Andy Gavaghan is Head of the ITV Archive and Content Library, one of the largest and most significant broadcast archives in the UK. With 1.2 million tapes and 200,000 film cans under his watch in Leeds, Andy oversees everything from the day-to-day supply of archive content to a sprawling two-year digitisation project in partnership with Iron Mountain. In this episode of The Archive Room, Andy walks us through how ITV's archive was centralised from regional broadcasters across the UK into a single facility, how content flows from broadcast into the archive, and the complex decisions around what gets kept and what gets junked. He talks metadata, quality control, film scanning strategy, 4K restoration, AI-driven cataloguing, and the future skill sets the archive world is going to need. There are hidden gems too, including the rediscovery of missing Michael Palin and Terry Jones episodes hiding in plain sight on the shelf, and a remarkable story about the only cameraman to capture the moment the Twin Towers came down. One of the most detailed and illuminating conversations about how a major broadcast archive actually works from the inside. Dominic Dare (00:05) Okay, so welcome to the Archive Room, the stories behind the footage. My name is Dominic Dare and this is my co-host, Sandra Coelho Welcome, welcome. So today on the Archive Room, we're thrilled to welcome Andy Gavahan, head of the ITV Archive and Content Library. Andy oversees one of the UK's most significant broadcast archives, managing everything from legacy film reels to digital assets. His work ensures that decades of iconic TV aren't just preserved, but remain accessible and alive for producers, researchers and audiences alike. So Andy, we're delighted to have you here today. Thanks ever so much for joining us. Andy (00:44) Pleasure. Dominic Dare (00:44) So, you know, for people that don't know, can you just give us a really quick overview of what is the archive facility for ITV? Where is it? You know, what does it look like? Andy (00:56) Yeah, sure. So for those people that don't know ITV, that dates back to around 1955 to the kind of birth of commercial TV in the UK. And initially it was a whole host of regional companies, first kind of broadcasting in the London area and then kind of extrapolating out across England and Wales and Scotland. Around 20 years ago, started to, well, first of all, we amalgamated as a company, so all these different regional companies over the years, over quite a long period of time, kind of merged into becoming ITV. I think it was 2004 that was the kind of final kind of merger between Carlton and Granada, two large kind of players in that kind of regional space merged, and we became ITV as we know it today. And then very shortly after that we began centralizing the archive service into here, into this building, the archive building in Leeds. And it was a long kind of tortuous process sourcing everything from all over the country from where can easily be kind of, you know, far south at Meridian TV or right in the north of England at Border. So coordinating all that was quite a task. And a lot of content was actually held with third party storage facilities as well. So it wasn't all held within ITV sites. So identifying where everything was, was a big project in itself. But over the years, we've centralized the physical archive here into Leeds. And we've today around 1.2 million tapes on site and around 200,000 film cans. And the film actually, interestingly, predates ITV because over the years, I think it was Carlton in the 90s, that acquired rank films. So that's 800 or so movies, kind of the cream of British cinema if you like. Our very earliest title dates back to 1927. It's a Hitchcock silent movie called Downhill, stars Ivan Avello. So we've got a whole host of film titles from the 20s to the 90s, as well as this huge TV collection. Dominic Dare (02:52) I mean it's a massive undertaking. you know, what does a typical day look like for you? I mean, what does your role incorporate? Andy (03:26) Oh, that's, there's no such thing as a typical day. It's got nothing to get out close for the answer, but it's quite a big operation and it's very central to a lot of other things we do. you know, obviously we're a producer, broadcast, a distributor, we do all those kinds of different things and the archive is central to a lot of that. you know, let's say from a production side of things, production team want to access old stories or old clips of various shows then we supply all that with an in-house digitization and film scanning facility. if we have to supply anything, it has to go through the digitization or scanning process. So there's that kind of side of things as well. We also have a catalog operations team that enter all the metadata, particularly for new content coming in, but also for the legacy as well to make sure that our metadata, our catalog is having it should be and we've got really good data we know what we've got we know what we can do with it so my typical day is kind of running all of that sort of stuff and we've got one or two big projects that we're currently either in flight or about to be so big tape digitization project going on right now. That's a two year project to essentially digitize everything that we've got on tape. And then film will be a future phase. We're looking at film scanning and, you know, in fact, last week we were looking at some new film scanners to not only tackle the huge number of films that we've got to scan, but