For years the corporation has been digitising its vast reserve of content, turning up lost footage of everyone from General Eisenhower to Victoria Wood. Meet the team bringing a century of footage back to life
Deep inside a giant shed in a business park in west London, Dean Cripps is preparing to digitise some old film. It came up in a canister from one of the vaults downstairs, at the BBC Archive Centre in Perivale. A second reel carries the magnetic track, or sound. Cripps, who is 61 and has worked in the archive for 43 years, feeds the reels through an old telecine machine, lining up the sync marks at the start of each film.
Soon the machine is whirring away, spooling through another piece of broadcasting history. Cripps controls the speed with a mechanical lever, watching images flicker across the screen in front of him. He looks as if he’s driving an old tube train.