BBC Connected Histories
An ambitious five-year project which runs until the end of 2022. Its aim is to create access to an extraordinary national resource previously hidden from view: the hundreds of recorded interviews the BBC has conducted over the years with its own staff. These interviews range from senior managers such as Directors-General through to popular on-screen personalities such as David Attenborough, pioneering editors of political programmes such as Grace Wyndham Goldie, and influential producers such as Sydney Newman, responsible for creating Doctor Who. Such frank accounts reveal in vividly personal ways the inside story of the BBC and its relationship with the wider world since its birth in 1922. Making them accessible promises to transform our understanding of the BBC itself and, indeed, of the cultural history of the last hundred years more generally.
This is a Sussex Humanities Lab project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project team includes David Hendy, former Sussex Humanities Lab director Tim Hitchcock, Margaretta Jolly, Alban Webb, Anna-Maria Sichani and Denice Penrose. Project partners include the BBC, the Science Museum Group (including the National Science and Media Museum), British Entertainment History Project, Mass Observation, and Adam Matthew Digital.
Image credit: Olive Shapley (producer) with Mrs Emerson in the colliery village of Craghead, County Durham BBC North region 01/01/1939 © BBC