also what's the best possible quality that we can get. So yeah, we'll look at lots of different aspects of supplying archive content to a business that not only produces programs, but also distributes and broadcasts them as well. The broadcast delivery workflow, anything that's repeated obviously has to come from the archives. So we're part of all that. We've got our finger in all kind of pies that you could possibly imagine when it comes to ITV. Dominic Dare (05:32) I think you hit on the down on head is that, you know, it's a commercial operation. So ultimately, who decides what gets archived? So let's imagine that a show, take a story journey. Let's say we've got Love Island. Let's for example, we have that show, it's been broadcast. You know, how can you can you let us follow that journey from something being shown on TV to how it ends up in the archives? Andy (05:54) Yeah, well, I mean, it's a lot easier now than it used to be. When, you know, 10, 15 years ago, you're tracking down tape from production teams and they were sending all the rushes, you know, hundreds of boxes worth of tapes that may or may never get used ever again. It was a completely different scenario than as to what we have now. It's very much automated now. Our life is much, much easier. So anything that gets broadcast, it's almost pre-broadcast, it ends up in the archive, in the digital archive, because it's from there, from that repository that we run our broadcast workflows from, unless it's live content or really late delivery. So even though it's the archive, often we get the programs before they're even shown. And we have a whole host of people across ITV who's ensuring that the content gets delivered because we are part of that broadcast chain. So to ensure that people are meeting their contract and deliverable, if you like, to make sure that they say they're to make a program and we're going to broadcast it, there's what we call content operations teams that manage the intake of that content to make sure that everything is delivered as per contract. we don't actually, from archive perspective, we don't actually chase the assets anymore like we used to when it was all on tape. So we're quite lucky that way. And our policy is that anything that we make or distribute then it goes into the archive, certainly for the period that we own the rights. So for example, we may acquire a program and broadcast it for a year or two. It will be in the archive because that's where a lot of our kind of broadcast workflows originate. But at the point of the rights expiry, then we will either delete it or send it back to the producer, whatever we're kind of contracted to do. And also in terms of other content, of rushes or stock shots and things like that, then it's very much up to the production teams to decide if they want to archive it or not. Much of it doesn't get reused and we're quite happy for that to kind of be ephemeral and not hit the archive. But if it is valuable, then we trust the production teams to make the right decisions about keeping that type of content. Dominic Dare (08:12) Yeah, it does. I it's a complicated web of rights, obviously. You know, we're just interested. Does that sort of mean that you then, because it's a digital workflow now, and is there any editorial decision making on, what you keep and what you don't, or you decide the right side of things, everything that's shot, say, by ITV? Let's say rushes, for example. How would that be handled? Like, do you manage to keep rushes from production companies? Because I know ITV owns hundreds of production companies around the world. How has that workflow managed that kind of content? Andy (08:43) Well, when ITV acquired these different companies, as you say Dom, they're all over the world, kind of the rule is that we allow them to manage themselves as much as possible. So from an archive perspective, all we're interested in from them is the finished program. that's what we would expect it to have delivered. When it comes to other material, then it's up to them if they want to send it to us to archive or whether they want to keep it themselves in their own repositories or delete it. That's entirely up to them. And on a smaller scale, that's what we say to our own internal production teams as well. If they want to deposit it with us, then it's up to them. But the thing that as an archive that way, you know, the red line is really we want to finish programs. That's the policy and everything else is kind of a decision made between ourselves and the production teams. But we're very much guided by the production teams on that because of course, we don't know what rushes the film that we don't know if it's valuable or not. We have to take their guidance on that. It tends to be increasingly that we don't take much in terms of rushes these days. I don't know why that is. Well, it probably is something to do with the fact it's easy to store content within the production team so they can create a hard drive, I guess. Instead of having hundreds of tapes they need to store somewhere. But I think it has to be said as well that over the years when we've done our analysis on reuse of rushes, we can see some single figure percent is used or reused. So our kind of mantra is if it's high value, then we want it. So let's say it's an interview with a prime minister or Paul McCartney or Bowie or all that kind of stuff that you know, the crown jewels, then we expect that to be delivered. But it's very much up to the