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I was really delighted this week when two (almost) complete Patrick Troughton Doctor Who stories emerged from Nigeria of all places. By coincidence I have just finished watching the last of Troughton’s stories with the kids. I haven’t seem The War Games myself for at least 25 years and it really was as good as I remembered it – a solid story, excellently scripted and never dragging in spite of it’s 10 episode span. I had been telling the kids that after that it was the last of the 2nd Doctor stories but now we will have Enemy Of The World and Web Of Fear to look forward to. The latter is a real treat as the last Christmas episode alluded to this and left me somewhat clueless as I’ve only ever seen the first episode (as would most people under 50 until this week).

The funny thing is that I discussed this with a colleague who works at the BBC earlier this week. He commented on the rumours indicating that this referred to a couple of old tapes that turned up a while ago. I assumed he meant the two odd episodes that surfaced in 2011 (he probably did). The conversation I was having with him regarded the deletion of old data. Some data has to be removed for legal reasons (for example the data protection act) but more often than not it’s for simple economic reasons to save on disk storage. This was largely the same reason that so many old TV programmes were wiped – the VT was regarded as a far more valuable asset than the content recorded on them. I can understand that it’s difficult to determine what will be of interest in the future but it’s small consolation that so many Doctor Who, Top Of The Pops and Wednesday Plays were regarded as ephemera: passing trivialities to be watched and wiped.

The economic arguments do make some sense in a hard headed accountant’s mind but the costs of archiving in some basic form are surprisingly trivial in the larger scheme of things. The problem is that it’s not always obvious exactly what will prove of interest to future generations. Pick an old newspaper up and the cover story may be intriguing with the sports pages providing a trip down memory lane but the biggest interest is actually the adverts and classifieds. What were people doing, what did they aspire to and spend their disposable income on? Turn to the letters page and it can be surprising at both what ordinary folk were concerned by and even what the prevailing received wisdom was.

The BBC did archive certain programmes, often quite haphazardly, for posterity and sometimes they hit gold. Purely by chance one archive from 1957 is the very first TV appearance of a very young Jimmy Page later of Led Zeppelin super-stardom. Of course, in 1957 the BBC had no idea  of how significant he would become (and not in the area of scientific research as he suggested.) It does make you wonder what else of significance was lost:


Deleting old TV programmes looks mindlessly myopic now but I believe we are doing the same again. This time the destruction of content is in the digital sphere. It looks like trivia but the comments sections on web pages, blogs (like this one), Twitter and the whole raft of social media are going to be the historians’ goldmine in the latter part of the 21st Century. That’s as long as we don’t idly hit the delete button for the sake of the cost of an extra disk drive.