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The Listeners' Archive

2012-11-15T15:52:09+00:00

Thank you to everyone who contributed to Wednesday's first programme from the Listeners' Archive. Your recordings meant that on the BBC's 90th anniversary, we were able to hear previously lost radio moments - from Skiffle Club and Music While You Work (the picture above shows Mr Wynford Reynolds on a factory visit for Music While You Work from 1942) on the Light Programme in the 1950s, to Chris Evans' first show on Radio 1 in 1995, via appearances from legends such as Jack Jackson, John Dunn, Kenny Everett, Tony Blackburn, and John Peel.

Our thanks go to everyone who sent in audio - and in particular to listeners Charles Wright, Kay Vere, Alan Hyde, Mick Freed, David Roberts, Brian Field, and Colin Smith. Also thank you to our experts and collectors: Paul Wilson from the British Library Sound Archive, David Lloyd, Graeme Stevenson from the Old Time Radio Show Collectors Association, and Brian Reynolds of the Masters of Melody website.

We're still sifting through contributions and digitising audio, and will start returning tapes in the next couple of weeks. In the coming months, we hope to make more programmes from the great material you've told us you've got and/or already sent us, and if you have recordings we might be interested in, do let us know, at listenersarchive@bbc.co.uk or via Twitter @BBCListeners.

We still have one more fascinating programme made from your C60s and C90s; its producer, Heather Davies, tells us more:

'On the up-coming Cassette Edit of the Listeners' Archive (Sunday 18 November 12 noon, BBC 6 Music) Steve Lamacq will be opening the doors on his own private collection, which includes the very first interview and BBC session from a new band who would come to define the next decade of music, but who in 1999 hadn't left university yet... a new band called Coldplay.

In the thought-to-be-lost interview, a young Chris Martin tells how the band came to be, and how they left a copy of their first single in Lamacq's pigeon-hole, but that somehow no-one picked it up. After such an inauspicious start, Lamacq went on to see them play a small gig, attended (by their own admission!) mostly by their friends. Lamacq was so impressed that he then invited them in for their first session for the BBC, and he enjoyed the show so much, he later recorded it over a promo cassette to preserve the session in perpetuity. In the programme Lamacq talks about how strange it is to hear the show back: "I don’t think they’ve changed that much as a band. The music is probably more ambitious now, but as people, they still have that mix of self-deprecation and a rather cheeky sense of humour".

The show also features previously lost archive from Pink Floyd, Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney and a young Gideon Coe who joins Lamacq in the studio.'

Will Jackson is the project manager for the Listeners' Archive

Do you have any of the lost editions of Letter from America?

2012-10-18T11:27:53+00:00

Alistair Cooke, presenter of Letter from America, in 1946

(Ed's update 31/10/12: The Letter from America archive is now live and you can find it here - PM)

This November the BBC will be launching an online collection of 920 episodes of Letter from America, the weekly 15 minute programme written and presented by journalist and broadcaster Alistair Cooke. You’ll able to listen online or download these to play whenever you want.

Letter from America ran from 24 March 1946 to 20 February 2004 making it the longest-running speech radio programme in history. There were 2,869 episodes of Letter from America broadcast but there are huge gaps in the archive. In the early days the script was saved rather than a tape of the programme. The Letter from America covering the assassination of J F Kennedy is saved but, for example, the Bay of Pigs is missing.

Paddy O'Connell and the Broadcasting House team would love to hear from any listeners who recorded editions of Letter from America during the 1940s, '50s and '60s. If you were an avid listener who preserved one of these programmes do get in touch with the BH team via the form on the website.

(NB: In the 1990s many of the earlier historic episodes were re-recorded for commercial release - for this project BH are only looking for recordings made at the time of the original broadcast.)

New link: The Letter from America archive
Guardian: Radio 4 to embrace online future by unlocking its past
BBC Media Centre: Major new online archive of Alistair Cooke’s Letters From America to mark BBC Radio’s 90th birthday
BBC Radio at 90: The Listeners' Archive
Radio Reunited: BBC Radio at 90

The Listeners' Archive appeal: an update

2012-10-02T13:45:31+00:00

George Orwell at the BBC, 1943

We’ve had a great response to our initial blog about The Listeners’ Archive, with plenty of offers of reels and cassettes via Twitter @BBCListeners. There are some great programme recordings out there, from Billy Cotton’s Band Show and Music While You Work, to Junior Choice and Alan Freeman.