production teams to identify that, tell us about it. And then we're quite happy to archive it. Sandra (10:46) What happens, Andy, with different formats? Love Island goes out in the USA, it goes out in France, it has an Australian version now. Do you keep all of those in the archive? Andy (10:58) Yeah, yeah we do. you know, it's obviously we want a kind of record of output, but there's reuse, you know, so, you know, whether it's clip sales or whatever. most of our content is being reused for one purpose or another. So yeah, we expect everything. We don't necessarily have the best workflows in terms of getting all of that content, particularly if it's Australia or the Nordics or Germany or somewhere. So it is a bit of a faff sometimes to get hold of that content. But yeah, we expect to have that in the archive. Dominic Dare (11:34) So, you know, just thinking about as my head goes, right? So you've got all this content coming in, right? We touched on it a little bit earlier. Metadata, so finding it and sourcing it and just kind of knowing what you've got. How is that? Is the information about a program, let's say you've taken an individual program for a production company, does that data come with it normally? Andy (11:54) Yeah, yeah. when we commission content or when we acquire content, part of that commission and acquisition process is you don't only send the asset and by that we really mean the digital file of the content that we expect. We also expect metadata to go with it and we have a metadata schema. That will be things like the title, episode title, the cast and crew and all that kind of catalog data that you'd expect to have in an archive search system. So yeah, the intake of data is very much attached to the intake of the asset. And my team, in terms of catalog operations, that's what they manage. They manage the intake of that. they're the team that go chasing that data if it's not supplied with the asset. They also modify the data as well if it doesn't come in quite the format or the level of detail or whatever we expect. Those guys manage that intake. And they also look after the legacy side of things. As we continue to digitize and as part of the digitization project is we're constantly finding things as well. So we're adding new episodes sometimes if you find episodes, quite rare we do that. But certainly new versions and things like that. So that team add all that data to the catalog so other people can find it and also so we know exactly what we've got as well. Dominic Dare (13:19) So in terms of that digitization project, is huge, I mean, archiving everything, how do you partner on that? How do you future proof that to make sure you're holding stuff on a server that is going to last? Because I think that's an issue that comes up a lot when we talk to people in archives is legacy formats, digital servers, what sort of thinking goes into that process and how do you manage such a big thing? How do you even get it going? Andy (13:35) It is a big thing. It's not a standing start actually. We've done about a third of all tape. We've chopped it into phases. So phase one, we're looking at videotape. And as I say, we've done about a third so far. But the rest of it, what we identified was, it's blindingly obvious, everybody knows this, but there's only so many machines and there's only so much time we've got to be able to do this. So we wanted to accelerate what we were doing. We were doing it, but it was pretty slow. We have our own internal digitization facility, but our capacity is around 20,000 tapes a year because we have a lot of, you know, those things we talked about of getting content to people on the day, you know, whether it be for a clip sale or whether it's for broadcast and all that kind of stuff. That's what we do, right? And to some extent, the digitization as a programmatic piece of work is something we do around the edges of the kind of everyday stuff. So we knew we needed to accelerate it and as you say Dom, when you're in that position, you kind of really need to find a good partner to work with. And we'd been working with Iron Mountain for a couple of years, working on, we identified that there were certain formats that were more at risk than others. So things like UMATIC, UMATIC is probably the easiest one or the worst format that we've ever had. So, Umatic, we wanted to make sure that we weren't dependent on that as a format, if you like. We want to just kind of digitize it and just forget about it. So, that's a project we did a few years ago, and we partnered with Iron Mountain to do that because we only had a couple of Umatic machines in-house. So, we did that. We did D2 as well. I had to go over quite a lot of D2. Companies like LWT, for example, were very big on D2, so we had quite a lot of content on that particular format. And again, just not very many machines within ITV existed. So we partnered with Iron Mountain for that. And then when it came to the big digitization projects, obviously we kind of, with it being such a big project, it's got to go through the full procurement process. But I think that experience, Iron Mountain had, working with us for a few years, kind of saw them in good stead and they had a really good proposal. So we work with Iron Mountain for the next two years to basically, you know, complete the videotape digitization piece. Yeah, and then we're looking at film, which is gonna be even bigger, I think. Dominic Dare (16:13) It's a huge one. Sandra (16:13) Now that's huge. When you