Anglia Television at the East Anglian Film Archive
The School of Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia,
and the East Anglian Film Archive, which is part of the School, has
received a Resource Enhancement grant worth £412,910 from the Arts and
Humanities Research Council (AHRC), to catalogue its important collection
of ITV Anglia programmes and news film dating from 1959.
The collection comprises some 20,000 cans of film and 8,000 videotapes
produced by Anglia Television between 1959 and 2000, including news film,
documentaries, current affairs, lifestyle programming and a small amount of
drama. It is potentially of great interest to academic researchers both for
the insights it offers into regional television history and for the
materials it offers to other disciplines such as history, geography, design
and journalism. The catalogue should make the collection far more
accessible to users. Towards the end of this 18 month project, a research
symposium will be held to help draw attention to the academic potential of
the collection and to situate it in the context of the history of British
television.
This is part of a much larger cataloguing and digitisation programme at the
East Anglian Film Archive, for which fund-raising is on-going, and one of
the purposes of the award is to identify conservation requirements for the
collection and to prioritise material for digitisation. The key outcome
will of course be the catalogue itself, but we will also be recording
interviews with current and former Anglia staff, adding their personal
memories of the production of many of the programmes, and enhancing our
knowledge of changing industry practices over half a century; the
cataloguers will also be able to draw on valuable contextual information,
such as our collection of the Eastern edition of the TV Times dating from
1959.
ITV Anglia Managing Director Neil Thompson said of the award: “We are
delighted that the fascinating history of commercial television in the
region is not only being expertly preserved at the Archive but will be made
more accessible to the people of the region, and beyond, with this
comprehensive cataloguing project. We look forward to digital technology
making more of this rich source of cultural history widely available”.
For further details about the project, please contact Professor Andrew
Higson, Head of the School of Film and Television Studies
(a.higson@uea.ac.uk), or Richard Taylor, Director of the East Anglian Film
Archive (r.taylor@uea.ac.uk).