They’re held by people who may just have taped one show they loved, to enthusiasts who have amassed amazing collections that form mini-archives in themselves. We’ll be talking to them as many of them as possible to collect material for our programmes, and to record the stories behind the recordings.

The other side of the project is getting to grips with what might be useful for the BBC to hold. We’ve been working with programme makers and archivists to draw up a list of particular requirements.

We’ve also heard from listeners about programmes they’d just like to hear again. The list is a work in progress, and will constantly evolve, as gaps are filled and new requests arise. It ranges from individual performers, to broad genres. And this is where you come in. We’re hoping someone pressed “record” on any of these, in any format, and that it might be gathering dust in a loft or cupboard somewhere in the UK. Some of the things we're looking for (See below for a more detailed list):

We’re keen to find music sessions from high-profile artists and comedy programmes from before 1990.
Drama series are also in demand, from Mrs Dale’s Diary and Waggoners Walk, to The Archers from 1948-1959 and 1969-1987, when there aren’t complete runs in the archive.
We’ve learned there’s very little held in the archive on “women’s lib” from the 1970s.
We also want BBC appearances from George Orwell, Richard Burton and Dylan Thomas, and Reith Lectures from the 1950s.
Plus we’re looking for recordings of regular live programming that captures the sound of a generation, but that may not have been considered important at the time – magazine programmes or DJ-presented shows from pre-2000. We’d love to hear, for example, Mike Read on Radio 1 talking about Frankie Goes To Hollywood!

Blow the dust off the recording and bring it along to one of our Open Days on Thursday 11th October – (see below for a list of venues).

And in the meantime, if you have any recordings in any format that you think we might be interested in, let us have the details now - we’re on twitter @BBCListeners or email listenersarchive@bbc.co.uk. Please don’t send any audio to us at this stage – we want to check first whether it’s already in the archive.

Places to bring your tapes on Thursday 11 October, between 9am and 5pm:

BBC Radio 2, Western House, 99 Great Portland Street, London, W1W 7NY
BBC Radio Ulster, Belfast
BBC Radio WM, Birmingham
BBC Radio Bristol
BBC Radio Wales, Cardiff
BBC Radio Foyle, Derry/Londonderry
BBC Radio Leeds
BBC Radio Newcastle
BBC Radio Norfolk, Norwich
BBC Radio Nottingham
BBC Radio Sheffield
BBC Radio Solent, Southampton
BBC Radio York

Your recordings will be returned to the location where they were deposited; alternatively, please supply a self-addressed envelope with appropriate postage.

And here are those programmes and genres that we're particularly looking for:

Pre-1990 music sessions (i.e. BBC recorded music performances) in particular, high-profile artists.
Pre-1990 comedy programmes. For example, Hancock and Goon Shows all have missing episodes from the early series.
Pre-1990 drama and readings. Examples would include The Archers from 1950-1959 and from 1969-1987, periods where there are not complete runs.
Pre-1982 news bulletins.
Pre-2000 live presented DJ programmes and magazines – the daily mainstream output of networks.
BBC appearances by Dylan Thomas
BBC appearances by Richard Burton
BBC appearances by George Orwell
Interviews with Alma Cogan
First BBC appearances by Petula Clark
Coverage of “women’s lib” in 1970s
Mike Read's “ban” of Frankie Goes To Hollywood: Relax – Radio 1
Waggoners Walk – Radio 2 soap 1969-80
Mrs Dale's Diary - Light Programme drama serial, 1948-67
Family Favourites
Midday Spin
Music While You Work 1940-67
Pick of the Pops 1955-72
Saturday Club 1957-69
Easy Beat 1960-67
Housewives Choice 1946-67
Top Gear (radio show - BBC Light Programme/Radio 1)
Junior Choice
Derek Jameson, Radio 2
Kenny Everett
Alan Freeman
Emperor Rosko
Out On Blue Six – Mark Radcliffe, Radio 1
Reith Lectures: 1949 Robert Birley; 1950 John Zachary Young; 1953 Robert Oppenheimer; 1956 Edward Appleton; 1957 George Kennan; 1958 Bernard Lovell; 1959 Peter Medawar; 1967 JK Galbraith

(Update - some new wants added 10/10/2012):

