Jean Seaton, Professor of Media History at the University of Westminster, and Official Historian of the BBC, closed the first day of the ICA SBA 17 conference in Stockholm with a talk on “Whose job is it to save history anyway?”
About the ICA SBA conference
The ICA SBA conference is an annual conference for business archives, organized by the International Council on Archives’ (ICA) Section on Business Archives (SBA). The April 2017-edition was organized by the Centre for Business History in Stockholm.
See all films and presentations from the conference here.
Jean Seaton is Professor of Media History and the Official Historian of the BBC. She will publish in the Autumn of 2024 the next volume of the Corporations story, Holding the Line: the BBC and the Nation, taking Lord Asa Briggs work forward for Profile Books. This involves everything the BBC did in a tumultuous decade from the conflict in Northern Ireland, to the invasion of the Falklands, to Not the Nine O'Clock News, the Proms, the early music revolution, devolution, Dennis Potter's greatest plays, Attenborough's revolutionary series Life on Earth, and Radio 1s most influential moment, as well as the role of women in the Corporation, programmes for children and a tense and complicated relationship with the government. The historian was given privileged access to BBC archives, but also gained privileged access to state papers. For the first time the Corporation's history is seen in the round. It has depended on several hundred interviews, and explores both the programme making decision that go into the making of an iconic Television series like John le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but also the high politics around the imposition of the broadcasting ban.
