HC Deb 28 February 1978 vol 945 cc423-32

Motion made, and Question proposed, that this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Graham.]

12.27 a.m.

Mr. Bryan Magee (Leyton)

The basic consideration underlying my motion can be stated very simply. It is that we as a society have not yet woken up to the fact that, with the development of audio-visual material, chiefly used on television and in film, we have acquired a form of historical source-material which is comparable in bulk, interest and importance with the printed record, and that because we have failed to wake up to this fact, we make nothing like the necessary institutional arrangements for its preservation, nor do we make the necessary financial arrangements for its preservation.

I wish to bring these shortcomings to the attention of Her Majesty's Government and to the Minister responsible. The enormous importance of the film and television material that is being made in such huge quantities every day can be brought home if we try to imagine what it would be like if we were now in possession of extensive film of most of the major battles of history, the wars and all the social events of history—if we had on film extensive interviews with most of the major political leaders and military commanders of the past; or if we had interviews with Shakespeare, Beethoven, and so forth.

If we had that kind of material in extenso, it would make a tremendous difference to the whole character of our cultural heritage and to our whole conception of our past. Yet it is precisely this kind of material that we are now making in immense quantities and will continue to be making from this age onwards. We are not keeping enough of it. It would be untrue to say that nothing is being done, though, and I should like very swiftly to outline the existing arrangements, because I wish to go on to criticise their shortcomings.

The British Film Institute monitors the entire television output in this country. It requests between 5 per cent, and 10 per cent, of the material for preservation, but it gets by no means everything it requests. It is given some. It has to buy the rest. It gets, of its request, about 45 per cent, from the ITV companies and a drastically lower figure, between 12 per cent., and 15 per cent., from the BBC.

There are reasons for that discrepancy. The chief one is that the ITV companies tend to use the British Film Institute as their own archives and, therefore, not to attempt to do themselves what they subsidise the institute to do. I say "subsidise", because they give it a quite generous grant to carry out its activities. That grant for the coming financial year will be £40,000.

The BBC gives the British Film Institute nothing, for two basic reasons. The first is that the BBC thinks it would be wrong to give, in the form of grant to another institution, the licence payers' money. The other is that the BBC carries out the institute's function for itself; it has enormous archives of its own.

During the coming year, the British Film Institute will be getting £30,000 from the Department of Education and Science, and the informed "guesstimate" of the people concerned in the British Film Institute is that they are likely to spend about £12,000 of this on buying ITV material and £18,000 on buying BBC material. The reason for the difference in those figures is that the BBC's output is very much higher, not least because there are two channels.

That is the basic situation as it operates at the moment, and it is thoroughly unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. Only a couple of years ago the BBC set up an archives advisory committee, and its terms of reference begin with a phrase which reveals in or between the lines most of what is wrong with the BBC system. The terms of reference begin with the words: Given that the BBC's income from licence fees should be used primarily for broadcasting purposes and that accordingly its archival policies should have as their main object the preservation of those items and categories of material required for its own re-use or reference purposes.… In other words, first, the BBC's archival policy is based on the assumption that the archives are for it, the BBC, for its own use and reference, which strikes me as being obviously far too narrow and far too self-regarding a consideration. Secondly, the BBC, as these terms of reference make clear, is reluctant to spend money on making and keeping archives. Because of the present licence fee system, it has nothing like enough money to make the programmes, let alone keep them, and, of course, keeping archives on film and video-tape is extremely expensive—the tapes are expensive in themselves and the costs of storing are, in the nature of things, ever growing.

A third serious objection to the way the BBC conducts its archives at present is that it does not make them freely available to scholars and other people from outside. It makes access so difficult and so expensive that, for practical purposes, most of the people who would want to make use of those archives cannot really be said to have access to them.

A different shortcoming of the present system is this. I mentioned a moment ago that the British Film Institute monitored everything shown on television, requested between 5 per cent. and 10 per cent. of it for keeping, and got very much less. It is inherent in this situation that it can preserve only what is transmitted. There is one important part of television whose nature is such that a great deal of value is lost before it reaches the screen, and that is news film, which is perhaps most important of all in the context of this debate.

Every day the BBC and Independent Television News receive enormous quantities of newsreel film from all over the world, which obviously show some of the most dramatic and interesting events in various parts of the world. These vast quantities of film have to be cut down for use in television news bulletins. They are cut down to the half-minute or one-minute clips that we see on our screens day after day, and in the process the rest of the film is usually—not always—thrown away. One ends up with tiny clips of film, full of joins, and usually covered with scratches, and in nearly all cases this is all there is to be considered for preservation. In this process film of great historical interest for the future is lost. In practice, whatever guidelines and rules of conduct may appear in print, the actual selection process of this material is extremely haphazard.

