Drama and D'Oyly Carte:
The Jeremy Stevenson Archive
Welcome to an introduction to Jeremy Stevenson's archive.
Jeremy has what is probably the largest and most comprehensive archive of privately-held recordings in the UK.
He is a specialist in vintage radio shows, but also has a lifelong interest in Gilbert & Sullivan, and has an unparallelled collection of G&S performances, especially those by the D'Oyly Carte.
The collection contains thousands of BBC and other recordings on reel, vinyl, "78", cassette, minidisc, VHS cassette, wax cylinder and CD.
The collection has been growing since 1958, when Jeremy's first recordings were made. This is its fifty-first year.
The collection consists of:
1. BBC Radio Plays, comedies and dramas, including thousands of items not kept by the BBC.
2. Gilbert & Sullivan recordings by the D'Oyly Carte Company and others; many recorded live and never intended for broadcast.
Jeremy has supplied numerous items to the BBC for broadcast. Some of the repeats of vintage Paul Temple, Goon shows, some Hancock episodes, Navy Lark, Embassy Lark, and numerous one-off plays not retained by the BBC have come from his archive.
Here is a mini-exhibition of Jeremy's recording equipment as used in 1958, put together for the 50th anniversary. It is all in working order. Click on the images for a bit more detail. By today's standards it is pretty basic, but it contains the essentials essential for an archivist - firstly, a decent recorder; secondly, a reliable radio, and thirdly, a timer for recording items when one is out.
Here is the current workbench, with some minidisc recorders, a Ferrograph tape recorder, another reel-to-reel machine, an analogue tuner, a DAB radio, an amplifier, and a CD burner, all interconnected. Also wired in are a DVD recorder, a NICAM VHS video recorder, and a computer. Jeremy was tinkering with one of the machines when I took the picture. Under the bench are the most recent ten years of Radio Times in bound volumes. The others (all of them, from issue 1) are there too, but out of view.
Jeremy is keen to hear from others who may have recordings of interest. He would like to hear from you if you can supply the following:
1. Pre-1960 recordings made by the D'Oyly Carte company.
2. Radio plays not currently in his archive. (for example, earlier plays by well-known writers - Don Haworth, Allan Prior, Henry Cecil, Ivor Wilson, Don Taylor, Andrew Sachs; classic dramatisations (Dickens, Webster, Shakespeare) - etc.
For further information please visit Jeremy's site. He can be found at
http://www.gilbertandsullivan.freeservers.com .
compiled by Nigel Deacon / Diversity website
