A trip into the BBC's picture archive for a special radio anniversary

The 30th September 2017 marks the 50-year anniversary of Radio 1, 2, 3 and 4 playing concurrently across the UK airwaves. The BBC’s Photo Library has put together a special collection of stills in anticipation, to represent the scope of BBC radio imagery from the very beginning, right through to the present day.

The Photo Archive itself consists of in excess of six million photos dating back to 1922. A large number of these are publicity images relating to BBC broadcasting output and the history of the corporation itself. The Photos team has delved into the vaults to pick some of the rare pictures, to produce a set of the most interesting photographic finds in the Archive depicting BBC radio.

Much of what was found has not been seen since it was first taken. The photos were originally used to publicise radio and television programmes and were then archived for both posterity and future re-use. While there is always a demand for some of the more popular photos from top BBC shows, most photos in the collection will be kept in the vault until they are requested or digitised as part of a project. The Photo team was reorganised and expanded in April with a renewed mission to re-discover underused images through collection-building and increase proactive conservation work.

In order to find these photos the team used a range of research tools such as a hand-written card catalogue, and online resources including BBC Genome. From the information gathered we searched by year or programme title in the hard copy collection of photos. The collection has been accessioned using different filing systems over the decades, and is held in different formats such as colour transparency or black and white negative.

One challenge in this case was the sheer volume of material to look through in the time available. Some material from certain dates is not catalogued at all, so staff did not always know what they would find until they went into the vault and looked on the shelves. This certainly made for interesting work.

The wider collection is currently being used across the BBC to celebrate this anniversary, but here are twelve of our favourites, selected especially for the BBC Genome blog...

Two of the band members for little-known band Amboy Dukes performing at the Radio 1 Club, which was on the air live every weekday. We believe this broadcast took place at Maida Vale Studios…

The archive has plenty of photos dating back to the early days of broadcasting that show sound effects being made for radio. It’s not just the actors who make radio special, Here, the studio manager goes the extra mile to provide bathing sounds for Kama, or The Third Way... The actors are Jan Edwards, Janette Richer, Pauline Letts and Hilda Kriseman. 

Producer Charles Lefeaux with members of the cast of The Quarter Million Boys, a play by South African author William "Bloke" Modisane, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 1969. The author, who also plays Caiaphas, is seen on the right.

BBC Radio 4 broadcast an all-night programme of Election Results from 1970 and this photo depicts a general view of the special editorial area for Radio 4. The programme ran live until 4am. The clock reads 1am... only 3 hours to go. 

It’s always nice to find a well-known actor appearing in an early BBC production and in the Archive we have some wonderful examples of portrait photography, this photo combines both. This production of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd also starred Patrick Mower. 

This picture shows Dame Sybil Thorndike recording The Evening is Calm at her home. She was 93 years old and returning to radio for her first acting role for nearly three years. The title of the play gives a poetic and moving picture of life in a Norwegian Old People's Home and Thorndike masterfully brought to life the character Tilde Lund. In the background you can see the sounds engineer at work, what a huge responsibility he had.

This is one of our favourite finds. Andrew Sachs, author and star of "The Revenge" the first play for radio without words, is seen emerging from a river, having recorded an underwater sequence for the play, in his hand you will see a special "binaural-stereo" microphone used for underwater recording. The team was intrigued by the idea of a play for radio without words, not to mention the lengths gone to by Andrew Sachs to record the noises on location. 

Here we see Producer John Theocharis presenting a cassette recording of Outside the Jeweller's to the Pope John Paul II - neatly wrapped in striped paper. The Pope in the late 1950s wrote a play called The Jeweller's Shop, on which this production was based. 

This striking image caught our eye, the photographer was there to capture the disc jockeys and live acts, for a moment they turned their attention to the teenagers waiting for Take That and delivered one of our favourite images of the roadshow in 1992.

We looked for something less obvious than the posed shots that are often used for publicity. This behind-the-scenes image of Radio 3's Hamlet in 1999 gives a glimpse of how a radio drama is recorded. Madia Vale has been used to record many radio dramas, it’s not all rock'n'roll!

Many people may not realise that this series started life back in 2000 on Radio 4, before it was commissioned for television. The billing promised a sketch show that would "take a look at life in Britain in the new millennium by following the lives of some less than ordinary folk".