We need something in the audio-visual field that is similar to the British Library. We make very carefully instituted arrangements—quite rightly—for the printed word. The British Library has a copy of everything published under copyright in this country, and comes as near as possible to making and keeping a complete record of the printed word. We spend substantial amounts of money—and rightly so—on the preservation of our heritage in the form of buildings, pictures, objects of art, ancient institutions, but when it comes to this new form of historical source material, which is so enormous in scope, so great in impact, and so self-evidently destined to be of importance and value not only to future historians but to ordinary members of society, there are no statutory arrangements for its preservation.

Neither the BBC nor ITV is under any statutory obligation to preserve material. They do so voluntarily, but in both cases it is, in some ways, against their interests. The BBC is seriously short of money, and every penny spent on preserving programmes is a penny off making new ones. The ITV companies are in business to make a profit, and they are not too keen on the substantial sums involved in preserving archives which, however used, cannot generate enough income to cover their costs.

What we need is a national institute, which can develop perhaps out of the existing British Film Institute. This would be a national depository of audiovisual material whose job would be to acquire and preserve such material. Such a body should be publicly funded for these purposes. I should like to see all the other bodies concerned enjoined by statute to make their material available to it. For example, I should like to see the new broadcasting and television licences, when they are awarded—as no doubt they will be—to the BBC and independent television companies, contain a clause requiring those bodies to deposit material with the National Film Archive, just as publishers are required to deposit with copyright libraries copies of all the books they publish. Appropriate funds for this would have to come from public sources, because there are no others they could come from.

12.40 a.m.

The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. Brynmor John)

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton (Mr. Magee) for raising an unusual subject, and unusually interesting subject. As one who is fascinated by history and who recognises—perhaps this is a sign of increasing age—the grip that nostalgia exerts over many people, I clearly see both the relevance and the importance of this subject.

Those who have seen the home film series "Caught in Time" on BBC 2 will not need to be told of the importance of preserving visual images of our times Neither can we underestimate the importance for historians and future generations of having a much better picture of what it was like to live in former times than we have of our past. Indeed, those who live 100 years hence cannot but have a much more graphic picture of our times than we have, for example, of a comparable time—the era of the American Civil War.

Paradoxically, we are in danger in this age of producing too much material. For example, the BBC produces 15 million feet of film per year. Unless infinite resources are to be devoted to such a project, there is bound to be competition between the sorts of records we preserve, whether it be the printed word, the still picture, the gramophone record, or all the varieties of film available.

Almost inevitably, we are not in any position—this seems to happen on so many occasions—to make a clear choice as to a method, nor are we in an uncluttered field. There are existing sources and institutions. It is worth while for me to deal with a few of them, to put the matter on the record.

The BBC has a script library which has, it is said, 6 million papers. The Radio Times Hulton Picture Library has over 6 million photographs. The gramophone library of the BBC has 1 million records. The film library has about 250,000 cans of film. As my hon. Friend said, the IBA makes grants to the National Film Archive, together with a Department of Education and Science grant, and also gives some free material. So there is some preservation of material for future generations.

The recently published Annan Report shows that that committee considered this question and made recommendations which have not as yet engaged as much attention as they should have. The committee urged the BBC, the ITV companies and the National Film Archive, which is part of the British Film Institute to get together to discuss common indexing of catalogues—for example, to facilitate the incorporation of material in the national film archives.

The Annan Committee also recommended that all recordings and transmitted programmes for which no further use was found by either the companies or the corporation should be distributed at cost with perhaps £5,000-worth a year being supplied free. It suggested, thirdly, that some of those closely involved should be offered the tapes at replacement price, again if they were not required.

We are now consulting the various bodies about the Annan recommendations. I shall deal with one or two of the comments which have been received—some from bodies I have enumerated. The proliferation of bodies involved in the preservation of archives will thus be seen. One such body is the British Institute of Recorded Sound, which acquires broadcast recordings and has 300,000 tapes from the BBC. It is probably one of the largest collections in the world.

Another and more unlikely but significant body which has commented is the Imperial War Museum, which has 14 million feet of tape, much of it preserved by agreement with the BBC. It has expressed the wish that it should have a voice in any future scheme on the acquisition of material. However, the main comments have naturally come from the two corporations, and in the main they turn on the fact that the third recommendation—that is, the tendering to people closely connected with programmes—is impracticable having regard to the copyright laws.

For some time the BBC has had the archives advisory committee, under the chairmanship of Lord Briggs, looking at its policy in this field. I accept what my hon. Friend says, that no individual corporation can take the place of a national body if that is what we, as a country, choose to have. I understand that the committee is likely to report in the autumn, notwithstanding the strictures of my hon. Friend about its terms of reference and the stringency of finance. It may have something to say not only about the policy in general but about a policy which is capable of adoption.

