Broadcasting House - Archive Special

This week on BH, we're at the Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House with a live audience for our archive special. This BH is the culmination of the experiment we started in January, asking you for your requests from the BBC's vast archive. We hear recordings of those affected by the Thalidomide scandal, the first ever uninterrupted sixty seconds on "Just A Minute", a British Olympic medal win from 1976- and we hear from some of the many listeners who got in touch with us to request these items, to ask them what it means to them. We also bring news of a fresh release of archive material relating to the Dunkirk evacuation in WWII, and the censoring of reporting on it at the time. The Director-General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, joins us to talk about how the Corporation is planning to use its archive in future. And to discuss the role of archive in modern media, we speak to Richard Ranft, head of the Sound Library at the British Library, and Emily Bell, soon to be the first director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. The Sunday papers were reviewed by dancing legend Lionel Blair and Diane Abbott MP, in the week she announced her candidacy for the Labour leadership.