20 years of the BBC News Channel (BBC News 24)

Getting material from an agency who once produced branding for the BBC would have a high cost, whereas running an off air copy, reingested and ARCd appropriately wouldn’t (it would come under fair use policy I think), and would be of good enough quality, given that it was, after all, only on air again for a few seconds. As Inspector Sands has mentioned, there is now a great deal of archive material the BBC no longer has rights to show, and it’s very hard in some circumstances to totally establish that edited archive footage is totally clear of ‘fee incurring’ footage.

Well he said is was PasB recordings, and it all looked broadcast quality to me, they aren't off-airs as such, just recordings from actual programmes rather than the raw footage (which they couldn't find).

You could probably just about get away with fair dealing for the clips shown during Afternoon Live and the Five giving context to the guests commenting on the early stuff on the basis of it just about being a review.

Possibly a bit more of a stretch to apply it to gratuitously playing out old Top of the hour countdown sequences, I would suggest.

And even obtaining PasB footage is a tedious task. Look at the paperwork involved...

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/commissioning/site/PasBMRFTemplates.docx

That's not for obtaining a PasB recording, that's for producers of radio programmes to fill in so the programme can be put in the archive. Without details about what's in the programme it's difficult to find afterwards.


It's really not difficult or expensive to obtain archive footage at the BBC. Ever since I've been involved with the BBC its just been a case of looking it up and ordering up a tape, nowadays a lot of it is viewable on your desktop and in the case if radio can be downloaded in a usable form from there.

I say usable as the last decade or so of output is available on a BBC desktop, and a lot more of some radio, but it's off air mpeg encoded so not good enough to rebroadcast unless you're absolutely desperate

Physically getting the material isn't an issue, finding what you want can be (hence the complexity of logging forms like the one above). As ever clearing the rights to reuse a piece of archive is usually the big issue

Sounds like a TVS situation where half the stuff they don’t have access to/gone awol

Btw there was full bbc World News title Idents in full from 1999 on YouTube but I can’t find it, does anyone know where it is?

Not really

No large archive, especially for something as large and old as the BBC, will have everything perfectly catalogued and available. Stuff doesn't get logged or it's been transferred from older systems, or the detail is variable because different departments did different things.
Apparently this was a bit of an issue when they launched BBC7 (now 4 Extra) as the cataloguing of a lot of the old radio comedy was in a shocking state

Stuff going awol is another matter. A lot of material doesn't exist because it's not meant to. 'Archiving' doesn't mean 'keep everything'

I'm not sure of the archive policy but you wouldn't expect them to keep everything broadcast on the news channel. And if they did it likely wouldn't be catalogued and probably wouldn't be in broadcast quality. Obviously it will be for a bit and then any useful bits clipped out and entire news archive but whole hours, not.

So you wouldn't expect them to have every 'countdown'. Unless someone thought they might be useful in the future and they were deemed important enough to go into the archive... and even if all that was the case they would have to able to be used for free all these years later

But as I say things are a bit different now as storage has got cheaper and it is possible to keep everything broadcast, and the BBC has been doing that since about 2006, but it's off air so not that useful especially in the case of the news channel where everything will have a clock and ticker on it


The fabled TVS archive is a different case. There, supposedly there is no documentation at all. Also it's not a living archive like the BBCs, nothing's being added, catalogued, transferred etc. There's no impetuous to do anything about it

I'm a little surprised that they showed some of the old countdowns post-1997. Some time ago, I had started doing a project, and managed to get this far. And by judging an incomplete work, I'm glad I didn't upload it!



I'm surprised that the BBC didn't credit the original re-creator.
And possibly the reason why it was is higher quality may be cause of another video provider.
https://vimeo.com/121077009

A quick plug for a new page I've put together looking back over 20 years of the channel formerly known as BBC News 24: http://www.desandmick.co.uk/television/bbcnews24/ which is based loosely on the News 24 pages at the old TV & Radio Bits website.

Just to support what Inspector Sands is saying here - I'm a librarian and this is absolutely true. The amount of times in my career so far I have found items that have been mis-catalogued is unbelievable. All it takes is a typo in the metadata and it makes it more difficult to find. Cataloguing standards have changed over the years and so has the competence of various librarians. Another problem is that sometimes someone will have updated the classification number and either not relabelled the item for forgot to update the catalogue record. That's a needle in a haystack job. I'm guessing that missing items will be somewhat less of an issue in a controlled archive like the BBC's, but I'm sure it's not impossible that items have become mislaid over the years. In a university library where you have got mischievous or lazy students, items frequently get mis-shelved or, at worst, stolen. It's true to say that to be a librarian or an archivist, you really do have to have the qualities of a detective sometimes!


As a side note, one of the most interesting archives I have ever had the pleasure of seeing was ITN's. Buried deep in an underground vault, it was row after row after row of tapes and film cans. Absolutely fascinating stuff down there!

I thought I'd attempt mocking up a full length flags sequence now that we have higher quality copies of the visuals as well as the full length theme. The footage is of variable quality taken from multiple sources but I think it works well enough:



EDIT - 16 November 2017: New updated version now available above.
Original still available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8awQSl8VRQ

VIDEO CREDITS:
BBC World 1997 uploaded by LufthansaTerminal
BBC News Channel at 20: News 24 start up (w/Tony Hall Interview) uploaded by TV Newsroom
BBC News Channel at 20 (Nick Higham Package) uploaded by TV Newsroom

That's fantastic! I adore watching the old News 24 & World flags animations. They are so soothing!