Television and History: Questioning the Archive

Abstract

This essay raises the question of the status of TV recordings as historical documents. Although it is perfectly legitimate to read old programs from the 1950s onwards as historic evidence of their times, this says nothing about the contribution of television itself to the historical process. To be concerned with the effect of television itself on the general historical process, calls for a different approach: one that focuses not so much on the content of programs as on how they are made and with what available technical resources. This essay explores the status of TV (and radio) archives as academic historical resources through a brief analysis of microphones (radio), cameras (TV) and recording devices (for both).

Notes

1. Naturally, this development is taking place in the blogosphere (for examples, see William Merrin at http://twopointzeroforum.blogspot.com; David Gauntlet at http://theory.org.uk/mediast).

2. That the public has an interest in, and right of access to, the sound and TV archives was recently acknowledged by the BBC, which is now putting selected material from these archives online for general use. This is important and valuable, but by no means the same as the principle of a right of access to explore all the material in the archives—which is what academic historical research really needs, as well as a right to copies of programs as recorded for close textual scrutiny and analysis

3. Proxemics is a term coined by anthropologist Edward T. Hall to capture the social organization of space in all its cultural variety in everyday situations (see Hall, 1966).

4. On these developments in the UK, see Scannell (1996, pp. 58–74) and in the United States, see McCracken (forthcoming).

5. This is how Hilda Matheson, the first head of talks at the BBC (1927–1932), discusses the matter in her seminal study of the effect of radio (Matheson, 1933, p. 75). For a more detailed historical account of the management of talk on radio, see Scannell and Cardiff (1991, pp. 153–180).

6. On the communicative affordances of technologies, especially in relation to talk, see Hutchby (2001).

7. Most DVDs come with extras that include a feature showing the technical tricks and technologies used to create the magical special effects in the movie. My account of the use of the teleprompter for BBC news is taken from a documentary series called Inside the News—a historically informed behind the scenes account of just how television news was invisibly produced and transmitted live to air. It was made in the early 1970s and recorded off-air, at my place of work, the Polytechnic of Central London, for the library of contemporary television output we were then trying to build up for teaching and research purposes.