Not Only ... But Also... MI5

Yesterday I was unfriended by someone on Facebook.  I questioned the narrative generally wheeled on in articles such as this 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 (see here).  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.  

I have since depersonalised this post to remove that contemporaneous discussion as it isn't really the point I was trying to make and if the BBC can delete embarrassing material so can I... so astute readers may notice that this page has been rewritten several times and been airbrushed better than one of Joseph Stalin's photos.  

I'm still not sure what ethical boundaries my original comments crossed that caused him to unfriend me apart from "spreading conspiracy theories" but in my defence I would say that the central claim that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had a conversation with the BBC protesting that their tapes were scheduled for deletion is fairly well sourced.  However, I'm not a professional historian.  I do remember from GCSE history (which is where my education level ends) that you should have at least 2 primary  sources to stand something up ... Not just one secondary one and I think Harry Thompson spent a ridiculous amount of time researching what actually happened here and still couldn't get to the bottom of it perhaps because there's nothing to find but shadows...  Is it then irresponsible to speculate on it ?  Perhaps my acquaintance is right and it is so here are my mad "conspiracy theories" on my blog where they cannot offend anyone because I largely talk to myself here and most of the protagonists are dead.  I find myself to be most agreeable when taking to myself but strangely however to benefit humanity however much I plan, yet everybody says I am a disagreeable man?  But anyway just keep in mind that some of the below may be bollocks.

The central story about Peter Cook is almost certainly true but it is still 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?  Ironically I can't tell you the exact story because it's in a 500 page book that I sent to the Saint Christopher's Charity Shop at the end of last year because I didn't regard it as of enough cultural value to hang onto but copies are out there somewhere for some keen archivist to recover.  

In the light of considerable sustained interest in this page by the kind of people who think there is no surviving BBC TV footage of WWII because the BBC deleted it to hide coded wartime messages, I got hold of the digital version of Harry's book.  It actually opens with the story of the tape wiping which may be why I remember it so vividly.  Scanning it closer for the word "wipe" I found a bit further in where Jimmy Gilbert (then Head of Comedy) explains how the BBC's myopic wiping policy for Comedy at the end of the 60s actually worked in practice:

"The Head of Comedy simply didn't know anything about tape retention.  When I was head, Bob Galbraith, who was my organiser, used to come in with these print outs, and he would say "We're only allowed to keep eighty shows, so I'm suggesting we have the first and last of this and the first and last of that." I believe the thinking was, in a hundred years time you'll at least get a flavour.  But the first and last of every series meant absolutely nothing".

The Gnomes of Dulwich might concur with this sentiment if they hadn't been completely exterminated.  It's hard to tell but it may be that what Gilbert is saying here is that given an invidious choice, it made more sense to him to jettison entire series and serials than to preserve a collection of "orphan" episodes.  It's also pretty amazing how he can abjure all responsibility whilst claiming to have been in a meeting discussing the subject.  It may have been the last subject on the agenda but... There used to be a joke that the BBC TV Centre was a circular building to reduce the chances of executives being stabbed in the back... Well, certainly the blame seems to go round in circles...  

In the article linked to above contemporaneous with the release of his biography of Peter Cook, Harry mocks the BBC for having the cheek to call their VHS "The Best of ... What's left of" when it's pretty much the only extant material, most of which was illegally filmed live off his own TV by the Producer who feared his creations being wiped... As indeed they were.  "That's why the so-called classic scenes from the series are the only ones you ever see," said Mr Thompson, "It's the only ones they've got." That's all there is, there isn't any more... as Ethel Barrymore used to say.

The generally accepted view is that all this destruction was accidental and no doubt much of it was.  Videotape was expensive and reusable so many tapes were simply reused.  The BBC's website puts the cost of a Quadruplex 2 inch tape in the late 1950s shortly after it was invented at ~£2000 a reel inflation adjusted for today.  However, there were still political decisions to be made about what was and was not important.  And £2000 was probably still only 5% at most of most program's budget so how much was this policy of recycling tape like scenery really about the money even if we factor in storage costs?  That said, to an accountant 5% is ... 5%.  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 not just a technocratic one.  

Now going off on a bit of a mad tangent 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.  Given the BBC was at the time probably the most powerful media organisation in the country by a long chalk it would be a bit surprising if there wasn't some such arrangement but... well... okay... now then now then now then ... 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.  For example Thompson said that many of the "Not Only... But Also ..." tapes were reused for News because it was seen as a priority to save every news item ... even local news.  We know News was where vetting was at it's most active and what the government was most interested in so it may be this priority was set or influenced by ...