go through that, do you have a look at restoring some of that film content or will it be just digitization? Andy (16:24) It's a bit of both Sandra, so we're gonna be looking at, to be perfectly honest, I've still got to kind of really figure out what the strategies are around that. And the first thing we need to do is, it's not only what assets, what film is in scope. So what do we need to do? you know, things like rights and all that kind of stuff comes into it. But then with film in particular, what's our best asset, what's our best set of film for us to digitize from. So we get to do that piece of work. I mean, we've got reasonable dates or so. It shouldn't be that difficult, but it's still a significant amount of work for us to be able to do that. And then, yeah, I think exactly what you said, Sandra, we need to decide whether we're gonna just kind of run a factory process and kind of raw scan everything. Or do we do that and restore? I think the answer is we're gonna restore certain things at the point of kind of scanning, if you like, and then other things I think we'll leave to later. And just create a digital copy, the digital master that we can go back to and then effectively create a preservation copy that we can restore and do whatever we want with further down the line. Time is ticking and we just kind of wanna get it done as soon as possible and then circle back and do some more restoration. But also, we do have a restoration team in house and they want to get the teeth into some of the, particularly the film titles. So I think we do both, but we've got to be quite selective about how we do it. Sandra (17:53) Quick question on that is are you going to restore to 4k or is that going to be 4k everything? Andy (17:57) Yeah, 4K. We're certainly going be scanning to 4k and then the restoration is the best possible quality output that we can get. Sandra (18:11) and a hard one, are you gonna junk the film afterwards or are gonna keep it? Andy (18:17) No, we've got to keep the film. There may be some thinning out. We can do film that's really in bad condition. then, so if we've made a nice scan of it and the film's completely shot, sometimes when we scan your film, you kind of realize you've got one pass at it. So maybe that can go by the wayside. And we have a lot of duplication. One of the hallmarks of our archive is we have so much duplication. there's a particular title, Eagle has Landed, so we all know that. We have 546 cans for that one title. So yeah, lots of different versions, lots of different kind of localized language versions and stuff, but we know we've got far too much. And you see things written such as US short version. Okay, but I don't know what that means. Short, you know, how much shorter and what does short mean? Do we have a long version? So within all that, I'm pretty sure there's something we can do. And that thing that I said earlier about finding our best asset, our best set of film, that's going to be the key thing to that whole project. Sandra (19:24) How do you do that, Andy? How do you find the best asset? Andy (19:28) It's just sheer hard work, elbow grease and time. We'd like to think that the data can really guide us on what we've got. So we have a library management system called MediaPulse which has lots of inherited data and new data that we've added to it over the years. This is for the physical archive, by the way. The digital is something different. So we do have data, but you guys have been in this business long enough to know, the older the data, kind of worse, the more sketchy it is. yeah, so there's plenty of gaps in the data. And I think the Eagles Landed is actually a really good example, actually, because what we did, I wanted to use it as kind of, this is as bad as it's ever gonna get, right? We have nothing that's as complex as this in the archive. And so what we had to do was basically pull everything off the shelves, spread it all out on the floor, and then start to kind of put it into their different sets, and then identify what each set was, and then try to make a decision based on what we found out, but I have to say we're still figuring that particular one out, and we've been at it a couple of months. So yeah, we're just gonna have to just look at as much as we can, whether it's the data that we've got within the system or whether it's the labels, but for some of it, we're gonna have to stick it on our steam back and take a look. Dominic Dare (20:48) Can I ask you a question? you know, back to the Umatics, which we know are a dreadful format, would you junk those as well? Because, you know, that comes up a lot. Is the mantra just to always keep the element? I mean, surely that can't be commercially realistic, can it? Andy (21:01) No, as you say, we know we're a commercial enterprise and we've got to kind of always think about the bottom line. So with film, there's something that we can do, but our principle is we're gonna keep film. With tape, the thinking is we're not actually executing this and we've got a couple of years yet before we have to make the decision, but our thinking is that we will dispose of tape once we've got a validated, fully queued seed file created from that tape. Things like UMATIC D2, I'm not even sure we've got a UMATIC player anymore within ITV, so reason to keep it once it's been digitized once we know it's a good copy and yeah, and then that's why the QC process is so important. It's not just a QC process to say, yes, everything's correct and it looks