Ancient Web: BBC VT Oldboys Kept the Videotape Rooms on the Record

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Television history is usually told through famous presenters and celebrated programmes. BBC VT Oldboys remembers the people who had to make the videotapes work.

Visit BBC VT Oldboys.

Chris Booth says the site began in 1998, chosen to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of videotape at the BBC. What started as a modest picture collection eventually expanded, by the site's own account, to more than 2,000 pages and nearly 6,000 pictures. Its November 2022 note invites more corrections, recollections, and photographs. This is an archive assembled by people who remember the machines, not simply a history written about them.

The old-fashioned, picture-heavy navigation is part of the experience. It feels less like a polished museum installation than an enormous staff scrapbook whose maintainers kept adding shelves.

The people behind the recording light

A striking example is the surviving page for Good King Memorex, a BBC videotape Christmas production. It preserves images, sequence links, and names including Grant Watkins, Roger Moody, John Watts, Brian Barwick, and Ross Archer. That material records a workplace's unofficial creative culture alongside its technical one.

Booth's recollections are also documented outside the site. In a September 2001 discussion of BBC VT Christmas tapes, he identified himself as a BBC videotape worker from 1963 to 1993 and described how departmental cameras, tape exchanges, and Christmas productions developed. The discussion shows that these were living professional memories being exchanged online, not just captions added decades later.

For an independent check on the archive's importance, the specialist TV Studio History site explicitly directs readers to the former BBC VT engineers' website for more information and old photographs.

Videotape was a physical, operational process, involving specialist crews, recording formats, editing rooms, machines, and considerable ingenuity. As broadcast technology changed, a surprising amount of that everyday working knowledge depended on people willing to identify an old photograph and explain what it showed.

BBC VT Oldboys gave those people a permanent meeting place. A thousand corporate anniversary videos could probably be made without capturing this much of the work between takes.

Explore the BBC VT archive and its surviving Christmas-tape material.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.