The BBC kept a bulk-erasure machine. Tapes that were judged to have exhausted their usefulness went into it, often after being rubber-stamped with three words on a form: "no further interest." From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, roughly sixty to seventy percent of the corporation's output was wiped this way. Doctor Who is missing 97 episodes. Top of the Pops is missing 514. Of the 432 editions of Juke Box Jury, two survive.

The reasons were unromantic. Videotape was expensive and the BBC had no formal archive policy until the late 1970s. Storage cost money, repeats were uncommon, and tapes that had been licensed abroad were expected to be destroyed once the licence ran out. When colour broadcasting arrived, black-and-white material was treated as an embarrassment to clear from the shelves. Engineering departments had budget pressures that nobody in the future would have to answer for. So the tapes went, by the cartload.

Peter Cook offered to buy the colour videotapes of Not Only... But Also out of his own pocket. The BBC wiped them anyway. Terry Gilliam, watching the same logic from inside the building, bought the Monty Python tapes himself before anyone could get to them, and that is the only reason the show survives in colour. The Beatles' single live appearance on Top of the Pops in 1966, performing Paperback Writer, was wiped in a 1970s clear-out. A 2019 discovery turned up eleven seconds of it, filmed off a television set on an 8mm home camera, presumably by a child who was not supposed to be holding the camera at all.

What gets me is that this was administrative, not catastrophic. No fire, no flood, no political purge. A producer signed a form. An engineer fed the tape into the machine. The bureaucratic vocabulary did the violence: low priority, no further use, no further interest. Mark Fisher's hauntology turns on the loss of futures that were once promised. Here is its inverse, the loss of pasts that were already delivered, watched by millions, then quietly retracted. The country has holes in its cultural memory because somebody needed shelf space.

Adam Lee, working as Archive Selector in 1993, ordered the wiping of children's programming from the seventies and eighties without consulting the children's department. Of Play School's 5,500 episodes, fewer than 2,000 survive. Of Play Away, sixty-nine out of one hundred and ninety-one. The 1993 round happened well after the BBC was supposed to know better, and well after the home video market had made the mercenary logic obsolete. A staff member made a call that he was permitted to make, and the call could not be unmade.

Recoveries do happen. The BFI runs an annual event called Missing Believed Wiped, where Dick Fiddy presents whatever has surfaced in the previous year: a Sean Connery teleplay from the Library of Congress, an early Doctor Who episode from a Nigerian broadcaster, a complete Steptoe and Son run kept on the side by a BBC engineer as a courtesy to the writers. The recoveries arrive sideways, through enthusiasm or accident, never through the system that destroyed them. They cannot reverse the loss. They can only register, gently, what was nearly lost a second time.

Sue Malden became Television Archive Selector in 1979 and inherited a culture that had already burnt through most of its own evidence. She was the first person allowed to be sentimental about it. By the time sentiment was permitted, the building was already mostly empty.

Sources: