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The Television Archive: Past, Present, Future Jason Jacobs
In the spring of 1991 I made my first serious research trip as a young scholar: it was to the BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC) at Caversham Park, just outside of Reading. At the time I was a PhD candidate studying at the University of East Anglia with Charles Barr as my supervisor. A few years before Charles had written a pioneering article where he described the need for a systematic history of early television1 comparable to that of cinema, citing David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson’s The Classical Hollywood Cinema2 as a potential model. It was reading this for the first time that led me to dump my original proposal to study the plays of Dennis Potter (a lucky escape – Glen Creeber, who enrolled at UEA a year later, was to make far better job of it than I could have done3), and I decided instead to pursue the history of early television drama. Scholarly interest in early cinema was peaking since its revival in the late-1970s: Thomas Elsaesser was still at UEA when I arrived and had just published his edited collection Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative;4 Mike Allen was also there finishing his groundbreaking thesis on D.W. Griffith.5 Surrounded by such activity I felt that early television was a vast unexplored area that surely deserved at least as much attention as cinema. (I even called my first conference paper at the International Television Studies Conference in 1991 ‘Early Television: Space, Frame, Narrative’). I decided to look at television drama from the 1930s to the mid-1960s in the UK and the US in order to, single-handedly, fill the gap in scholarship. In particular, I wanted to explore the assertion that the BBC TV’s early drama was constituted by ‘photographed stage plays,’ a Reithian respect for the legitimate theatre.6 Even if true, surely there were camera changes, decisions on framing, performance and other aspects of mise-en-scène that were worth investigation. So my first research trip was full of trepidation and expectation. I imagined that once I entered the archives would open up and reveal their treasures, and that I’d be overwhelmed with relevant material just begging to be written up and published. In order to search for drama plays at the WAC one had to browse through a printed catalogue that provided little more than the titles and number
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of files for each title. And it is fair to say my feelings after gently untying the strings of a blue-grey folder in the quiet reading room were those of incomprehension and disappointment: they were incomprehensible. Some odd memos about obscure bureaucratic procedures; complaints about lack of rehearsal time: no clear statements of aesthetic or artistic intent; no clear shot breakdowns or handy discussions about the distinctions between film, radio and television. On my return and as I read more – one of Charles’ first instructions to me was to read all of Asa Briggs’ History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom7 – and pored over the BBC WAC photocopies I had requested (made largely out of desperation to return with something) I began to realise – that is, I was developing a framework of understanding – how these scraps and memos might make some sense. Although there was no explicit answer to my research question, what was in evidence in the memos, the complaints, the budgets, the rehearsal timetables, the requests for film, was creativity – the residue of artistic endeavour. The file on Clive of India (BBC, 1937), one of the first I consulted, contained a studio plan indicating various camera positions: this was, I later realised, more than a few lines drawn on a page with the edges of a biscuit tin – it was a way of visualising the play, not merely as illustrating a broadcast (radio with pictures) but finding the special conditions in which the play could be organised and framed for live television transmission. Repeated contact with the archive began to teach me that my thesis was not simply about refuting the ‘photographed stage play’ model, but about how creative practitioners practically and intellectually deal with a new medium. There was a debate about the aesthetics of this new medium but it was couched within the pressure of production. Complaints about lack of camera rehearsal time, for example, were part of legitimate bids to explore the mobility of television’s mise-en-scène rather than simply a ruffled producer’s gripe. In what seemed like a weird coincidence between personal endeavour and the wider culture (of course it was not), as I worked on my thesis, television history was becoming more prominent in scholarly publication and elsewhere. On television itself there was the beginning of a glut of television retrospectives inaugurated by TV Heaven (Channel 4, 1992). In academia, television history gained momentum during the 1990s: John Corner had already published his edited collection Popular Television in Britain,8 which provided an exemplary model of the kind of historical research I was interested in, while William Boddy’s superb account of 1950s television in the US demonstrated that historical research on television could be used to map the minutiae of the eddies and swirls of policy, production and critical currents of that time.9 Closer to home at UEA, Susan Sydney-Smith had begun her groundbreaking history of the British police series,10 and there was emerging work on early German television drama.11 By the mid-1990s, Briggs had published his final contribution to The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, John Caldwell’s Televisuality12 placed the television image at the centre of its history, and Horace Newcomb’s monumental Television Encyclopedia13 was in development, eventually providing what remains the most diverse range of histories of programmes, personnel, concepts and policies relating to television.
