Not Only ... But Also... MI5

Yesterday I was unfriended by Tony Hadoke on Facebook.  I questioned his narrative in an article he wrote for the Guardian or something that all the BBC's destruction of archive material was accidental.  I said we know that this is not entirely the case.  The evidence I presented comes from the late Harry Thompson's biography of Peter Cook.  This recalls Peter Cook discovering the BBC was planning to destroy the master tapes of "Not Only... But Also" and writing to them pleading for them not to.  He even offered to replace the video tapes with blanks and store the originals at his own expense but the BBC bluntly refused stating this was against policy and destroyed them anyway.  Toby seemed to become very irate and advised me to "read a book" and when I responded that this was a story that I had read in a properly researched biography by a late acquaintance of mine who was a TV producer at the BBC decided to block unfriend me.  Reader, I am heartbroken.

Of course, this is only one incident in one book and perhaps we shouldn't read too much into it but it shows a case where an author and performer who clearly shared the copyright with the BBC wrote to them and literally begged them not to destroy the only existing copies of his performance and the BBC callously ignored his pleas.  Why? Was it because Equity feared that repeats would destroy work for new actors?  Was it a policy?  Toby touts the view that all this destruction was accidental and no doubt much of it was.  Videotape was expensive and reusable so many tapes were simply reused.  However, there were still political decisions to be made about what was and was not important.  The Telegraph (which like a broken clock is sometimes right twice a day) claimed that recordings were ranked on a scale of A to E and the responsibility of deciding what to tape over was made by individual producers.  But someone still had to come up with the ranking system and categorise things.  That's a political decision.  

Now we do also know that despite it's much vaunted independence from the government that from the late 1930s until 1984, MI5 stationed an intelligence officer (latterly Ronnie Stonham) at the BBC to vet editorial applicants because this was revealed by a 1985 Observer investigation. The personnel records of anyone suspicious were stamped with a distinctively shaped green upward-facing arrow resembling a Christmas tree.  Barry Letts who had strong left leaning political credentials expressed some astonishment of having ever made it through such a vetting process.  Many journalists were blacklisted.  Now, it's a bit of a leap to say from this that the BBC had a deliberate policy of deleting potentially embarrassing material but it's not a conspiracy theory to suggest that MI5 was at the BBC to shape policy and that by extension the policy of what to select for deletion and preservation may have been shaped in some way by such an arrangement.  So...

I suggested there might be a political angle to these decisions.  By that I don't mean that some producer sat down and decided to record over Peter Cook's tapes out of malevolence or personal spite (although someone clearly personally tipped him off) but there might be an element of prejudice in what was selected for deletion which could contain political motivations.  That might seem a leap but here's an example from my own life (sorry, if it's not in a book yet - I'm too busy to write one)...

A few years back YouTube decided to delete my Pear Shaped in Iraq YouTube channel.  After a two year investigation by the Data Commissioner it was recovered and restored.  Google claimed that this was because the channel had been deleted in error and it has to delete material because of the sheer volume of material uploaded to YouTube.... and this may be true but I have another personal private channel the public can't even see that's never been deleted and you'd have to be the world's least skeptical person not to ever get an itchy chin given the political nature of the material.  

Data deletion and selection for deletion isn't a problem that's going away because of changes in technology.  Indeed, with more data being produced than ever before there will be more problems than ever before.  But I doubt these things will ever affect Toby personally because despite being far more widely read than me and spending centuries in the BBC Archives he's not exactly Woodward and Bernstein.  

I also questioned whether the BBC's claims that it's deletion of material was just "standard industry practice" holds up to scrutiny.  The level of material deletion in the 70s and 80s varied a lot partly because of the regional franchise model of ITV creating a lot of autonomous regional franchises but some people had a more careful attitude towards their archiving.  Much of the material Lew Grade of ATV produced still exists because he insisted on using film so they couldn't be taped over and even filmed in colour before Britain had colour TV so that he could maximise overseas sales.  Meanwhile the BBC at the beginning of the 70s was left with a lot of black and white footage that was hard to sell abroad because it was late to the colour market producing eventually big archive gaps at the end of the 60s as few film video transfers for overseas sales were made....  Still PAL produced a better and more stable picture than NSTC so swings and roundabouts...

Anyway I must hurry on over to Draft 2 Digital now to turn this into a book so it becomes TRUE.