Desert Island Discs, first edition with Vic Oliver, which was recorded by Roy Plomley - 29 January 1942.
The Archers: The wedding of Phil and Jill: 16/11/57 - they were married on a Saturday - two episodes on Friday 15th and Monday 18th
The Archers: The Queen’s coronation 03/06/1953 - there wasn’t a programme on the actual day – 2nd June.
The Archers: Birth of Shula and Kenton: 08/08/1958
The Archers: Jennifer tells her parents she is pregnant: 17/01/1967
The Archers: The wedding of Pat and Tony: 12/12/1974
Radio Ulster’s first day of broadcast - 1975
Radio Ulster: first “Talkback”
Radio Ulster: first Stephen Nolan show
Radio Ulster or Radio Foyle: first Gerry Anderson show
Radio Ulster: first Hugo Duncan show,
Radio Ulster: “McCooeys” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00dgyxx)
Appearances by JC Beckett – in particular, his history series “Ulster Since 1800”
Appearances by Tyrone Guthrie or Richard Hayward

Read BBC Radio at 90: The Listeners' Archive on the Radio Blog and Radio Reunited: Marking 90 years of radio on the BBC Mediacentre website for more information on BBC Radio at 90

An Archive for the Future

2011-11-04T19:05:00+00:00

The Science Explorer from BBC Radio 4

The Radio Festival which was held this week in Salford is the annual event where the Radio Industry gathers both to celebrate what we do and to look at where the Radio world is heading. In his keynote speech the BBC Director General Mark Thompson explained our plans to make a huge archive of speech radio available as part of our online Radio product.

The scale of the task is almost infinite. Our ambition is similarly big. Users should be able to find the highest quality BBC audio on any subject or about any person or place in which they are interested. They may go there out of commitment to a particular programme they know and love or they may find the audio via a search engine or another part of the BBC Website and be introduced to the riches of BBC Radio that they may never have encountered before. So my job along with others is to set some priorities and keep the ball rolling.

There is more to this than digging out a number of rather dusty old programmes and add an archive nostalgia corner to our website. As my former colleague Sue MacGregor reminds us in the Daily Telegraph today there are some gems that we must try to surface. However to focus only on these is to miss a bigger opportunity. The archive of speech radio must be of wide contemporary interest and will be at the very heart of our online offer. We must also ensure relevant programmes and extracts can be found easily by existing and new radio audiences.

We have already started the work. Over 20 hours of each week's Radio 4 output is added to the archive. We are also going back from the current schedule to build collections of the most relevant, useful, educational speech radio content that will supplement our current programming or agenda. Listeners inspired by Jim Al-Khalili's Life Scientific on Tuesday mornings can explore many more of the themes by listening to hundreds of archive programmes gathered in Radio 4's Science Explorer. Later this year a further 500 editions of Desert Island Discs going back to 1987 will be available as streams or downloads.

Radio 3's archive enables us to build a comprehensive audio guide to the world of classical music. We began with the Proms this summer where concert information was linked to relevant editions of Composer of the Week or Discovering Music. The site attracted record numbers of users. Look out for more of the same in the Symphony project which has started this week.

Radio 4's programme brands remain a significant point of entry to our sites and our content for many users. They are still a rich seam for us to mine. For example, we have presented archive items from Woman's Hour since the very beginning of the Radio 4 website. We know there is huge potential in that programmes' archive of encounters with a vast number of the great women of the last 60 years.

Archive underpins much of the wider BBC's online ambition so the radio archive will also be reached by journeys across the whole of BBC online. The content will also be a key element of future public service partnerships. All this will make radio bigger and more relevant than ever in the digital world. Making that archive portable via downloads that can be consumed on all devices is an essential requirement.

We know we are onto something exciting here from the way our archives are appreciated now. On air Radio 4 Extra has more listeners than any other BBC Digital only network and online there are more than 2 million requests every month for audio on demand. That is the second highest amount after Radio 4 itself. Only a month has past since we made the entire In Our Time archive available as downloads or podcasts and over 1 million editions have been downloaded. There have been over 5 million downloads of editions of Desert Island Discs since we launched the archive 5 months ago. The Reith Lecture Archive which goes back to 1948 has had almost a million downloads. There is lots more detail to come and I will keep you up to date on our progress here and on the BBC Radio 4 blog.