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By the time my PhD was eventually published (albeit at half its original size and highly modified) as The Intimate Screen in 2000,14 scholarship in television history had clearly reached the point of that of early cinema in the 1980s. To name a few of my favourites: John Caughie’s Television Drama was a major theoretical re-evaluation of that topic and had a significant historical component;15 James Chapman’s superb history of British adventure serials, Saints and Avengers,16 Michele Hilmes’ edited collection, The Television History Book,17 and more recently William Boddy’s New Media and Popular Imagination18 and Derek Kompare’s Rerun Nation.19 In Britain, Janet Thumin’s Inventing Television Culture20 signals how archives such as the BBC WAC and the Granada Archives continue to be used, while Catherine Johnson and Rob Turnock’s edited collection ITV Cultures21 demonstrates that television history is now mainstream. All of the above owe a major debt to primary archival research. Another indicator of the importance of the television archive is the rise of successful grant applications that have television history and, implicitly, archival work as a major component; in particular the multi-institutional AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies (http://www.movinghistory.ac.uk/), which seems to me to demonstrate that television history will expand further into a – if not, the – major field in television studies. As major institutions such as the BBC and NFTVA continue to pursue their ‘missing believed wiped’ detective work, and many now acknowledge that television is part of ‘our heritage’ – personal and national – we will see increased accessibility to archival content for all. In addition, the major development since the mid-1990s is the rise of web-based resources for the television historian. As might be expected, this is an uneven range. But it is possible to at the very least find episode transmission dates, summaries, cast lists and other material that formerly would be very difficult to find. Compared to 1991, television history and television archives have never looked so healthy and appealing. Archival-derived television history is now a vital aspect of most discussions about the medium and seen as a healthy and legitimate pursuit in its own right. I’ve recounted this obviously rather partial and personal history because a significant part of my biography and development as a scholar is intimately linked to researching in television archives. The irony is, as anyone who knows me well will attest, I’m not really an ‘archive’ kind of person: I smoke a cigarette at least every fifteen-minutes, I suffer from mild-to-panic-stricken claustrophobia, and sitting in anything short of the softest reclining leather armchair gives me backache. As a scholar working mostly on northern hemisphere television, but living in Australia, I’m also sympathetic to Michel Houellebecq’s observation that ‘taking a plane today, regardless of the airline, regardless of the destination, amounts to being treated like shit for the duration of the flight.’22 It would be far more convenient for my constitution and demeanour if I concentrated my research on Australian Big Brother. As I write this, I’m sitting under the shade of a palm tree on the back deck of my sunny Brisbane suburban garden, disturbed only by the squabbling of nearby rainbow Lorikeets. Being stuck in a reading room all day poring
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over old files, or watching telerecordings of 1950s television in a poorly ventilated viewing room should have little appeal to me. As a fully paid up technophile in possession of multi-task mobile phone, PDA, PSP, digital music players, laptops of various sizes and more flash memory that you can shake a stick at (all unfeasibly wireless), I’d like to imagine how much easier things could be in a future where the digital age has delivered on its utopian promises. For example, let’s assume that all materials relevant to television history have been scanned or otherwise digitised and are available online for searching and retrieval. Telerecordings, oral histories, documents – everything that still exists materially in the archives (or elsewhere) is there, virtually, online. Let’s also assume all matters of copyright and access have been magically and amicably resolved and the costs are taken up by mutual subscription between public and private institutional archives. Next, imagine a scholar who wishes to find out about, say, the impact of Rudolph Cartier’s BBC production of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) on television aesthetics of the 1950s (a major component of the final chapter in The Intimate Screen). Now it is possible to search across the entirety of BBC output without having to plough through various files in the hope that they will contain something more than a receipt for teacakes in the BBC canteen for Claire Bloom and Sean Connery. A quick search through the WAC would pull up all the relevant files and their contents (scanned in colour of course); the cast and crew list would be further linked to their careers in the BBC, and further linked to non-BBC online sources (such as fan pages, transcripts of memoirs, interviews). One could download the digitised telerecording, interviews with Cartier and the scriptwriter Nigel Kneale, or any other adaptations of the novel on film or television (and their related documents) including the earlier (1953) US version. One could also cross reference this with digitised oral history interviews with practitioners, and search other nation’s online television archives (how many African nations have adapted this novel for television, for example?). In a short amount of time one could have a pretty thorough hard drive folder replete with the harvest of every document or material relevant to the planning, production and reception of the television play. Qualitative