Speechification

Here’s a particularly egregious example of the wastefulness of the BBC’s programme archiving policy. Heather Couper’s marvelous Cosmic Quest is a thirty-part series about the history of astronomy that’s been going out over the last six weeks on Radio 4: a top dollar resource for enthusiasts, educators and the generally curious. The first twenty-five episodes of the series have been thrown away already and you’re going to have to get your skates on if you want to hear the last five because they too will have been overwritten by the end of this week.

I know this is more a sin of omission than of commission—that’s just the way the automated archiving set-up works. I also know that there’ll be some rights issues here (I imagine Couper herself has plans for further exploitation of the series and BBC Wordwide probably has an option to repackage the shows) but I believe that it’s essentially a kind of public service vandalism to commission such powerful stuff and not to create a permanent home for it online where licence fee-payers, schools, parents and the rest can get at it.

The optimal location for a content asset like this, created using public funds for use by the British public, is in a public place like the BBC’s web site. Any other use of this asset will, inevitably, under-utilise it (even if thousands can be persuaded to buy it on CD or in book form) and the BBC’s purpose here ought to be to make the best possible use of it by sharing it as widely as possible.

So, enough with the whinging. Here’s the final episode, about the search for extraterrestrial life. You can listen to an omnibus edition of the last week’s shows here for the time being and, I notice, the whole series seems to be knocking around the torrentsphere in chunks of various sizes if you’re that way inclined.