Radio Times Archive

So after I watched Porridge yesterday, I saw a friend on Facebook describing how his pre-school children had difficulty with the concept of Live TV that you couldn't pause, let alone no-daytime, linear programming over 3 or 4 channels.

This got me thinking, what was it actually like? Is there an archive of TV listings that I can look at? And of course, because this is the twenty-first century there is but it's not quite what I'd expected.

This area is fraught with creative and technical rights issues so the BBC have created something that at least works even if it's not a facsimile of the Radio Times magazine.

Here's the page for today, forty years ago, on BBC2 but there are listings from 1923 through to 2009.

BBC2 was (is) the minority interest channel distinct from BBC1 which was mainstream News, Sport and Entertainment while BBC2 would do more niche political stuff, documentaries in science, arts and culture. I guess it's much the same now, just that they transmit almost all day and anyway you can timeshift your viewing with iplayer and the web.

But you can see that there was nothing on BBC2 until 11am when it was Play School, a programme for pre-school children. Then it closed down again until half past five for the news and then a documentary that I remember watching with wide eyes on Erich von Daniken's theories about extra-terrestrial life visiting Earth in pre-history. I wouldn't be surprised if fourteen year old me also stayed up to watch some snooker with Pot Black 79 at nine o'clock but I would have drawn the line at golf or darts.

As ever with these things, there is an advisory for those over the age of forty or so that you may well get lost in reminiscence and nostalgia.