analysis software could then be used to search among this material for keywords and phrases; and the chapter pretty much writes itself, right? There are obvious advantages to this scenario: the scholar no longer has to make expensive research trips – at the moment if I want to browse the BBC files I have to travel halfway across the world to a precise point on the global map (the BBC WAC reading room); in my fantasy, I could stay right here under the palm trees and call up this information to whatever the future equivalent of the PSP or PDA would be. Convenience should not be sniffed at: I am currently completing a comparative history of early television drama in the US, UK and Australia, which has required me to travel across the world over the past three-years to various archives at enormous cost in travel, accommodation and photocopying. But in the future I can have access to all material – scanned, online, searchable and retrievable – without disrupting my teaching schedule or family life. Even more than being a convenient
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tool, such a resource would allow a vast augmentation in the range and possibilities for cross-reference of material available to the television historian; it would enable international debates (thanks to translation software) on a scale that are much needed if we are to transcend the narrowness of national television histories. Like many of the fantasies around the promises of the digital archive, this one is both seductive and slightly disturbing. There is a sense of loss, and it is this sense I want to unpack as a conclusion. An important part of that loss seems to me to be purely physical. When, for example, the archivist at the BBC WAC wheels in a trolley full of files I can see and feel the weight and volume of the work ahead. Moreover, I know that I have to work through each file, sifting what is relevant and perhaps adapting my ideas of relevance as the process of selection and analysis continues. If the research visit is costly, there is the pressure of time on this process – frameworks of understanding have to be clear and flexible, available to be quickly sharpened and modified in the light of new material that emerges as I gradually process the files. There is also the sheer palpability of history in the texture, colour and smell of written files that we cannot access through online searching. Even if we can be sure that every scrap, every dust mote and inkblot has been faithfully scanned and represented on screen, there is, I suggest, a loss of contact with the ‘past’ in its original forms. Apart from that, it is doubtful that such a search of online material would tell us very much about television drama aesthetics in the mid-1950s, let alone the impact of Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is partly because the word ‘aesthetics’ is almost never used in any of the archival materials, but mostly because to get a sense of television aesthetics before and after Nineteen Eighty-Four one needs to do a considerable amount of viewing, reading and theorising. It is only by having a relatively clear sense of the trends and fashions in television’s mise-en-scène during this period that any sense of innovation or change can be claimed. We need the time to conceptualise and theorise – time that is available during moments of thinking and contemplation away from the archive, and away from the clickable screen. The sheer availability and searchability of material is not the whole story. We need a framework, a method in order to understand it – and yet this is not something developed comprehensively a priori: we don’t completely know, in advance of looking at the archives, what will count as relevant information. There have to be repeated periods of blind searching, rogue searching, or ‘chancing it’ in the hope that something relevant will turn up, or what seemed irrelevant takes on a new significance in the light of additional findings: one gradually accumulates a sharper grasp of history or even discovers a history one had not anticipated. For example, in 2004 during some research at the National Archives of Australia in Sydney into the Australian Broadcasting Company’s drama department in the late-1950s and early-1960s, I selected a file called ‘Correspondence with Authors’ thinking that it would reveal some clues about organisation, commissioning processes, budgets and so on. It did; but in the main it was full of unsolicited screenplay suggestions from the Australian public. I had discovered a seam of enthusiasm and creativity that I had not even imagined would exist at this early
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stage of the nation’s television development. Similarly, the same year while in the BBC WAC, I wanted to find out about the relationships between scriptwriters in the UK and US and Australia, but, at the suggestion of the archivist, I consulted a file on BBC transcription policy in the 1950s which revealed a fascinating history of the BBC’s failure to break into the market of US television drama. This, in turn, reflected back on reasons for the relative absence of co-operation between UK and US drama screenwriters. Another example: while researching in the Wisconsin Historical Society at the University of Wisconsin-Madison – the repository of many of NBC’s files, including the collection of NBC executive Pat Weaver’s personal files (recently donated by his daughter, Sigourney) – I stumbled upon Rod Serling’s correspondence – decades of it – that, unlike the BBC personnel files, did not distinguish between private and professional papers. For three days I was absorbed in Serling’s life as it changed, publicly and privately, as he became more and more successful during the late-1950s, before eventually abandoning television writing in the 1970s. As it turned out Serling had developed a strong relationship with UK TV drama director Alvin Rakoff – here by chance were many of the issues