good. It's also to say it's good enough for us to never go back to the tape, right? So our thinking is right now that we're gonna dispose of tape once we've done the full digitization QC and what we call a validation. So a validation isn't necessarily a technical QC, this is definitely the right thing that we think we've digitized. Because sometimes our data's a bit sketchy, sometimes even the labels aren't, you know, we think it's episode one, but actually it's episode two. So we're doing all that checking as well. So at the end of all that, we should have, you know, at least as good a source kind of technical copy. And also a full kind of knowledge that it's the right thing that would digitize. So that makes the disposal of tape decision a little bit easier, but I am kicking that can down the road a bit because I am an archivist and we like to keep things. Dominic Dare (22:37) Honest to goodness, everybody we speak to has done the same thing. It's like nobody wants to be on the hook for junking any original formats, you know. Andy (22:45) Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think for as long as we can go without doing that, we won't. But the day will come, sure Dom, and hopefully we'll be in a really strong position to be able to say, you know what? It's actually fine. Yeah. Dominic Dare (22:58) And so, just from my lay point of view, so when you talk about quality control, like is that done in real time? and how, you know, is that workflows literally somebody has to eyeball this nowadays or is that AI integrated into that workflow? How does the quality control work? Andy (23:04) Well, we usually do, well we're doing three things. The first is, it's an AQC, so an automated machine kind of doing the QC, checking for levels and drop out and all that kind of stuff. So that's pretty good. And then we do a five point check. So that's someone kind of spooling through, beginning, middle, middle, end kind of thing. And that's industry standard, that's kind of what we've done for years and years and years in terms of QC. And then we do that final validation, but part of that validation is also kind of another set of eyeballs on it. It's not real time because we haven't got enough hours of the day to view hundreds of thousands of tapes over the next couple of years, but it's a pretty robust system that we've got. And also, you know, just simple things like, you know, using the broadcast masters and not, you know, dub copies and all that kind of stuff. So ensuring that we're using the best possible asset to digitize so you've got less kind of issue, you know, going forward around technical failure and stuff. Yeah. For me, it's less about technical failure. It's more about the right thing has been digitized. That's my worry, that's the thing that keeps me up at night because with the AQC tools that we've got, they are robust. And then with the kind of human eyeball checks as well, I don't worry too much about technical failure. It's more around we've digitized the wrong thing or we think we've digitized something and it's not that. And then whenever the tape gets recycled, we don't want to get to that point and have made some mistakes. So we try and be as painstaking as possible, but still within the parameters of doing a lot per day, per year. Dominic Dare (24:53) In terms of anybody that is interested in getting into this world, looking to the future now, so as archives, everything's digitized, we've got these workflows in place, what skill sets do you see that are needed now? What areas do you find it hard to recruit? Because this is a very specialized area, so what do you see for this archive over the next 10 years? Andy (25:14) It's a really good question and it's changed such a lot over the last 10 years. I mean, when I first started, everything was kind of tape based. Film wasn't a kind of thing anymore and people quite sniffy about film. Everyone loved the Digi Beta and then it was HD tape. And it was really about a logistical role, making sure everything got to where it needed to get to. And data wasn't so much a thing, it was in everyone's heads and all that kind of stuff. But over the years, that's changed massively. Data is really the thing that drives everything. And even this kind of digitization project is predicated on doing it at kind of on mass, it's really much a data-driven project. It's difficult to make individual decisions, particularly when you're selecting what we need to digitize. So, you know, we've got huge lists of thousands of tapes that we're working from to send off for digitization, and that's really kind of based on data. So data and data management is increasingly important. We're looking at AI a lot now as well. So one of the projects that we're looking at doing next year is getting AI to do, to basically create catalog data. So we have lots of gaps in our data, particularly the further you go back. And what the digitization work helps us to do is kind of the foundational work for us to be able to do cool things like AI analysis. And the things that we look, the products that we're looking at now are really around backfilling catalog data. So creating short, medium, long synopses, finding the casting credits, looking at copyright lines, and getting all that data into the catalog, but on a kind of automated way and doing it at scale. So I would probably say data, AI, kind of key things to think about going forward. I also think that in the next few years, tape will stop being so much a thing, but film