The purpose of vetting is to create thought conformity.  Therefore it may be that the BBC erased 60 to 70 percent of it's own archive over 30 years is not an accident or a conspiracy but a classic example of Groupthink.  This is normal, so it must be sane.  "Jimmy Gilbert, head of comedy at the time said there was no opposition to the order," recalled Thompson... even though there was.  It was ignored.  Indeed, however you spin it.... in  the case of "Not Only ... But Also..." the policy does appear to have been directly challenged which does make the destruction of the material apparently for it's own sake to comply with "a policy" a deliberate and conscious decision and not just a case of "just following orders" ... at least on this one documented occasion.

One characteristic of Groupthink is the existence of "Mindguards".  Persons who act as self-appointed censors to hide problematic information from the group.  Much like me being ejected from a Facebook conversation half way through and becoming completely confused by what was said and the sudden ostracisation. No one told me what the problem was, I was just cut dead.  The explanation I was given for my ejection was "persnicketiness" - that I was putting too much emphasis on "minor details".  That's one way of looking at it.  Another is I was rejected by the group because my ideas did not meet with the group's need to reach a unanimous consensus.  I guess we're all guilty of blocking people on social media who we find annoying... but there is a downside to this.  We create our own echo chambers...

One criticism of conspiracy theories is that they are unrealistic because real conspiracies are actually hard to conceal and frequently leak information.  How then did the BBC manage to keep it's Christmas Tree Files secret for 50 years?  And did the BBC having a secret vetting system stop being a conspiracy theory when it was found to be true?  I joked that the BBC had deleted "Not Only ... But Also..." on some kind of instruction from Harold Wilson.  This didn't happen but what did happen is that straight after resigning as Prime Minister, Harold Wilson went into TV Presenting with the help of David Frost.  He hosted some of the worst chat shows in history.  Is this what was taped over Not Only but Also ...? During Christmas 1978, Wilson appeared on the Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special.  Wilson's TV career was a bit of as a disaster as his dementia prevented him interacting with enough mental agility - his best output "A Prime Minister on Prime Ministers" for Yorkshire TV is still worth a watch ... as it was prerecorded Frost & Wilson were able to work around the dementia problems.  But anyway, the point is there was a bit of a revolving door between the government and the BBC at the time... and at the end of the day the various board members are political appointees... So Wilson may not have had the motive or opportunity but we can place him at the scene of the crime - the BBC Comedy Department during the late 1970s.  

One of the things that makes conspiracy theories so popular with their consumers is that they are emotionally satisfying.  If we are to believe Sue Malden's official BBC account of the archive gaps, video tapes were simply bunged after 3 years into a blanking machine having been stamped only with three words "No Further Interest".  At least if there was a conspiracy it would suggest someone cared about archiving and preserving the past even if they made the wrong decisions.  Actually, if the truth is simply no one was interested - no one cared at all - that's actually more shocking.  Then again, Sue tells us that everything was recorded so it must be out there somewhere.  This isn't true.  Almost all the original 60s black and white Dr Who that exist ...only exist because film prints were made for overseas sale.  At the end of their life they were either returned to BBC Enterprises to be destroyed or destroyed by local broadcasters who were required to provide a "certificate of destruction".  Most of the remaining episodes that still exist today ... exist only because of localised disorganisation at purchasing TV networks.  These avenues of recovery have been almost completely exhausted now which is why the BBC is in seemingly endless negotiations with "private collectors" - people who either half inched the films instead of throwing them in the bin, picked them up at a jumble sale or found they'd fallen off the back of a lorry.  Wiping the videotapes of "Not Only... But Also" might be classed as a stupid decision .  Wiping the master tapes and physically destroying the telefilms of Doctor Who simply to stop anyone else watching them is such next level incompetence, it's hard to believe there was not some degree of malice.  The peak of the BBC's wiping is said to have been reached in the late 60s/early 70s when the launch of BBC2 doubled the number of videotapes needed overnight... This is why there are bizarrely more extant William Hartnell Dr Who episodes than Patrick Troughton...

According to Wikipedia a conspiracy is a plan or agreement between people for an unlawful or harmful purpose.  Well, the routine wiping of video tapes and the routine destruction of telefilms certainly fulfills the criteria of a secret because the BBC told no one about it.  As BBC archivist Sue Malden says... when she started work there she expected it all to just be on a shelf.  It wasn't.  There were big gaps all across the archives.  One argument advanced for the BBC's deliberate destruction policy was that if it had been learned that they were spending a lot of money archiving old material then there would have been public outrage at the waste.  But would there?  We don't know because no one outside the BBC was told of the policy.  Perhaps a deal could have been done with the National Archives or the BFI or some other institution.  The BBC told Peter Cook that they couldn't allow copyright material off the premises but also that it had no commercial value anymore.  There is an obviously illogicality here.  If it had no value why was Cook not allowed to buy the tapes?  The bizarre situation was that only British Television Licence Payers were not allowed to buy the tapes.  Foreign TV stations were still allowed to buy them until every penny of their foreign resale value had been drained.  Ironically Peter probably could have saved his tapes if he'd pretended to be a foreign TV station.  The thing is he wouldn't have known about the activities of the BBC's commercial arm because before the Freedom of Information Act 2000 the government and the BBC didn't have to tell the public anything.  When I was a Civil Servant in the 90s literally everything was an official secret.  Even stationary deliveries...

