‘This is London…’ in praise of the BBC Archive website.
I am a history buff. As such I find libraries and the smell of old history books seriously exciting. During a recent visit to Northumberland (Reuben would not approve) I spent several wonderful hours exploring the history section of the reasonably famous Barter Books in Alnwick. (See here: http://bit.ly/9D7xvL). I’m a vegetarian, but enormous books on the Reformation, printed like ornate bibles, more than justify the cows killed for their leather to craft the book covers. I found the older history books to be of two kinds: the first, hopelessly specialised volumes on, for instance, the history of land ownership in Kent in the mid-15th Century (these books are unreadable); the second, books that attempt in one go to explain the entire course of the history of Europe, say, or democratic government, starting with the Greeks.
Stephen Fry once cited the library as something wholly without flaw. Libraries are, he explained, almost ‘sexually exciting’ places, as they are ‘powerhouses of knowledge’. This applies to books in general, but history books in particular. Enclosed in the most pedestrian-looking books you can find the whole sweep of human experience. You can follow Alexander the Great through Persia, watch monarchies fall to revolution, or ponder the disappearance of hats in mens’ fashion in the 1960s. A.J.P Taylor put it very well, as he often did:
History is the one way in which you can experience at second hand all kinds of varieties of human behaviour, and after all the greatest problem in life is to understand how other people behave, and this is what history enables us to do: to see people in all kinds of situations and in all kinds of walks of life…It makes the reader, and to a certain extent the historian too, aware of a fuller, much wider life than somebody could possibly have merely by his own private experience. [though I'm sure he'd agree that leaving the house is often a good idea].
Immersing yourself in history from afar with books is one thing, seeing it happen is another. When we’re old and ugly and not as mobile as we used to be, we’ll likely be asked where we were on 9/11, as we ask people where they were when Kennedy was killed. (I was in year 6 at the time; my friend Nick was staying at my house for after-school games and neon coloured food. I’ll make the story more interesting later). Likewise I’ll always remember being called down in 2003 to watch the chimp President himself announce the invasion of Iraq to the world on TV as my Dad did the ironing. Such moments of ‘we interrupt our regular programming…’ punctuate the 20th Century: people learned of war or crisis from the television, which provided memorable viewing (think of Walter Cronkite choking up like a girlie liberal in Nov. 1963); earlier they sat by the wireless, fretting.
Which brings me to the BBC Archive. Museums must house pots and bits of metal for the benefit of historical memory, and likewise our country needs a class of archive minions to sit in the presumably dark, dank bowels of the BBC and sort through their thousands of hours of broadcasting, and provide it for the public. This civilisational achievement you can enjoy by clicking here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/.
Modern British history is made clickable on this thing. Election coverage, interviews with statesman, public scandals of yore, plus more hours of quality programming than a human being could watch in a lifetime. When Nicolas Sarkozy first took power, one of his first public statements expressed the desire to make French public broadcasting as good as the kind les rostbiffs enjoy for £2.60 a week. Here, you can see why.
The site has a ‘Today’s Choice’ box on the homepage, with a video or radio broadcast of note. Today’s is from 3rd September, 1939. It is highly likely that today you will spend slightly more than 12.38 minutes on your computer either mindlessly youtubing, embarking on a blue-link adventure on Wikipedia, looking up ridiculous sexual activities on Urban Dictionary or masturbating for the third time today (just to prove you can). I would encourage you to forgo such things and listen to this broadcast, preferably in a dark room.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/ww2outbreak/7917.shtml
