FROM Metal Mickey and Albion Market to the first British-Asian soap, 60 years of television has been digitised, showcasing the world as we knew it in the video era.
It’s all available on BFI Replay - a new free-to-access digital film platform launched in public lending libraries across the country, including Bradford Libraries. The result of one of the UK’s largest mass digitisation programmes, the content is drawn from at risk video tape collections from the BFI National Archive and regional partners, including the Yorkshire Film Archive.
Designed to preserve video tape collections most at risk from technical obsolescence, 100,000 items that would otherwise be lost forever have been digitised across a range of tape formats spanning the 60-year history of video. Thanks to National Lottery funding and the support of Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, these newly digitised moving image stories - selected from news reports, documentaries, adverts, charity videos, magazine shows, dramas, oral histories and local community video archives - are now available to view on BFI Replay. While some screen stories are familiar and memorable, there are also forgotten gems, rare and unseen for decades, and groundbreaking early factual programmes.
Highlights include a focus on soaps, peeling back the years of Coronation Street, Brookside, Emmerdale and Crossroads as well as the largely forgotten Albion Market and Family Pride, the first British-Asian soap opera. Fondly remembered children’s classics include Metal Mickey and Animal Kwackers, and the Public Information Film is explored in a new collection alerting viewers to a more modern set of dangers, such as online predators and texting while driving.
There are vintage interviews with actors and film-makers including Robin Williams, Ben Kingsley, Mike Leigh, Ishmael Merchant and James Ivory, and literary stars Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie. The Camera is Ours: Women Documentary Film-makers, is a companion collection to the BFI National Archive’s recent celebration of Britain’s women documentarians from the 1930s -1960s.
Groundbreaking multicultural TV from the 1970s onwards is explored through magazine shows aimed at diverse audiences, from LWT’s tough factual reporting on Skin, and a tribute to Bob Marley, to Central TV’s Midlands arts review Here and Now, featuring a young Benjamin Zephaniah.
Some content, such as news of the Sinclair C5 and Teletext, reflects the making of the modern world, exploring changing technology. There’s also a focus on key historical events from the video era, including the miners’ strike and the impact of AIDS in Before Stonewall: An Oral History of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community, a 2003 Heritage Lottery Funded project.
BFI Replay also celebrates the heyday of regional television, with the late, great Bradford-born Richard Whiteley on Yorkshire TV’s Calendar People interviewing famous Yorkshire folk including James Herriot and novelist Jilly Cooper
The collections are curated under four main themes:
* The Time Machine: Archive film, TV and video exploring key events in British history, with a search tool to search by date or decade. Highlights include the 1984-85 miners’ strike, represented in television, with reports from leading current affairs series Weekend World and independently-produced video collections exploring the strike and its impact.
There are programmes exploring what the future - the world we live in now - looked like to our parents and grandparents, taking us back to the early years of a technology revolution in the 1970s and early 1980s that was beginning to transform workplaces, homes, education, healthcare, fashion, transport and almost every facet of everyday life.
* The Making of Us: From classroom to living-room, TV and video shaped our learning experiences over the years, with programmes such as Think Tank, Yorkshire TV’s Don’t Ask Me science show with Magnus Pyke and ITV’s Kids Aid.
* Screen Stories: Uncovering classics and forgotten gems from TV yesteryear in adverts, government films and film-maker interviews. Be Careful Out There! takes up the Public Information Film story from the 1980s. Among the usual subjects, like road safety, are new fears - rogue internet traders, online predators and Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross advising us how to beat the ‘Millennium bug’.
* Closer To Home: Stories with regional resonance, told in films, videos and programmes made by, for or about local communities, exploring places, issues and events from regions.
Arike Oke, BFI Executive Director of Knowledge and Collections says: “BFI Replay gives democratic, UK-wide, free access to our regional and national film and television archives which for too long have been inaccessible to many. Through the public libraries network we’re able to connect people in each UK nation to their stories and vital histories on screen.”
Adds Isobel Hunter, CEO Libraries Connected: “BFI Replay will give library teams the skills to curate targeted content for their local communities, to engage existing library users and attract new audiences who might not expect to find this material within a library. Libraries see it as an exciting addition to their existing cultural programme and an opportunity to open up public access to this incredible archive.”
* Visit bfi.org.uk/replay
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