Audibility in the Archive: Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s Poetry for Radio

Back in the mid-nineties, my line manager, an archivist at the Film and Sound Library at BBC Wales told me an anecdote. Some years before, the entire archive had to be reorganised, material was to be culled, space on the Cardiff campus had become a premium. These were the days of quarter inch audiotape and editing by razorblade. Recorded sound was still a physical object, preserved in cardboard boxes, catalogued by year, week and programme number. The refurbishment contract necessitated a quick turnaround, which meant that radio producers were under pressure to authorise what materials they wanted kept. A skip had been brought to the back of the archive, and was filling fast. Alarmed by the mini mountain of white boxes that were massing, one evening my boss took a stepladder and climbed into the skip to sift through the reels. Programmes in both Welsh and English were rescued. Some were archived as compilation tapes under the acronym WAL (Wales Audio Library).