Andrew Caspari is Head of Speech Radio and Classical Music, Interactive

The Specialist Classical Chart Podcast is back - this time for good!

2011-08-02T15:45:00+00:00

One of my recent joys working on our interactive services for BBC Radio has been receiving our monthly figures for downloads and podcasts from our site. Last month listeners successfully put 14.8 million downloads on their PCs or mobile devices.

That's up from 9.8 million in July last year. One of the reasons for the increase is the boost in the number of speech programmes we can now offer. The recent release of 500 editions of Desert Island Discs and the archive of the Reith Lectures has proved very popular. Podcasting is a great way to build up your own collection of programmes to enjoy whenever and wherever you want!

And although we have done great things with speech content, it's not been so straightforward with music in podcasts. So I'm really pleased to say that, as of today, we're bringing back a podcast which should appeal especially to classical music fans.

Although to date we've released many podcasts containing the speech content of classical music programmes, such as Composer of the Week, we've not been able to include longer extracts of classical music. That's because we don't have the rights or the permission to do this, and the BBC has been wary of doing anything that might adversely affect the commercial classical music industry.

But now, something has changed. Working with the BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) earlier this year we tested a podcast of the segment of Radio 3 Breakfast that covers the Specialist Classical Music Chart every Tuesday morning. This includes a number of excerpts of music from the chart, each of which can be up to 9 minutes long.

The audience seemed to like the offer.

What's more, any fears that it might discourage people from buying classical music or listening to live radio proved unfounded. In fact nearly 25% of those who listened to the podcast said they were inspired to listen to more live radio, whilst 70% said they were listening to the same amount (eDigital Research for the BBC). 80% of listeners said the podcast had introduced them to music they had not heard before. Good news for the music industry came with the finding that 25% of listeners to the chart podcast had purchased classical music as a result. The BPI's classical committee is pleased with the outcome, saying the podcast supports the work to "...obtain a wider audience for the specialist classical chart and for serious classical music in general". So, all in all the trial was a success.

Now the BBC Trust has agreed to a change in the Radio 3 service licence to allow the Specialist Classical Music Chart to become a permanent offer from the BBC. The podcast is back from today, and you can download it here. As a distinctly average guitarist, I'm delighted that a classical guitar release is top of the chart at the moment, so I hope an extract of the number one is included.

Andrew Caspari is BBC Head of Speech Radio and Classical Music, Interactive

The picture (from 1970) shows "Otto Klemperer who celebrated the bi-centenary of Beethoven's birth by conducting his nine symphonies in sequence with the New Philharmonic Orchestra".

A record month for Audio and Music's websites

2011-05-09T16:40:00+00:00

Following the headlines in March's iPlayer stats pack that we published last month, I wanted to share some more details and insights about BBC Network Radio's interactive performance, as it was a record month for us. They say events drive reach, and plenty happened on the Radio websites in March that helps prove the adage. Reach to all BBC Radio sites hit 3.7 million average weekly unique browsers*. And if you factor in A&M's music and events websites, such as Music and Radio 1's Big Weekend, we recorded an overall reach for all BBC Audio and Music sites of 4.3 million UK average weekly unique browsers. That's an all-time high for us.

Online interest in Chris Moyles' marathon 52-hour broadcast for Comic Relief was a big part of this, pushing traffic to the Radio 1 site to a record 2.4m average weekly UK unique browsers. Live footage from the studio, carried on the Red Button, attracted 2.84 million viewers. And then there was Fearne Cotton. Her offer to appear in a swimsuit if the total raised by Moyles topped Â£2 million caused a surge of traffic that helped crash the Radio 1 site for a brief time. So, events do drive reach, and we've learnt some useful lessons there about capacity planning. On top of this, there have been about half a million clicks to view the section of the programme again via the website, and at Radio 1's official channel on YouTube.

We've had a superb month for live online listening. And although live listening via the internet still accounts for a relatively small amount of all digital consumption, we know people find it convenient to stream radio at their desks: compared to consumption via analogue platforms, online radio listening doesn't fall away so dramatically after radio's 'usual' breakfast time peak. In March, we recorded 29 million requests for live streams, 18% up on this time last year. Record performances across BBC network radio contributed to this, including 5 live sports extra, which nabbed 1.3m live stream requests for its World Cup Cricket coverage. Did I say... events drive reach?

