| Hilary | Jan, can you tell me what initiated the project from the BBC point of view? |
| Jan | Well, it was the idea of Will Wyatt, actually, it was one of his Eureka moments in his
bath, apparently, he thought the BBC ought to be able to use its resources in capturing
and archiving memories of the Twentieth Century. Well the capturing is OK because he could
send us Injuns out into the field with tape recorders; the archiving he had to leave to
the British Library. So the British Library and the BBC got together, they decided on
sixteen themes. I’m an ex History graduate, I was history teacher for nine years so it seems to make sense of my experience in the BBC as a producer, and my previous experience as an historian. They appointed myself and a girl called Sarah Julian as my researcher and we were then given five months for interviews of between 150 and 200 people, of anything up to two hours in length. And then we would have four months in which to make sixteen half-hour programmes. |
| Hilary | You’re quoted in the Burton Trader as saying “Working on the tapes reliably reduced me to tears, frequently to laughter, and hopefully the programs will induce the same effects in our listeners.” What response have you had to the programmes that have been broadcast so far? |
| Jan | We’ve had lots of unsolicited phone calls from people who have just rung in to say that they really enjoyed it, and sometimes where I’ve had contact with people like yourself who have been interviewed, they have been stopped and told that people have enjoyed the programmes. I’ve had no overt criticism so far. |
| Hilary | We are at a unique moment in history: we are about to leave the old Twentieth Century behind us and go into the new Twenty-first Century. What are your feelings on the novelty of the project? |
| Jan | I suppose I feel it shouldn’t have been so novel, but is something that the BBC should actually have been involved in before now. I could see how the Millennium itself tripped the wire and caused people to focus their attention on the large scale but I suppose I mourn the fact that we haven’t been doing it on a smaller scale more frequently over the country, and I hope that we might begin to do so again. |
| Hilary | Dialects are something that I think we take for granted, and it is only when they disappear that we realise we have lost something of our heritage. What are your feelings on that? |
| Jan | Well it’s a cleft stick, really, because you can’t stop it from dying. All you can do is observe it, I suppose, and if in the process of observing it what you’re in effect doing is archiving it you are kind of preserving it in amber. Well. Fine. At least let’s do that. But I don’t think you can inject artificial life into it. |
| Hilary | The tapes from your research are to be stored in the British Library sound archive. What are your views on the lasting value of the project? |
| Jan | I think it will be valuable, not only because it preserves the facts, it also preserves the emotions. I was at great pains to ask people how they felt about things, not just to recount them. You can read events, you can read factual inventions, you can read statistics in the books. What you don’t get is the emotions |