Thursday, December 19, 2013

TV on the radio - again

TeamRock, one of the 793 digital rock radio stations currently plying their trade, has done a deal with the BBC to do a rerun of Tommy Vance's last-ever Friday rock show from Radio One.

That's interesting, but this is even more tantalising:

John Moran, BBC Radio Head of Business Affairs, said: “We are pleased to be working with TeamRock to begin to unlock the BBC radio archive for further broadcast through new partnerships with commercial radio. The digital rebroadcast of this programme shows how gems from the archive can still reach new audiences.”
There hangs the possibility of other shows being dusted down and rebroadcast. And you know what eight-letter name that means, don't you?

Mark Page.

No, hang on:

John Peel.

Those sessions you neglected to tape in the 80s and 90s, and Marc Riley has yet to rebroadcast? Time to send nice letters to Absolute Radio...


2 comments:

Frank said...

The BBC only started routinely archiving broadcasts sometime after 2000. In theory most of Peel's post millenium shows would be available for re-broadcast from the BBCs digital archives.

However, there is sterling work going on amongst a hardcore group of Peel fans to track down and digitise as many shows as possible. Somewhere in the region of a thousand bedroom-recorded cassettes have been donated from a multitude of sources and the project is on-going with more tapes being donated all the time. The intention is to catalog all the tapes (peel.wikia.com) and hand the sound files over to the BBC but as yet the BBC have not seemed particulary interested…

If you want to put a shout out for more tape hoarders to come forward that would help. Complete shows with links are preferred, but anything goes really - pre-punk is gold dust.

Robin Carmody said...

Indeed, this Friday Rock Show had not been officially kept by the BBC but was recovered from a recording made by Tony Wilson (who produced pretty much all the Freeman and Vance rock shows over a twenty-year period).

May I join in the bigging-up of the Peel Wiki. In terms of actually re-broadcasting shows one thing that would help would be that Peel's shows were broadcast on, and usually recorded from, FM long before most of Radio 1's output was, so would come much closer to the broadcast standards required today.

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