Isn’t it shocking? 

11 June 2012 tbs.pm/1300

When we started Transdiffusion online over a decade ago, we set our ‘mission statement’ (ugh) to be to bring accuracy to the field of broadcasting history.

The problem back in the wilder days of the WWW was that presentation enthusiasm and pop television history had little in the way of concrete facts to work on. The clips that were available were – and often remain – divorced from their context, so the intrepid band of pres geeks and historians had to make a lot from a little. Clips chosen because they were a rare example of something were often the only example of that thing and indeed of the entire period in question, so were soon seen as being a definitive record of normal practice – the fact that they were posted because they were rare soon fell away.

GeoCities and other such cheap hosting allowed anyone to put up a website about TV pres and dozens, if not hundreds, did. They took things like the existence of a black-and-white version of ATV’s Zoom 2 (the “IN COLOUR” favourite ident of millions) and, lacking a place to put it in the history of presentation, slid it into 1964-1968. Who would appreciate that new monochrome programming existed after colour was introduced and that it was used simultaneously with the colour Zoom 2? Taped copies of breakdowns were passed around as being typical of the time and these sites filled with them, to the point that documentaries today represent television before about 1980 as being little more than apology captions.

We, however, were arrogant. Actually, I was arrogant. As Transdiffusion’s first modern Editor-in-Chief (a title I preferred to General Manager as used by us in the 1960s) I thought our USP could be accuracy. I’m still of that opinion (and it’s still probably arrogant) even in my second stint in the the chair. There’s no crime in using the word “probably”. There’s nothing wrong with “maybe”. We’re part of the Report an Error Alliance because, frankly, we want you to trust us and you’ll trust us most if we respond to mistakes and admit to them. There’s a button to press to report an error on this blog post if you find one. Please do.

We weren’t aware – I wasn’t aware – that the wild days of the WWW still continued. The sites full of well-meaning assumptions promoted as fact disappeared as quickly as the people who analysed our every word and took great delight in posting to forums about spelling errors or weasel words in our articles (oddly they never came to us directly asking for corrections or clarifications, despite the big notices saying we wanted them). But such things still exist online and hell, thy name is YouTube.

We’ve posted a selection of clips on “the popular video sharing website” as Radio 4 always calls it with a teaspoon of distain. And generally we’ve watched amazed as people have used software to download each clip, then edited off our modest frontcap, added something in the region of 15 minutes of bollocks to the middle of it and present the results as fact. And then complain in one way or another that our video, sans the bollocks, is a rip off of theirs, or that they are presenting things with “technical accuracy”. Yeah – specifically dated, almost plausible (occasionally), stolen guff, often with our branding still present in the middle. And then they report us to YouTube for stealing their work.

It is, I’m sure you can imagine, a bit dispiriting. The gap between posting something new on YouTube and it being turned into a nightmare parody is now about 30 minutes. Alas, alas, we’re going to have to start “watermarking” (ie putting a great big ugly dog on the clips) or find other ways of frustrating these people: not because of the theft – although that riles, obviously – but because the thieves are passing off what we do as real and people, especially new young pres fans, are falling for it.

The next time you see a BBC4 documentary that confidently asserts that television before 1989 was amateur rubbish and could barely be kept on air, remember that the researcher for the piece spent his or her day surfing YouTube and finding genuine Transdiffusion archive presentation re-edited to include insane breakdowns and ‘announcers’ with speech impediments talking in too great detail about the issues encountered, and reflect on why we’re collectively unhappy.


Update: main offender cwilliams1976 was banned by YouTube on 19 August 2012. He has since made several bogus legal threats against them, Transdiffusion and our Editor-in-Chief, amongst others.

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A Transdiffusion Presentation

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Philip 12 June 2012 at 11:51 am

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