Broadcasting Tomorrow will be the 100th anniversary of the first official transmission of the BBC, a news bulletin through the 2LO station in London. Within months it quickly grew through a network of transmitters across the country Now here we are a hundred years later with the multifaceted, multimedia organisation which exists today and we're hoping against hope will continue into the future.
This year's Review 2022 is going to be a bit different in that it's going to span the past hundred years and continue well into the next twelve months. It will be is a celebration of the BBC but with a twist. The corporation itself has been doing a pretty good job of highlighting its own history through the BBC 100 website and its connected history website so there's little point in replicating that.
Instead, I'm going to be look at that history mostly through the prism of other organisations, specifically their digital archives and libraries, news agencies and universities and linking to their video, audio and documents. It'll be clearer once you see tomorrow's first post which contains links to footage from Pathe News of Marconi testing radio equipment, articles about these origins and photos of the original transmitter.
This will not necessarily be everything. One or two of the UK film archives have hundreds of news clips from local BBC regional news programmes and I'll exercise some editorial control, only including material which helps to tell the story of the BBC. Similarly some of the digitisations of deposits in university archives are thorough enough to include random envelopes with a date scrawled on them which I'm not sure is even useful to a George Orwell historian.
As the "mostly" at the top of the third paragraph suggests, some BBC sources will be sewn into the fabric of these posts, but only from the more obscure parts of the corporations website, the "clips" section of programme pages and BBC Sounds, the material which the BBC rarely highlights itself but which reflects on its own history or representing the types of programmes being made at that time. There are some real gems hidden far below the surface.
Anyway, now the groundwork is laid, I hope you enjoy what's to come. It's going to be a big, addictive and fascinating effort for me and hopefully interesting for you too. At least it'll give me something to do in the evenings for a while. But I'm also genuinely interested to see if I unearth anything the BBC itself doesn't have in its archive. There's a piece of radio in particular which is old enough and obscure enough that I'm not sure. But you won't be seeing that for a couple of months yet.
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