The archive nobody was funded to keep
Thirty years of regional television sat in a basement because one projectionist refused to throw it out. What the collection reveals is not nostalgia — it is evidence.
The tapes were not saved as an act of preservation. They were saved because someone could not bring himself to put them in a skip, which is how most archives begin.
What a local broadcast records
A regional news bulletin is an unglamorous document and an unusually complete one. Street scenes, shop fronts, accents, the price of things, the way people stood while being interviewed — all captured incidentally, which is what makes it trustworthy.
Digitisation is a quarter finished and funded by a rolling grant that must be reapplied for annually. The collection’s custodians describe the process as being asked each year to justify the existence of the past.