Friday, September 12, 2008

History? What History?

Doing this documentary I'm daily confronted by the fact that people from my part of the world have come to believe that what we achieve is not very important.

Can you imagine NBC or the BBC throwing historic documents into a river to make room in the office or simply recording over old tapes cause they don't have tape stock in the television presentation department to put the lottery drawing on?

Today I talked to the head of the sports department at a news network on Third World Girl's home island who confessed that in transferring old shows from tape to digital much of the material from the year I'd been looking for had been lost. These are tapes dating all the way back to...wait for it...1983.

We'd love to have them, he said helpfully. Yeah, so would we. Maybe I should go sit in my wishing chair.

Nevertheless, onward.

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