There are now more than 7,000 links in BBC Genome to the World Service archive. Here is a selection of some of our favourites, profiling important figures from history.

As we have continued to sift through the thousands of programmes in the World Service Archive to identify more recordings that can be linked to listings in BBC Genome, the range of programmes continues to amaze. As cataloguers, we work in a more or less orderly fashion, navigating an alphabetical list or along a timeline. As listeners, however, we are like radio magpies, attracted by a particular programme, which on listening reminds you of something else. Soon you are happily ricocheting around the archive, finding new programmes you never knew existed. 

So, in this spirit, we offer a “playlist” of individuals whose lives and works feature in the World Service archive. 

One hundred years ago, a lot of British women got the vote, thanks to campaigners and suffragettes like Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960), featured in this Omnibus. Photography may show us what someone looked like but hearing their voice is momentarily to feel their presence. Listening to an early recording of her speaking about the origin of her mother Emmeline Pankhurst’s call to arms – “They must do us justice or do us violence!” – was quite thrilling. However, it’s what Pankhurst did next that is the real subject of the programme, as the defence of Ethiopia’s independence against the fascist advances of Italy became the focus of her activism. After 19 years of producing the New Times and Ethiopian News in London, the radical feminist and socialist, ended her days in a house given to her by the Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Adaba, where, in 1960, she was given a state funeral.

Appetite whetted, I put her name into the iPlayer radio search box and found Sylvia Pankhurst: Honorary Ethiopian, which was broadcast on Radio 4 earlier this year (and so is not yet in Genome). It’s presented by her granddaughter, Helen Sylvia Pankhurst, who grew up in Addis Ababa and still sleeps in the room that was her grandmother’s. Much of Helen’s own working life has centred on Sylvia’s twin passions of women’s rights and Ethiopia. A fascinating example of how ideals and consequences can cascade down the generations.

Another generation, another country, another woman on a mission: American philosopher, writer and director Susan Sontag (1933-2004) staged Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett in Sarajevo in 1993, during the 1,425-day siege of the city. In an episode of Meridian broadcast the following year, Sontag gradually brings life behind (and between) the lines into sharp focus and stands witness for those living under siege. And she makes the case for arts in times of conflict: “Culture – serious culture from anywhere – is an expression of human dignity, which is what people in Sarajevo feel they have lost.”

Once again, an iPlayer search turns up a complementary programme: Still Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo? BBC correspondent Alan Little had been in the audience of that original production and here he returns to the city 20 years later. Where in the scale of human needs do the arts come, he asks theatre director Haris Pasovic, who had invited Sontag to the besieged city. “The most important thing in war is not to survive. The most important thing today is to remain human … That is why art has been a primary need as much as food and sex and water.” Little wonder then that in the intervening years, the epithet “legendary” has attached itself to Sontag’s Godot.

As the first environmentalist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Kenyan Wangari Maathai (1940-2011) also helped people meet their primary needs. Maathai was the founder of the Green Belt Movement, a tree-planting campaign aimed at helping and empowering the poorest people in rural communities. Environmental devastation, particularly deforestation, she said, is interlinked with poverty, the political climate interacting with the physical environment. Here, in one of the World Lectures series from 1998, she talks about her research into rural poverty and how it shaped her ideas of what people can do for themselves. “Everyone can plant a tree.” And not any tree, either. Maathai advocates the planting of indigenous trees to preserve Africa’s biodiversity at a time when she said big agrichemical companies were taking control of more crops. “I am against the patenting of life.”

Another Nobel laureate who believed in preserving our genetic heritage for everyone was the late Sir John Sulston (1942-2018), interviewed in 2002 on Agenda. Officially, he was awarded his Nobel Prize for work on a thousand-celled worm but he really will be remembered as the man who kept the human genome in the public domain. “I could not understand, in my heart, how anybody on earth would actually say they should privatise the human genome… I thought it was absolutely despicable and therefore it became a moral thing. But still the pragmatic view was there as well: that we’d get more medicine, faster, if everybody worked on the data.” His account of the race with venture capitalists who wanted to sequence and patent human genes makes for gripping and salutary listening. What might have happened had his team lost?

We're almost there! And what better way to get ready than by transporting yourself to 1984. The late Sir Terry Wogan's Christmas Day guests included Freddie Starr, Kiri Te Kanawa and Elton John, with a special satellite interview with Victoria Principal, best known for her role as Pamela Barnes in American soap opera Dallas.

You can watch the full programe here or, if you're in the middle of Christmas preparations, enjoy this short clip of Terry Wogan being offered an unusual role in Dallas...

Don't forget you can find more BBC archive content by running a search on Genome and filtering the results by Programme Available. If you're feeling adventurous, just run an empty search and click on Programme Available, or click here. There are more than 11,000 programmes you can watch or listen to on those dark December nights...

Today's window opens up this archive gem: a clip from the first operatic version of A Christmas Carol, broadcast on Christmas Eve, 1962.

The opera was specially commissioned for BBC Television and starred Stephen Manton as Scrooge. The BBC Arts website released if for your enjoyment - along with clips of the 1935 film, Scrooge.

