The more things change, the more they stay the same...
The sheer scale of the Panorama television archive is staggering. Trust me, I work with it every day. Perhaps more staggering, several years into web 2.0, is just how little of the footage is actually available to view online.
We already have information on Panorama from 2000 onwards on the website archive. We also have an easily searchable site (there's more info about that on the ).
Panorama is fortunate in that most programmes can be viewed on the website for a full year after transmission. But that is of course the proverbial drop in the ocean when you consider a programme that has been running since 1953.
But little by little, this is something we hope to change.
To whet the appetite, we've made a trying to highlight some of the ground Panorama has covered in its first 50 years.
How to cover 50 years of such diverse television in an 11 minute film presented its own challenges. How do you decide between a fascinating sequence of reporter Robin Day peering over the Berlin Wall in 1961 or Millwall football hooligans love of a ruck from 1977? In the end neither of them made the final cut.
Problems like this were too big to overcome to be honest. So we didn't really try. What we did do is give a flavour of how Panorama has changed over the years and indeed in many ways how it has stayed the same.
L.P. Hartley's novel The Go-Between famously opens with the line 'the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there' and always struck me as pretty much spot on. But research into Panorama's past in any of the last six decades shows issues like race, immigration, education and health the hot topics they remain today for Panorama's audience.
Where Hartley was correct is mirrored in the way Panorama did things. Certainly in how they spoke to the audience and, in the days before cheap travel and our plethora of news options, what they thought their audience needed to know.
The way the programme has chronicled the changing face of Britain and beyond since 1953 is truly fascinating. Which is ultimately why we'd like to open up the archive and make some of this material available online.
That's why the purpose of my blog is to invite you to discuss Panorama's rich archive and where possible, we'll dig out some classic clips for you. I'll also be trawling the blogosphere to see what Panorama's from the past are being talked about.
And of course if you have a favourite Panorama, a story to tell us about a particular programme, or think you've found something that would interest the team, then please email me at panorama@bbc.co.uk marked 'Archive' in the subject line.
Comment number 1.
At 17th Dec 2008, RedVioletRugbyDog wrote:Look forward to seeing this initiative grow Eamonn. Any chance of seeing Brendan Behan interviewed by Panorama in June 1956 (drunk) or Robert Kennedy losing his temper with David Lomax March/April 1968? David McQueen
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