scanning and film restoration is going to be around for a long time. So those are skills that I think people will certainly need. And also from my perspective, just kind of technical know-how on how things, on how digital assets are managed. you know, so how our digital workflow is kind of built. What do we do in terms of storage? What's our policy around digital storage and all that kind of stuff? So increasingly technical know-how is a real thing. Part of what we're doing at ITV right now, so the archive is to move to kind of a cloud storage model. And there's lots to learn about how all how we get it into the cloud for a start. Quite lucky at ITV that we have technical teams dedicated to this kind of thing. I don't have to know that much about it because we have experts in-house who do all that. But I certainly think if you're getting into the archive sort of sector, that know-how is increasingly essential. Sandra (28:09) How many people are in your team, Andy? Andy (28:11) I have 15 people in my team and it's roughly five, five, five. So five people looking at archive research and making sure that the content gets to where it needs to get to. Five people working in digitization and five people working in our catalog operations team. Dominic Dare (28:30) That's super helpful. I was thinking just very quickly, how did you get into this Andy? What's your background? Andy (28:36) I completely fell into it. My girlfriend at the time worked for ITV, she worked in news and I finished university. I had no clue what to do, but I thought she had a really cool job. Telly sounded something that was kind of working, you know, in a buttons factory or something. And she came home and she said, there was a job going in the library downstairs. Is that something you'd like to do? I thought, well, it's a way to get into telly and I'm not doing anything else. So I came for the easiest interview I've ever had, or ever will have, because my old boss was basically like, when can he start? Because they just needed someone to just to kind of get tapes out to broadcast and get a list of what was being broadcast you know, in six weeks time, get all the tapes together and then send them to the different broadcast centers. And that was my job when I first started. And it was on a six months temporary contract. And I had kind of highfalutin ideas about being a documentary filmmaker, which I have to say after about two hours of working in the library, I realized this is what I wanted to do. I just absolutely loved it. It was so fast-paced. There was just so much going on deadlines all the time and it just was an adrenaline rush and it's changed a lot now but I still get that feeling every day of this is, I really love doing it. Before, I would say, because this is over 20 years ago, by the way, and archiving wasn't really a thing. It was all about just kind of managing the broadcast kind of side of things. That's what we did in the library. But over the years, we've become this resource for basically all the business, all of ITV's different areas have to plug into it. And our stature has increased over the years and really now we see ourselves as, my role now is really about ensuring that the legacy is kind of in place. So, you know, I guess what I want to kind of achieve is a fully digitized, fully preserved, easily accessible, easily findable, discoverable library that is just there at everyone's fingertips. And it's all there. There's no gaps. It's all done perfectly. That's what I want to do. Dominic Dare (30:58) Well, I mean, that's wonderful to hear and it's amazing because like that's what we dream of and it's huge kudos to you for even being able to take it on. you know, more to ITV as well for trying to make it happen. You know, it's not easy. Andy (31:11) Yeah, you're right. I mean, the difference that that, you know, 10, 15 years ago that the archive or the library was seen as something that, just something that was there that wasn't necessarily there to invest in, there to kind of, you know, really kind of secure and look after, that's completely changed. We're seen as, I would say, ITV's main asset, and we get the kind of support we need now, whereas I would say 10, 15 years ago, that wasn't necessarily the case. Sandra (31:42) Any disasters, Andy, in the archive? Ever? Andy (31:45) Yeah, well, the worst thing that happened, I would say, was the flood we had in 2015. So it's about 10 years ago and it was horrible. It was a boxing day night. So had quite a nice boxing day, you know, bit of a party. Got a call, I think it was about three in the morning from security saying that water was coming into the archive and we'd been, I will say flooded once before and some water had gotten under some roller shuttered doors and had done nothing but clean the floor. It wasn't a flood. He cleaned the floor, it wasn't a disaster. So I was a bit angry. I was like, they've called me at three, just for this. It's fine. Get the cleaners in. They're in tomorrow. It'll be fine. But of course, I had to kind of see for myself. So drove into the city and tried to. So I got to the road where the archive is situated and it was a river. And I thought, oh gosh, okay, this is different from before. So I managed to wend my way down the back streets and got to the archive building. yeah, there was about three inches of water. It's quite a lot because it's a big you know, floor base so three inches is a lot of water and that was my god so called the fire brigade and luckily for us