But els in deep of night when drowsines Hath lockt up mortal sense, then listen I To the celestial Sirens harmony, That sit upon the nine enfolded Sphears … John Milton, ‘Arcades’ (1634) I spent a great three hours yesterday afternoon at the British Museum’s exhibition Shakespeare: Staging the World. It’s been their blockbuster CulturalRead More
Last Friday I went to the Theatre Plays on British Television conference at the University of Westminster. It was somewhat thinly attended, which is a great shame, since every paper was good (and left you wanting to know more) and the theme is an intriguing one. For the first four or five decades of itsRead More
A perpetual buzz of conversation mingled with the crackle of peanut shells that littered the floor like snow in winter. Every step in any direction crunched … Nearby, children were reading the titles out loud for the benefit of their foreign parents. Some even translated the words directly into Yiddish. Babies cried, kids were slapped,Read More
I’ve been thinking about news lately. At the British Library we’ve just piloted a television and radio news service, called Broadcast News, which has selected news broadcasts from May 2010 onwards taken from seventeen channels available on Freeview and Freesat. But the service can’t just stand alone. It has to join up with other newsRead More
I spent a fascinating, exhausting and illuminating two days last weekend attending the conference of the Federation of International Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA), which was held at the British Library. FIAT/IFTA is a representative body for those archives, commercial and public sector, that care for the world’s television heritage (its film equivalent is FIAF, the internationalRead More