I wanted to explore in the comparative history being discussed (the next week while in the UK I was able to interview Rakoff himself). These examples illustrate that the nature of archival research is not necessarily governed by clear methodologies set up before we leave home; sometimes one has to allow chance and exploration its place in one’s approach – that is, we have to be alive to the possibility of contingent opportunities that the archive may hide. Archival research, whether in written or audio/visual archives, represents the ontological opposite of surfing the Internet. It requires the patience to proceed at a slow steady pace, a concentration that is available to entrancement, to the gravitational pull of webs of decision making and creativity from the past, while always remaining keenly aware of the demands of the present to sort, select and categorise. It requires the scholar to make and to refine judgements about relevance and significance in ways that online searching only attenuates, standardises and simplifies. I have obviously been rather indulgent – and perhaps over-romantic – in presenting what is a very personal intellectual history here. My point is that this history was in part constituted through archival visits, and I would be a very different academic – and person – without them. As a diffident child of a workingclass family, growing up on the east coast of Norfolk, for the first twenty-years of my life I had rarely strayed more than ten miles from where I was born. The opportunity to travel that archival research necessitated was an important component of my development as a scholar. Whether it was visiting the Museum of Television and Radio in New York and being introduced to various scholars by William Boddy, or discovering how to get to the NFA by tube in London, or by chance striking up a conversation with Darrell Newton at the WAC over tea and biscuits and discovering mutual friends and interests, I feel that my intellectual and social grasp was augmented by archival work. This is in contrast to how some have figured the archives as a site of lonely existential labour,23 or an oppressive repository of selec-
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tion and omission.24 If television itself has been described in terms of its social and socialising abilities as a medium, then there is the paradoxical reality that visiting television archives – the travel, the adaptation to new places, new people, having to articulate then rearticulate one’s project to oneself and others – also offers in the real world what the virtual one cannot: a fundamental sociability. Whatever the future accessibility of television archives, I for one look forward to contemplating another of Pat Weaver’s overlong memos while watching my smoke drift away on the breeze of Madison’s Lake Mendota. This essay is dedicated to the friends and colleagues I met at the University of East Anglia during the early-1990s, including Susan Sydney-Smith, Kevin Donnelly, Mike Allen, Janet McCabe, Glen Creeber (with whom I shared a memorable trip to the BBC WAC), Paul and Nevi (wherever you are now), and Jon Cook, whose lectures on television were an inspiration to me.
Notes 1 Charles Barr, ‘Television on Television,’ Sight and Sound, 55:3, 1986, 157–159. 2 David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, Routledge, 1985. 3 Glen Creeber, Dennis Potter: Between Two Worlds: A Critical Reassessment, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997. 4 Thomas Elsaesser, with Adam Barker, ed., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, bfi Publishing, 1990. 5 Michael Allen, Family Secrets: The Films of D.W. Griffiths, bfi Publishing, 1999. 6 Carl Gardner and John Wyver, ‘The Single Play: From Reithian Reverence to CostAccounting and Censorship,’ Screen, vol. 24, nos 4–5, 1983, 114–124; and Carl Gardner and John Wyver,’ The Single Play: An Afterword,’ ibid., 125–129. 7 Asa Briggs, A History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, vols 1–5, Oxford University Press, 1995. 8 John Corner, ed., Popular Television in Britain: Studies in Cultural History, bfi Publishing, 1991. 9 William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics, University of Illinois Press, 1990. 10 Susan Sydney-Smith, Beyond Dixon of Dock Green: Early British Police Series, I.B. Tauris, 2002. 11 Knut Hickethier, ‘The Television Play in the Third Reich,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 10 : 2, 1990, 163–186; and William Urrichio, ‘Introduction to the History of German Television, 1935–1944,’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 10:2, 1990, 115–121. 12 John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television, Rutgers University Press, 1995. 13 Horace Newcomb, ed., The Encyclopedia of Television, Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997; reprinted in 2005. 14 Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama, Oxford University Press, 2000.
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15 John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture, Clarendon Press, 2000. 16 James Chapman, Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s, I.B. Tauris, 2002. 17 Michele Hilmes, ed., The Television History Book, bfi Publishing, 2004. 18 William Boddy, New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television and Digital Media in the United States, Oxford University Press, 2004. 19 Derek Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television, Routledge, 2005. 20 Janet Thumin, Inventing Television Culture: Men, Women and the Box, Oxford University Press, 2004. 21 Catherine Johnson and Rob Turnock, eds, ITV Cultures: Independent Television Over Fifty Years, Open University Press, 2005. 22 Michel Houellebecq, Platform, Vintage, 2003, p. 30. 23 Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, Rutgers University Press, 2002. 24 Helen Freshwater, ‘The Allure of the Archive,’ Poetics Today, 24:4, 2003, 729–758.