they're literally like four or five doors down from where we're situated, pure fluke. So within about an hour they were able to kind of set up the pumps and start pumping the water out. So it could have been a complete disaster if we weren't so close to the fire service. Very few items were damaged. It was more from people walking through the water and the water then splashing onto a shelf. That was more the issue, so nothing was really saturated. But we sent a few things off to specialists to dry out, but it wasn't too bad. The worst thing actually, it wasn't damage to the tape or the film. 99.99% of it was fine. It was the flooring. So we had kind of chipboard kind of bases on the racking and stuff like that. So all the flooring had to come up. And it was about a year to kind of replace all that and make it good. So yeah, it was a bit of a disaster, but it could have been much, much worse. Dominic Dare (34:25) I think we just, it's amazing, it's fantastic, we appreciate your time. Should we do our little quick fire thing, Sandra? Sandra (34:32) Yeah, but before we start that, can I just ask what are the hidden gems in the catalogue? I just, you know, I want to know what you think are the hidden gems, because I know what I think are the hidden gems. Andy (34:46) All right, it'd be interesting to know what you think. Did you hear a few years ago we found that missing series of the complete and utter history of Britain? So that was, it was almost the precursor to Monty Python. Michael Palin and Terry Jones did this sketch show for LWT in 69, 68, 69. And only two episodes were thought to exist. Network actually released those two episodes. But thinking the other four had gone, we found those hidden in plain sight. They were just kind of miscatalogued. But they were there all the time on the shelf. But it just goes to show how much the data kind of, you know, is how important it is because if it's miscatalogued, it's missing. So that was really good to find that. And it's quite a rare thing because even though data is a bit sketchy, the further you go back, usually you've got a title and you kind of know what you've got, right? You might not know all the detail about it, but you know. So that was a really good one. But we've got so many cool things, you know, whether, you know, I like my football and seeing, you know, 66 World Cup, you know, on film, and that's always a good thing to see. Or, you know, that great interview with Brian Clough, and when he was manager of Leeds or just being sacked. Great TV, you don't get anything like that these days. But I'm a big aficionado of, I love a quiz show. There's not enough of them around. Things like 321 and Bullseye, love all that. Cheesy TV. Sandra (36:21) Should we do the archive spotlight round? Quick questions, one word answers and you see how you get on. Okay, Archive or Digital? What has your heart? Dominic Dare (36:18) Fantastic. Andy (36:27) Archive, definitely. Sandra (36:43) Okay, weirdest thing you found in a film tin. Andy (36:47) I remember once opening a can of sound and everything was, basically it was so deteriorated. It was just dust. Sandra (36:55) This is atrocious. Andy (37:09) That was interesting. You've got to look after your film. It wasn't from here, by the way. It was something that was sent to us. Sandra (37:13) Clip that gave you goosebumps. Andy (37:20) 9-11 the towers coming down so there's a program called 9-11 the firefighter story and is a documentary filmmaker from Anglia TV called Paul Beriff who was in New York filming animal cops and he was in a police station and he heard on the radio or something that there'd been a terrorist attack at the two towers and being the consummate journalist that he was he dropped everything, went with his sound run to the two towers and parked, went in the car, parked as close as he could to get there, went on foot the rest of the way and he literally captured the moment the towers came down and you see the camera just turn and run, he's like, right, I've got to get out of here. I've never seen anything like it. And Paul actually came up to look at the rushes with me because we were cataloguing it all and he was telling me this story and it was fascinating. Sandra (38:22) It's so interesting. I've watched that program and it's heartbreaking to watch just seeing the terror in his voice as well. If Reels could talk, what would they say? Andy (38:43) Digitize me. Sandra (38:39) Most underestimated part of archive work. Andy (38:43) Cataloging. Sandra (38:44) And what if you could take one archive project to a desert island, which would it be? Andy (38:58) Coronation Street episode one. I've seen it so many times because it's just the job, you just end up seeing like the iconic stuff. But I just love it. It's an amazing snapshot of a time that even I didn't, I'm too young even to remember that. But I just love it. That Northern Kitchen Sink drama. It's amazing. Sandra (39:19) have you digitized that one or is that still in the can? Andy (39:21) No, that's digitized. I mean, we broadcast that quite a lot. It's on our ITVX right now. Sandra (39:27) really? Okay. Thank you. That was great. Dominic Dare (39:30) Well, thank you so much. Yes, Andy, thank you so much for your time and your generosity with that. I think that was fascinating. So we really appreciate it. We'll come back and keep in touch over the years as the digitization progresses and see where you guys are at. But yeah, thanks ever so much for joining. Andy (39:44) Thank you