“It evokes memories; it takes you back to a particular place and point in time” — how archive footage transformed the Scotland’s Game TV series

By Neil Sargent, Archive Researcher

I spent almost a year going through the BBC archives and numerous other commercial resources to source material from the last 30 years of Scottish football for Scotland’s Game.

How I got involved

My background is actually quite diverse, which I think is really important for anybody wanting to get on in the media these days.

I did my undergraduate degree in history and then worked for several years as a writer, media manager and edit producer before going back to university to do a Masters in Digital Journalism.

Since then, I have worked as a journalist on a freelance basis, as well as managing the football archives for various well-known media organisations. When the BBC advertised for an archive researcher for Scotland’s Game, it was a no-brainer for me to go for it: there aren’t many jobs that combine history, football and journalism.

I was lucky enough to get the job in October 2015 and it was a great project to work on.

Broadly speaking, the series covers the last 30 years in Scottish football, which is a huge period of time to cover when you think of all the stories that have unfolded during that era: the Souness revolution at Rangers; Maurice Johnston’s signing; the financial troubles at Celtic, Hearts, Gretna, Motherwell and Rangers; the abuse suffered by Neil Lennon; and the decline of the Scottish national team, to name but a few.

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It’s really important that the archive researcher knows these stories and the characters involved inside and out, because my job is to find footage that can tell the story and bring it to life on screen.

In some cases, we were telling stories that unfolded over many years in the space of just a few minutes, so there are months of work involved in painting a sequence with archive footage that appears for just a few moments on screen.

You also have to bear in mind that, the further back in time you go, the harder the footage becomes to locate — archive catalogues get sketchier, tapes might be lost, damaged or misfiled, or, in extreme cases, the footage might have been wiped by someone who didn’t appreciate its value at the time.

Just look at other BBC productions like Dad’s Army and Morecombe and Wise, for example — episodes of which remain lost to this day. A lot of work goes into locating footage, watching it, logging it, digitising it and making it available to the production team in the edits.

Sometimes, I also had to find material at short notice for the production team, which can prove to be a challenge.

As an archive researcher it is your dream to find material that doesn't just add to a story but actually creates one.

Early on in the production I found material relating to Wallace Mercer’s attempted takeover of Hibernian in the 1990s.

Even for a self-confessed football anorak like me, it was a story that I didn’t know too much about, but thanks to a couple of superb but little-known documentaries made by the late George Hume, we were able to mine some phenomenal footage and bring the story to life again for a whole new audience.

We also struggled to find the entire match of Wales v Scotland from 1985 when Jock Stein died, as almost all of the broadcasters have deleted the match footage, but kept the news story.

We eventually found a copy of the game on DVD on eBay.

It’s remarkable how many myths and rumours have grown up over the years and become accepted as fact but, when you subject them to scrutiny, you realise that the facts don’t quite support the assertions.

We also made use of a large number of newspaper headlines in the series, and this involved spending hours in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, trawling through microfiche archives trying to find the stories that we needed to illustrate particular events.

It’s a painstaking process, but the results on screen are great and makes it all worthwhile.

We also made extensive use of photographs, which are scattered across lots of different picture agencies, with different owners and rights issues associated with them — so the archivist has to source the photos, clear them for use on television and make sure the appropriate payments are made to the copyright holders.

Scotland’s Game is a history programme, so the archive is absolutely crucial.

I’d go as far as saying that, without the archive, you wouldn’t have a programme — it would just be a series of talking heads. You could have the most interesting contributors in the world but, without colourful and rich archive footage, the stories lack depth and would quickly become boring.

Archive footage evokes memories: it takes you back to a particular place and point in time and it tells the story in a way that words never could.

They say that a picture paints a thousand words. I wouldn’t disagree with that.