Broadcasting is a long-term medium with a short-term memory.
Although programmes may still be seen and heard - The Avengers outlived ABC, The Bill survives Thames, Round The Horne lived on after the Light Programme - the presentation of a dead company, its personality, disappears forever as its name fades from the airwaves for the final time.
An end-cap may survive, a front-cap on an afternoon’s nostalgia television show, an announcement on a ‘classic’ recording, but to all intents & purposes, a deceased broadcaster may never have existed.
Why? “Fashions change”. “We live in the now, not in the past”. “We’ve left that era behind for something new, something better”.
Excuses. The truth is simpler than these platitudes murmured by the newer companies. They want to erase the memory of their predecessor. Re-write history. Put themselves back in 1955, or pretend that history began in 1993.
Not here. The life of a company, whenever it expired, can be celebrated on the net. We won’t let them go quietly into the dark. We remember them. We celebrate them.
Here is history - learn from it or become it.
