Going Nationwide

A few weeks ago, I had an email on my work account from Paul Lee. He's a writer and researcher interested in various topics, who I don't really know as such but with whom I'd previously had a very small amount of contact online regarding archive television matters. TV history being one of his areas of interest.

One of his other areas of interest is the topic of ghosts, and he had emailed to send me a press release about a discovery he'd made. Not about ghosts, as such, but about a report into them - a report broadcast on the BBC's famous Nationwide programme in 1972, but which hadn't been seen since. Of course, any story involving the digging up of a bit of TV history is always going to be of interest to me, and as this one involved Norfolk it meant that I could do a bit on it for work.

What Paul had been able to do was to establish roughly when the Nationwide report had been broadcast, and arrange to go to the British Film Institute in London to look through their holdings of the programme from the relevant period. He went through episode-by-episode through the weeks in question, to see whether the edition in question and the report it contained on the mysterious goings-on at Bircham Newton in West Norfolk had survived.

It wasn't in the BBC archive - I'd checked myself to make sure. At the time, the main BBC archive didn't regularly preserve full editions of shows like Nationwide. Instead, they usually just archived the pre-filmed reports. While the studio item on the Bircham Newton case was a pre-recorded video insert, unsurprisingly that insert itself also seems to be long gone.

But while the main archive wasn't recording Nationwide, someone else was. I've not been able to ascertain exactly who or why, but the tapes at the BFI came from the BBC so I suspect they were reference copies made by the Nationwide production office themselves. They were recording the episodes off-air onto the Shibaden reel-to-reel video format, and apparently an almost complete, or at least very substantial, run of the programme's 1970s episodes survives in this format.

At some point these Shibaden reels were donated to the BFI, who in 2016 received a National Lottery grant to digitise these and other rare holdings which only survived on now-obscure formats. Which is how they were available for Paul Lee to go and have a look at, and where last month he was able to find the Bircham Newton report.

Thanks to the BFI I was able to get a copy, to combine with an interview I recorded with Paul to make an episode of our Secret Norfolk series on BBC Sounds. There's also an accompanying BBC News Online feature - both out today, of course, to coincide with Halloween. The perfect time, surely, to put out a ghost story!