The BBC has launched a website where users can browse listings from every edition of Radio Times going back to 1923, after completing an ambitious project to digitise the TV and radio listings magazine.
BBC Genome allows users to search by programme, date or Radio Times edition, revealing a snapshot of the corporation’s schedule on any given day in its 91-year history – and a fascinating insight into changing social and cultural trends over nearly a century.
The listing for the first ever Blue Peter, broadcast on the 16 October 1958, runs: “Toys, model railways games, stories, cartoons. A new weekly programme for younger viewers with Christopher Trace and Leila Williams.”
On 22 November 1963, the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, BBC viewers may well have been watching Scottish medical drama Dr Finlay’s Casebook.
After breaking in to scheduled programming between 7pm and 8pm with brief reports that the president had been shot and then that he was dead, BBC executives decided to continue with the planned Friday night lineup, prompting a flood of complaints.
The BBC Genome project involved digitising 4,469 editions of Radio Times from 1923 to 2009, with information after that point collated from online programme records.
Digitisation of the Radio Times archive was completed last year but Thursday is the first time it will be available to the general public.
“The publication of the BBC Genome marks a significant step forward in helping us to open up more of the BBC’s vast and priceless archives to the public,” said Tony Ageh, controller of archive development.
Some of the listings records are inevitably inaccurate due to scheduled programming being scrapped to make way for coverge of major news events, such as the death of Princess Diana in August 1997.
There are also 11 weeks where there is no information when the Radio Times was not published, between 1926 and 1983, for reasons including printing disputes, the 1926 general strike and 1947 fuel crisis.
The BBC is aiming to update the records by allowing members of the public to click an “edit” button and submit information and suggest corrections.
“This information will be invaluable to anybody looking to discover more about the BBC and the wonderful and important broadcasts from years gone by and it will also be our first chance to invite them to help us establish where there are gaps in our information and knowledge about the breadth and depth of our enormous collections,” said Ageh.
The corporation will then begin to be able to match its stock of physical programmes with the BBC Genome records to find out what shows are missing.
“It is highly likely that somewhere out there, in lofts, sheds and basements across the world many of these ‘missing’ programmes will have been recorded and kept by generations of TV and radio fans,” said Hilary Bishop, editor, archive development, BBC Archive and Jake Berger, programme manager, Digital Public Space, in a blogpost. “So we’re hoping to use Genome as a way of bringing copies of those lost programmes back in to the BBC archives too.
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