Radio Roots - Richard Dimbleby
April 19th, 2008 by Russell DaviesSomewhere there’s an archive as big as that one in Indiana Jones, full of letters, invoices and memos, detailing the internal machinations of the BBC. They seem to keep everything. No copies of the actual programmes, obviously, but all the accounting documents relating to it. The great advantage of this is it makes for tremendous internal history, lots of little documentaries about BBC people and projects illuminated by the marvellously dry language of the internal memo. This piece on Richard Dimbleby is a perfect example. Lovely stuff. And what a bloke. (And, just in case you were wondering, the Russell Davies presenting it isn’t me. He’s one of the many other, more popular, Russell Davieses.) MP3 here.
April 21st, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Nice one Russell. Terrific programme with some really interesting insights into the early BBC current affairs set-up. I learnt that the corporation was reluctant to call their posse of news gatherers ‘reporters’ in the early days so they were called ‘observers’ for quite a long time…