I’ve just stumbled across the BBC Programme Catalogue. It’s one of those oh-wow sites that appear from nowhere, and I can immediately see me using on an almost daily basis.

Here’s an example. Let’s pick an old show at random: That’s Life. Typing it in, we find there were 448 episodes, broadcast between 1968 and 1995. Let’s get more specific and look at That’s Life episodes from 1973, the year I was born. There were 13, all well detailed. The 18 August issue was the one closest to my birthday, and the running order was as follows:

ITEM 01: Administrative errors with AA membership ITEM 02: False calims of dodgy mail order companies, new laws to prevent this ITEM 03: Linda WEBSTER and Mike WALJER get to do a round in Brands Hatch. ITEM 04: Dodgy new and second hand cars. Esther i/vs David TENCH from the Consumers Association. ITEM 05: Judith and Stephanie sing ‘Rack and Ruin’ (2m35) ITEM 06: George presents a humerous look at the autumn programme schedules ITEM 07: Finding foreign objects in food ITEM 08: Esther helps Joan DAVIES to remove her manure heap by donating it to gardeners.

Item 8 would no doubt have been the highlight of the night. Clicking on any of the names in there, though, takes you to individual records for each ones, and there are supplementary links for all the metadata attached to the show.

The most extraordinary thing about it all, though, is the sheer scale of the undertaking. The database contains 948,329 items, covering every news story ever presented, every feature on any BBC radio show, every contributor to help out… And with it stretching back to the 1920s, a lot of it has been transcribed from the original handwritten notes, as they only started using computers to log things in the 1980s.

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