We broke more records with our podcasts, delivering 12.3m successful downloads to UK subscribers in March. The Archers topped the list of our daily podcasts, with Scott Mills in second place. Interestingly, although Radio 4's landmark series A History of the World in 100 Objects ended last autumn, its podcasts remain popular enough to make it the 5th most popular daily podcast title in March. This is evidence of the demand there is for making podcasts available for longerÂ and of the public value we can create by opening up the archive. First indications from the Desert Island Discs archive are also very encouraging. I've just had a first sight of April's podcast results - they're looking equally promising, including several hundred thousand successful downloads of our Royal Wedding 2011 podcast. This included a lot of interest from users in English-speaking countries around the world such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. It's another good example of how events drive reach.

A final, encouraging thing to note is the steady growth in reach to A&M's websites optimised for mobile devices. We've done a lot of work over the past 2 years to improve the usability of those sites, including automatically tweaking the pages to suit the device in question, and adding the ability to stream live radio for many devices. Devices are becoming easier to use too, and the performance since the start of this year suggests that the effort is now paying off: significant numbers of users now accessing A&M's content via mobile. March was a great month for this. There was growth across the board, with new sites for Radio 4's Desert Island Discs and Radio 1's Big Weekend contributing to the increase. And there was especially strong growth for Radio 1 and 1Xtra, where all mobile devices are now covered with key services and where fans used their phones to join in the fun with Moyles & Co for Red Nose Day.Â Which all goes to show... well, you know what goes here.

* Unique Browsers: this is the term we use to describe a single computer accessing our websites. It's not the same as measuring 'people', and it's not a perfect proxy - but is the closest we have for now. One 'unique browser' is counted for every distinct 'cookie' which has visited a website within a given timeframe. In the BBC, this timeframe is one week. A cookie is a small piece of information that a server sends to your computer to identify that computer on its return. Whenever you clear your cookies, as some people regularly do, your computer is issued with a new cookie when you return to a website.

Alan Phillips is senior business manager, BBC Audio & Music Interactive

A new series for Radio 2 - Sounds of the 20th Century

2011-04-06T16:42:49+00:00

As a producer for Trevor Dann's Company, a radio production company founded by the UK radio veteran of that name, I have the opportunity to work across an array of audio projects; however, I'm most excited about our new series, Sounds of the 20th Century. It's essentially an audio journey through five decades of music and events on BBC Radio 2 - every Thursday at 2200 for the next year.

One of the most challenging and unique things about the show is that - apart from Jeremy Vine giving a short intro at the start - there's no presenter. This means that each programme - dedicated to one year from 1951 to 2000 - doesn't feature anything that wasn't heard, seen or read at the time. It's just the music, the news, the radio, the TV and the movies as they were first experienced.

Our first task was to work out what happened each year. I trawled the internet, spent ages in my local library, and made use of the BBC's own mini research library (it's really small!) and other event diaries, to come up with the definitive list of what happened when... getting myself covered in lots of yellow highlighter in the process!

A massive spreadsheet of music and events followed, which I used to guide my search through the BBC TV and Radio Archive, the Newspaper Archive at the British Library, and the British Pathe and Movietone newsreel archives. Luckily for me, much of this is now available online, so I was able to search their collections without having to physically go to their preservation sites.

From all this research, we then selected the key stories that were really relevant in that year, balancing news and cultural events with clips from entertainment programmes and films. And at the heart of it all is the wonderful music of the time, sourced from the BBC's own music archive.

All these items were called in (electronically where possible) and then we sat listening very carefully. With no presenter, the clips really had to sell themselves in order to be considered for the final cut. They needed to explain what they were and deliver the great atmosphere we want to create for each programme. Much ended up on the cutting room floor.

Finally a running order was created, taking the listener on a journey that would contain the highs and lows, the clips that looked back and others that strove forwards. We took this into the studio and laid the tracks out, tweaked, considered, and tweaked some more. We're really proud of the final product.

We'll stay true to the music and plan to make a full and detailed running order available after each show (so you can work out what that clip was!).

Heather Davies is a Producer on Sounds of the 20th Century

Listen to part one of the Sounds of the 20th Century - 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain, the first hit single with multi-tracking (Les Paul's How High The Moon) and the first real rock 'n' roll record (Jackie Brentson's Rocket 88) - on BBC Radio 2 this Thursday at 2200.