aim is simple: Give 15 trainees the skills they need to find and report news stories from their own local communities. Then support them as they do this in a professional news environment. The result is a network of community journalists who can take their skills on with them into other journalistic work, whether that’s with the BBC, with other broadcasters or with local community news projects.

The Connect & Create team love running Step Up, not just because of the insightful stories that the Step Up-ers manage to find, but because of the support networks that grow out of putting such a diverse and enthusiastic bunch of people together over a 10 week period. 

Past Step Up trainees often tell us that the scheme launched new opportunities for them, mostly because of the other people they met along the way. Rob Carroll, a student from Salford whose TV report was broadcast on North West Tonight, says: "The experience I've picked up on this course will stay with me forever, I can do anything with it."

In 2011 we are running Step Up in London, Glasgow, Newcastle and Media City in Manchester.

Glynn Ryland is the Manager of BBC Connect & Create

You can find out more about Connect & Create on the BBC Outreach website.