TV listings archive anywhere?

> Personnel, I think chain letters never suited peak time

I agree actually -- I am not 100% sure on this but I believe that the 1988 series with Andrew O'Connor was originally intended as a 9.25 programme (it was certainly every bit as cheap as the 1987 Beadle one) -- but the ratings had proven so high that it was "promoted" into the 7.30-up-against-Eastenders graveyard slot, where it initially did very well (this spot had been home to a range of gameshows previously, as well as "The Roxy", another, rather more ambitious TTTV production that fell foul of being up against strong competition).

Chain Letters was produced at a high rate -- AIUI an entire 40-show run would be recorded in less than three weeks, at minimal cost. The very fact that the production values were never raised says to me that this was just a cheap little show that was never really intended for prime time, and could have been pulled at any moment. So it did well to last as long as it did.

Old TV listings is a real gap of information on the internet. You can read old news stories, blogs, football results etc from years ago, but you'd struggle to find out what was on ITV1 last month.

It sounds like something the BBC should be doing, starting first with their own channels and then extending to ITV, Channel 4 and Five.

I think I'd be rather hard-pushed to justify using public money, time and effort to create full online tv listings, which presumably would have to be fully-regionalised to be meaningful, going back to 1936.... And I suspect the interest in the listings themselves may be, shall we say, a little specialist!

It's a quite different question from whether the BBC ought to have a oermanent online presence for every programme.

I agree aberdeenboy, it's just that I'm actually quite surprised that some TV geek somewhere hasn't done something like this already

I mean, if you head over to "World of Spectrum" they have full scans of just about every vaguely-Sinclair related magazine ever published. And in all honesty that's actually a somewhat less geeky persuit than TV presentation

I know what my next quest in life is if I get really bored

(Also there's a guy on YouTube called Robin Carmody who seems to know everything about everything listings-related. He must be getting his info from somewhere -- surely he doesn't have 3000 magazines in his loft?)

I think he gets most of his info from the Times Digital Archive, which your library should give you a code letting you view it at home.

They are doing it:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/2010/08/bbc-genome-the-complete-broadc.shtml

What, you mean like www.bbc.co.uk/programmes ?
I don't think there's any plans to extend it to other broadcasters, but the backend was written with a view to creating a permanent online presence for each individual programme. Take, for example, an episode of Two Pints…. The page gives you all the useful information for finding out when it's on; when it's been on; and if it was available on iPlayer, you'd be able to watch right there on the page.

A nice side-effect is that it means you can find schedules for BBC TV and radio stations pretty much back to when they started populating the site with data in 2006.

There's a blog post about it: a page for every programme, and I remember reading quite a lot more about it at the time it was being developed, though I think that might be hidden in the depths of the old Backstage blog.

(It's all well and good as long as the people entering the metadata get things right - occasionally you see multiple pages for the same programme - eg Civilisation has a page for its original airing, curiously including all its air dates right back to 1969, and a separate one for its more recent outing on BBC HD. Though it might be some dull technical reason, like the new HD remaster having a new programme number...)

There's no such thing as the 'National Library' in London. However the best place to go is the Westminster Central Reference Library which has a collection of TV and Radio Times' as well as newspapers and other publications. It's near Leicester Square: http://www.westminster.gov.uk/services/libraries/findalibrary/westref/


It should be remembered though that TV listings don't actually tell you what went out on air. Something like the schedules on INFAX is the only way to actually be sure what went out on air, these are derived from the 'as run log' of the channel

Infax doesn't exist anymore, does it?
IIRC it used to be this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/catalogue_offline.shtml

Unless of course it still exists internally at the BBC?

Yes I mentioned a couple of pages back, INFAX very much still exists.

Programme schedules are a very minor part, it's the BBCs archive database - it contains a catalogue of every tape, disc and roll of film they have

[librarian] You just need to join the library and get your own library card, and/or use the public access PCs provided at the library. [/librarian]

Has the TV Room stopped updating their archive, haven't been any for ages, even though people are still being invited to send them in. I've found a heap of newspapers in my attic, that I was going to send in, with loads of BBC, ITV and RTE from the 70's, 80's and 90's, sent one a few weeks ago, and never heard a thing