Online now at https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/, the BBC Genome project offers over ten million listings detailing decades of BBC television and radio programmes.
It’s unclear how many survive in the BBC vaults, and many are lost forever. But over a quarter of a million can be immediately accessed, though there are some unfortunate gaps.
Regrettably, television ones require you to be in the UK but the radio shows are available anywhere. Shows are constantly being taken down with new ones put up. The BBC Genome listing indicates how long each programme is available and gives you a search term so you can prioritise those shows whose availability is ending soon.
[caption id="attachment_1039087" align="alignnone" width="887"] The Mighty Sparrow. -[/caption]
There is a wealth of programmes on TT history and culture. More general ones include a World Service piece on Diversity of Life and Culture in TT or a half-hour Artbeat show on Yoruba Culture in Trinidad. There also seem to be plenty on West Indies cricket and the latest Caribbean news.
But there is much to find on aspects of TT culture. If you are a calypso fan, there are a few fascinating pieces. Unexpectedly, there is an extended visit with Kitchener back in the 1980s in downtown Port of Spain, with world music DJ Andy Kershaw. Anthony Joseph, who wrote a “fictional biography” of Lord Kitchener, did a fine half-hour radio show in 2015 about Kitch that is also available. In 2018, on the Windrush anniversary, a Frontrow show featured Kitch’s London is the Place for Me and a new song, After the Windrush, commissioned for the show and performed by UK-based calypsonian Alexander D Great.
In a recent show called Inheritance Tracks, the British folk singer Eliza Carthy explains how she came to sang and still sings the Mighty Sparrow’s Good Morning, Mr Walker and her meeting with Sparrow in Grenada several years ago.
The show doesn’t have her recording of it, but there are performances on YouTube well worth checking out, especially the dancehall mix, complete with muppets! Listening to her version, you might think it was a traditional British folk song with her fiddle-and accordion-led band. Her ability to translate a Sparrow calypso into another medium is amazing and shows the universality of great calypso.
There is a recent piece on Walter Ferguson, a Costa Rican calypsonian who died recently at the age of 103. For many years, he didn’t issue records, but would home-record his songs on cassettes and sold those to visitors. Currently, there is an ongoing effort to find, preserve and make them accessible.
Sadly, many are not available. There were calypso singers resident in the UK who appeared regularly on the BBC in the Fifties and Sixties, like George Browne and Cy Grant. Grant would nightly sing a new calypso on each day’s news events on a TV news programme.
In 1963, BBC radio had a series called From Atilla the Hun to the Mighty Sparrow, with introductions by VS Naipaul. In 1998, there were two series related to calypso, the first called Billy Ocean'