To what extent can we blame the Actor's Union Equity?  Well, I don't know.  But I will say that whilst the closed shop was supposedly abolished by Mrs Thatcher, whenever I performed at an Arts Centre rather than the back of a pub, they always asked if I had unnecessary Public Liability Insurance which I always suspected was a backdoor method of checking that I was in Equity who offer insurance as a freebie... but that's another story...

Unfortunately satirical comedy has very little resale value.  Even in the 80s tapes of programmes like Radio 4's Week Ending were routinely wiped (which is probably for the best).  When they released a complication tape sketches had to be rerecorded.  Still, as Peter Baynham once observed... very few people are interested today in once up-to-the-minute jokes about Gladstone and Disraeli...

So anyway I suggested there might be a political angle to some of the BBC's wiping 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.  After all, if you were a 70s producer and you had to select something to tape over because that was your job you'd probably select something you didn't like - if it was me there'd be no Test Match Specials or old episodes of Question Time or... If we look at this decision making on a macro level you could say the selection of material for deletion must have mirrored at some point a balloon debate engaging the worst excesses of socialism and capitalism wrapped together which is probably hilariously recorded in an archive somewhere - we can't consider anything's economic value more than three years ahead and at the same time we must create work even if it means destroying things so we can rebuild them.  One could argue that the latter argument contains a certain logic since a huge industry has been created in recovering, remounting and reanimating old work.  In that sense the policy has in fact been a tremendous success.  It's just in terms of archeology that we see a problem...

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 an old YouTube channel of mine.  After a two year investigation by the Information 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. [They estimated their worldwide upload rate at 400 hours of video uploaded every minute] .... 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.  The placing of data in "the cloud" as a safe place might in fact make some of it more ephemeral.  I personally lost quite a bit of data when Xtranormal went bust.  It was wiped by the administrators and cannot be recovered.  Companies going bust or amalgamating can be a major reason for archive material being lost.  In fact some companies have reportedly fallen on such hard times in the past that they've melted down their own film stock to resell the silver in the silver nitrate ... Sort of Cash My Silver TV...

Anyway, 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/ITC 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...  

Oh well, as Sir Arthur Greeb-Streebling used to say hopefully the purpose of studying history is that we will all learn from our mistakes so we can repeat them exactly... a bit like the BBC who despite their new archiving policy in 1979 were still destroying film cans when Ian Levine turned up at BBC Enterprises in the early 80s and found all 7 negatives and positives of "The Daleks" marked "to be junked".

Further research reveals that actually this Peter Cook incident wasn't a one off.  Monty Python also entered into negotiations to buy their tapes off the BBC.  Terry Jones recalled to the Daily Express that the BBC "hated the show" and that he and Michael Palin smuggled tapes out to copy for preservation on Mr Palin's own domestic video recorder.  I'm not sure how you could copy a 2 inch Quadruplex tape onto Betamax or VHS but maybe this was a copy of a copy making a copy.  Separately Terry Gilliam claims that the BBC master tapes only still exist because he purchased them off the corporation... Oh well, at least policy changed ... The BBC regularly claims it had no archiving policy till 1978 or something but ... That can't actually be true as labelling tapes A to E would actually be a policy, wouldn't it?  Then again given they taped over the Moon Landings maybe ... The survival of more mid seventies programs might also have something to do with the replacement of Quadruplex tapes with Type C 1 inch tape which took away the commercial advantage of recording on a format that by the mid 80s was drifting into obsolescence... until the invention of helical scanning in the mid 70s there hadn't been a major format advance in a quarter of a century...

Of course it wasn't always the production company's decision to erase material.  On some occasions it would be due to a contractual agreement with the artist.  Producer Peter Morley of Associated Rediffusion recalled how Benjamin Britten did a reverse Peter Cook and contractually demanded the destruction of a tape of "Turn Of the Screw" made for Associated-Rediffusion in 1959 two years after it's broadcast.  This resulted in "a ceremonial wiping of the master tape". "It was," he said, "like attending a wake." The footage was later recovered as a film can ...

I was watching some old documentary on WWII the other day and the first twenty minutes was the historians discussing why they were making yet another documentary on WWII when the subject would seem to have been relentlessly explored.  They said that there are always more angles to be explored and more perspectives to view things from ... Which reminded me of an old Alexei Sayle routine about professional historians continually having to come up with new theories about history because that's their job and if they didn't constantly come up with new material like comedians...