There are three main difficulties, certainly with any national archive. First, what material is to be preserved? How should we differentiate between types of programme or types of material? I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks that we were in danger of swamping ourselves. Much of the volume of what is produced in television is seen to be of little lasting significance. Even many news items are of only one day's or possibly two days' interest. Certainly they are not of lasting significance.

My hon. Friend must face the fact—and he and I have discussed this matter, so that I know something of his thinking—that there is a dilemma. If we were unselective and preserved not only what was there but what might have been there but was cut out of broadcasting, the volume of what we would preserve would be enormous. On the other hand, I concede that when one starts to be selective about what one should keep one imposes a doubly subjective standard. First, there is the subjective standard of what the cameraman takes, and that is a selection which is all too rarely realised by many people. But, in addition, there is the editor's selection of the selection, as it were.

I believe that it is possible, with a poor form of selection of the material we wish to keep as opposed to that we wish to discard, to have as unobjective a view of history of our times as was Macaulay's a "History of England".

Mr. Magee

Does my hon. Friend concede that the tenor of his argument supports the view that, since any criteria of selection are bound to be controversial, and since what is thought to be important at one time may seem unimportant five or 10 years later, and vice versa—we often have great interest in past events which people at the time did not share—these become reasons for having wider rather than narrower criteria for selection? They are arguments for copious preservation of material rather than mean-minded preservation of material.

Mr. John

I understand that fully. I am rehearsing the arguments because it is right that we should face these issues. There is too little public discussion, but what my hon. Friend said, and his use of the adjective "copious", means that the institutional arrangements for housing the material will be a considerable task. Perhaps the material would be kept for some time before being weeded out, with all the problems that that would cause, but that would merely be delaying the selection rather than avoiding it.

The housing of such material would demand not only a large, but an ever-expanding building, because the material would never, save through its own inherent decay, be thrown out. We have to consider a housing programme of considerable magnitude and the demand of the other nations in the British Isles for the preservation of their material—probably in separate accommodation.

The question of cost is closely related to these other matters. In evidence to the Annan Committee, the BBC said that keeping all broadcast material for one year would cost £415,000 in initial outlay on tapes, £240,000 in capital cost and £165,000 in operating costs. The IBA put the total cost for the same period at £1.2 million, with £400,000 running costs. We are talking of very large sums, especially when they are coupled with the costs of buildings. Of course, a fourth channel will add significantly to broadcasting output. The corporation says that if there is any spare money it should be devoted to the primary role of producing material rather than being subservient to historical records.

As my hon. Friend fairly pointed out, this is likely to be a Government expense and it is for the nation to ponder its priorities and the probable expenditure and to weigh up what it wants to do. That is why I welcome the debate. It is necessary for us to make a decision. The Annan Committee said that at the moment the cost of a national archive was prohibitive, but that should not inhibit our discussions.

I look forward to the results of the Briggs Committee. My hon. Friend has raised an important subject and I have deliberately put some of the difficulties because we should not approach the matter unconscious of them.

I am conscious that the selectivity mentioned by my hon. Friend in the retention of material can manipulate the future's view of our generation as easily as the selection—sometimes to a disgraceful degree—by some newspapers can distort the view of society of even those living now. The recent television programme on what was and was not shown in the pre-war film newsreels was an interesting example of the way in which selectivity of presentation can mould our images.

I say as a cautionary note that our age is insatiable in entertainment, diversion, knowledge and education. It is not only self-consciously important films and subjects that will be regarded by the future as truly important. Often, the most glittering insight into an age can come almost accidentally from a side shaft of light on a work of art or from books or pieces of music. They can tell us much more than those that set out to describe the age in a conscious manner. I believe that it will not be possible for us to capture everything for posterity, but I hope that we can provide some practical, practicable and balanced way of showing our great grandchildren, or more remote descendants, what we were really like. The Government should be neither indifferent nor complacent.

Indeed, we are not indifferent or complacent. We would welcome contributions in this area. This is to be the year of broadcasting and television debates. That is inevitable with Annan and the renewal of licences to cover the pre-Annan period. It is clear that such matters will loom large in our discussions.

I hope that we shall all retain a proper sense of proportion about what we want to retain, out of the present production that beguiles us every week, to show our descendants. By so doing I believe that we can produce a matchless historical record and a matchless source of fascinating speculation, or information, about what our society was like. I shall be ready to continue the debate with my hon. Friends and any other hon. Members who are interested.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at five minutes to One o'clock.