“Out there, in people’s sheds and attics, are reels and tapes containing more radio jewels…”
“It’s almost like a national duty… in the same way it was your duty to make sure your house wasn’t emanating light in the Second World War.” Producer James Peak may have his tongue in cheek when comparing wartime blackouts to a call for members of the public to return any tapes of old BBC programmes they find to the archives, but as he oversees a BBC season of acclaimed plays that have been recently rediscovered (which continues on R4 Extra and Radio 3 in May, July and September) you can understand his evangelical zeal.
Peak claims “there’s not a duff one among them”, but pick of the crop has to be Radio 4’s Sunday drama (3pm), a production of arguably Harold Pinter’s best play, The Dumb Waiter, starring Bob Hoskins and Roy Kinnear as two hit men waiting in a restaurant cellar for news of their next target, which was broadcast on the World Service in 1981 and has not been heard since.
There’s also a lost 1980 radio adaptation of Dennis Potter’s 1971 Play for Today, Traitor, on Monday on Radio 4 at 2.15pm, starring Denholm Elliott as a thinly veiled Kim Philby character being interviewed by a TV crew in Moscow.
Although those two were found nestled in an obscure corner of the BBC archive – in the Transcription Service, which made copies to sell programmes overseas – many of the plays being broadcast were discovered among tapes sent to archivists the Radio Circle, who Radio Times worked with on our Treasure Hunt campaign to find lost programmes, which uncovered such gems as episodes of Desert Island Discs and Workers’ Playtime, plus a special TV treat that will be revealed in our magazine’s Feedback pages next week.
This season grew from a tranche of tapes the Radio Circle had catalogued, restored and returned to the archive, which included a staggering number of radio plays – more than 1,000 in total.
Peak explains the process: “Often these things are found on reels or tapes or obscure formats of the time, or sometimes they’ve been recorded off the airwaves by people in little Heath Robinson-style sheds [with] these fantastic, bespoke methods of early recording.
“We remaster them and get rid of the hisses and the scratches. Then of course you’re faced with the question of how clean is too clean? You don’t necessarily want to get rid of everything because you want the sense that these were hidden and of their time.”
Steve Arnold of the Radio Circle describes the process as an “audio car wash”, while his colleague, restoration expert Keith Wickham, agrees that you still want a bit of grit amid the sparkle: “If you take everything out, it starts eating into the programme itself. What you want is something people will happily listen to, even if it’s got some noise. It’s a balance you have to strike.”
Asked whether artificial intelligence could do the same job – in the same way AI tools were used to recover John Lennon’s demo for the Beatles’ recent single Now and Then – Wickham and Arnold are sceptical whether it would work for spoken word programmes.
Arnold does raise the possibility that “there’s a potential for reconstructing programmes from scripts, because if you’ve got enough of somebody’s voice you can possibly give the AI the script and tell it this is this voice, this is this one”.
It’s a glimpse of the future of restoring the past, but in the meantime James Peak has a simple message: “Out there, in people’s sheds and attics, are reels and tapes containing more radio jewels – which are part of our shared cultural heritage and belong to the nation! If this is true for you, remember it is a heroic act to get them back into the archives so that listeners can hear them again.”
Over to you, dear reader. If you have a cache of old radio tapes, which could contain a lost treasure, email treasurehunt@radiotimes.com.
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