Content in Motion | Curating Europe’s Audiovisual Heritage Conference, December 3-4 2015; www.euscreenxl2015.eu This paper will detail the use of archive footage within the BBC2 series Plunder and consider the programme’s production and reception. Today’s seemingly unlimited digital landscape would seem to invite the notion that the appreciation of archive film and television material as a historical object is a contemporary development. The growth of television archives in the last thirty years, and the large number of missing programmes from earlier decades, seems toconfirm the idea that television in the 1950s and 1960s was viewed and experienced as ephemeral, and more concerned with breaking new boundaries than reflecting on its own short history. It is unusual then, to find a series devoted to archive television in the BBC2 Saturday night schedule in the mid-1960s. Plunder was billed as "a weekly raid on the BBC archives" and ran as part of the discussion series Late Night Line-Up from 1965-67. Largely showing excerpts from pre-1955 programmes, the series invited viewers to enjoy what presenter Michell Raper called “the vanished joys of television” including interviews with notable figures and more formal fixtures of early television such as “interlude films”.

1. Visions of Change:
the evolution of the
British Television
Documentary
1950-1969

3. Tx BBC2 1965-1967

4. “Plunder is the programme in which television
lives in the past – its own past”
Michell Raper (producer & presenter)

6. “A Portrait of Gilbert Harding
by Lionel Hale with excerpts
from What's My Line, Face to
Face… and recorded
reminiscences from John
Betjeman , Jean Metcalfe and
Sir Compton Mackenzie”
BBC Two, 23rd January 1966

7. “...the amount of archival material is
woefully small. I think we shall be able
to run until the end of the year, but after
that, unless some fresh hoard is
discovered in the Regions we may have
to shut up shop, or completely revamp
the format”
Michell Raper
22 February 1966