Whitey - do us a favour pal...

jedstar · May 2, 2015

Jay said: ↑

Every goal Neil Redfearn scored which was broadcast by ITV or the BBC or Sky is on a tape, in a video library. Not on crappy VHS, but on Betacam. Betacam does degrade over time, but nothing like VHS, and the quality of the footage will be far superior to what is available on Youtube. This is the case whether it was broadcast nationally or by a local station; whether it was broadcast live, on a highlights package like Motd or Goals on Sunday, or at the end of a News bulletin like Look North. Depending on how far along these institutions have got with their digitising programme, the footage may also be stored in digital format on a hard drive, or it may now be exclusively in digital format with the tapes being recycled/thrown away depending on the archiving policy of these institutions.

I know this because, depending on the area I was working in at the time, archiving what we broadcast was part of my job. Tapes containing the rushes (raw, unedited footage, straight from the camera) are wiped and used again, but everything broadcast is kept. I worked for Yorkshire Television in the news/sport department. Every day we'd broadcast a number of short news bulletins plus our two main shows - Calendar and The Tonight show. Plus we'd have a football highlights package on the weekend and a number of one off specials. The vast majority of our programmes were broadcast live with presenters in the studio linking to video footage. Almost two hours of live footage every day - pretty intense. So, before any of our main programmes - Calendar or Tonight or Goals on Sunday, I'd take a brand new Betacam cassette, label it up and record the show. When the show was done, I'd box up the tape and send it down to the Library, where it'll still be sitting now. The BBC, Channel 4 and 5 and Sky will all have used similar systems. As well as our football highlights shows, we also broadcast goals at the end of the news shows, so there will be multiple copies of many of Neil Redfearn's goals in the archive at Calendar.

All regional and national commercial television centres are linked on a network that we called Lines. If a regional news story went national, ITN would contact the regional news centre who would play their footage down the line to be recorded at the other end. Much quicker and easier than sending tapes all over the place. The same was true with football. If Barnsley are at home to Middlesbrough, there's no reason to send cameras from both Yorkshire and Tyne Tees to cover the game. News broadcasters record the home games of clubs in their region and send out the footage down the line to other regions. We actually broadcast far less on Saturdays, but in the lines room it was our busiest day. Tapes are rushed back from the games to the studio where we try to quickly edit the footage in order to play the goals on our Saturday evening news bulletin and send the footage down the line for other regional broadcasters. They don't want the whole game, just the goals and major incidents, so you're spinning through the tapes trying to send those, while recording the footage that other regional broadcasters are sending from our local teams who are playing away, logging that footage, getting it to the editors and playing the stuff out when we go live. Because Neil Redfearn's goals were sent to other regional broadcasters as well as national broadcasters they will be archived all over the place.

Incidentally, the reason that Barnsley's goals often failed to make the early Saturday evening Calendar broadcast is purely down to the distance the tapes had to travel. Yorkshire Television is based in Leeds, just minutes from Elland Road and not that far from Bradford. There's a smaller studio (or was) in Sheffield, so easy access for Wednesday, United and Rotherham. There's also one in York, one in Hull and one in Lincolnshire. There's no studio in Barnsley, the tapes had to be taken to Leeds (easier to get to than Sheffield) and the time that takes means that they often did not arrive on time. Unless things have changed radically in the last couple of years, it's not that different now. Footage is still recorded on tape, digital Beta, but they look exactly the same. There's no satellite truck at every lower league game to broadcast the footage back to the studio. Transferring the footage from tape to a laptop is time consuming. Finding an internet connection when on location with the bandwidth required to send broadcast quality footage is problematic. It's still quicker to transfer the tapes in the van.

The tapes don't just sit on the library shelf gathering dust. A journalist revisiting the disappearance of a woman 12 months on comes to me and asks for footage about her, so I ring down to the library and ask for the tape for Calendar from a certain date, or anything catalogued with her name. We go through the footage and highlight what's needed to give to the editors. Andy Rammell is signed by Wycombe Wanderers, their regional news broadcaster intend to report it and want footage of him scoring a goal. Our sports journalist knows I'm a Barnsley fan and asks if I can recall a game when he scored a good goal. I remember a cracker he scored when we beat Sunderland 4-0 in 1994, so I ring the library and ask for our football highlights package from 29/30 March 1994, find the goal, play it down the line and it's broadcast that evening in Wycombe. Neil Redfearn becomes the new Leeds manager. Yorkshire Televsion have dozens and dozens of his goals for Barnsley sitting in the library that they can use when covering the story, which they did.

The reason I've bored you to tears telling you all this is that all that footage is yours. It's mine too. It's everyone's. We've all paid for it. The footage at the BBC we've paid for directly through the licence fee. The footage at commercial stations we've paid for by watching the bloody adverts. Eventually it will all be available to everyone (either free or a paid service). It'll be properly catalogued, put on a server and you'll be able to watch it. Type in Harold Macmillan or Neil Redfearn and you'll get a list of News broadcasts or TV shows that these people have appeared in. And with a click of a mouse, or a touch on a screen you'll be able to watch it. Unfortunately, I can't see this happening any time soon, despite the technology being available

However, the archive is open to employees of these companies. If you were on the late shift at Calendar there was a lot of time to kill between Calendar finishing at 6:30 or The Tonight Show at 7 and the late headlines at 10:30. Very little news came in during this time, the reporters and the majority of the staff had gone home. The place was empty apart from a couple of us in the lines room and the presenter. We'd set up the studio, get the tapes for the news stories sorted, do a quick rehearsal then get a takeaway and maybe watch a film. Often, I would have called down to the library before hand so I could watch footage of Barnsley games.

He'll not appreciate me telling you this, but there is someone who uses this BBS with access to the footage of many of Neil Redfearn's goals and any other Barnsley player you care to mention.
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Great stuff this Jay, I've always been a geek for this kind of thing and never had any idea how the footage is sent around the country so this was a great insight.

For me the TV companies are missing a trick not putting all this stuff online, although I can imagine it would be a monumental task given that I assume it would all have to be digitised in real-time and then transcoded into a load of different video formats for compatibility with all the types of devices that can access the internet.

I might email all the main broadcasters actually and see if it's a realistic possibility anytime soon, I'd be happy to pay a handsome amount for the service, and I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands of other people who would be as well.

Whitey - do us a favour pal...

jedstar Well-Known Member

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