After rootling in the BBC archives on the internet recently I started thinking, wouldn’t it be good if more programmes from the past were shown in full? The online archive contains less than a tenth of the total footage stored by the BBC (which would amount to nearly 70 years of TV if you watched non-stop), and only a few hundred complete shows out of so many thousands.
The same thing occurred to me again while watching Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words, the first in a series of three, which went out on BBC4 on Monday. There is a segment of the episode devoted to a Horizon presented by Stanley Milgram about his notorious electrocution experiment, and a clip in which he speaks about five consecutive sentences to camera without it cutting away to anything else. There’s just a Yale professor in his corduroy jacket, talking to the viewers as though they’re willing to concentrate for full minutes at a time and have no need of visual distraction.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in