Don't forget you can find more BBC archive content by running a search on Genome and filtering the results by Programme Available. If you're feeling adventurous, just run an empty search and click on Programme Available, or click here. There are more than 11,000 programmes you can watch on those dark December nights...

We’re pleased to announce that a new feature on BBC Genome is now available for you to use.

As so many of you write to us asking how to get hold of BBC programmes, we’ve now included links in the BBC Genome listings of opportunities to buy them.

We’ve identified more than 1,000 BBC programmes which you can either download-to-own or buy DVDs. More will be added in the coming months.

Among the much-loved titles already available are Absolutely Fabulous, Doctor Who and Dad’s Army. So if you’re searching through the listings and come across an entry which carries a shopping trolley symbol (see below) it means you can buy it. The trolley logo and an ‘available to purchase’ link indicate that BBC Store and other providers have a copy for sale. Simply click on it and you’ll be taken directly to a place which will offer you the different purchase options.

You can also filter the search results by clicking on ‘programme available’ in Advanced Search and this will only bring up listings which have either programmes to buy or programmes to see or listen to for free on the BBC website. Remember – there are already more than 10,000 of those.

Do contact us via Twitter, Facebook and our email address – if you have any questions, and to let us know how you’re finding the new feature.

Last year, BBC Genome began to link listings to programmes which are available on the BBC website. 

On the BBC iPlayer you can watch or listen to some programmes during a 30-day catch-up period, but you may not be aware that the BBC website carries special collections and single programmes that are permanently available online. Our aim is to identify all of these and make them easy to find, through the simple and intuitive search function on the BBC Genome website.

The result of our initial efforts last summer was to provide links to around 8,500 permanent programmes - the large majority of them radio, but there are also hundreds of TV programmes - all searchable through Genome, by clicking “Advanced” in the search box, then selecting “Programme available”. 

Since then, the project has continued, with help from within the BBC and also public-spirited members of the audience, who have helped us to track down other interesting programmes online that we had not yet spotted. 

Today, therefore, we’d like to say thank you for helping us to reach another milestone, and hitting the 10,000 programme mark.

We’ve been having a look back at what has been made available over the last few months, and here are some of our favourites:

Some valuable television archive has been added from the BBC Arts site, including these charming vignettes by the great Orson Welles on his life on the stage, and as a director, writer and producer, in the series Orson Welles’s Sketch Book. (Thank you very much for the suggestion, Stuart Ian Burns) 

“Something for me to turn to, when I lose the thread of what I’m talking about…”, says Welles as he brandishes the pad in question, and begins a narrative that includes an anecdote about being saved (by a sudden earthquake) from the embarrassment of forgetting the punch-line of a joke during an after-dinner speech. 

We have also managed to finish listing programmes carried by bbc.co.uk/archive, which contains a wealth of voices from the arts and literature, including Doris Lessing, JG Ballard, and JRR Tolkien. But perhaps this programme is the most apt for us here at Genome, a fascinating historical insight into the birth of the BBC’s sound archive, thanks to the efforts of BBC producer Marie Slocombe (1912-1995). 

(As an aside, we’d like to mention that we will be working on the /archive site in 2016 to breathe new life into it and bring together as many archive collections as we can. About time we hear you say!)

There is also much in the archive for those interested in science and exploration, with a wonderful collection of The Sky at Night, presented by the inimitable Sir Patrick Moore.

Many more archive programmes have been dusted off and uploaded to the BBC website by the excellent BBC Four team, who have made a selection of the best full-length BBC TV programmes available.  If you’re a fan of Sherlock, you may enjoy some real-life mysteries, or for techy nostalgia, a series of programmes on home computing, mainly from the 1980s. 

Added to the many programmes from our domestic channels, we have also started including BBC World Service programmes, thousands of which are now permanently available – particularly those broadcast in the last twenty years - including news and current affairs as well as documentaries and the arts.  

We hope you’ll get plenty of enjoyment searching through the programmes. Perhaps you’ll find a favourite, or a long-forgotten memory. Genome listings finish at the end of 2009, but you can also dip into the BBC's programmes pages to see what you can find from 2010 onwards.

"Tonight brings another exciting moment in the history of the BBC Television Service", announces the listing on the Radio Times, August 27, 1950. "Exactly a hundred years after the first message was sent by submarine telegraph cable between England and France, the first television pictures are transmitted across the sea from one nation to another."

On that day, the first outside broadcast from the continent was made in a one hour special called Television Crosses the Channel, presented by Richard Dimbleby.

The audience were able to watch live images from the Hotel de Ville in Calais, and a long programme of civic celebration and entertainment.

An article on the Radio Times warned: "On Sunday, August 27, the pictures might not be as good as we would like. They might cease. But if they do come, then think as you watch the French faces, as you hear the French voices, of what there is in this moment. In the floodlit square will be television, the new wonder. In the shadows beyond will be stirring the excitement that men felt one hundred years ago when a message passed along a rubber-covered cable laid slowly and painfully on the bed of the sea, the thoughts of the Guards fighting their way back to England, the history of centuries. Even if the hour planned becomes only the glimpse of a moment, it will still be a great moment."

And 65 years later, you can still watch a clip about how the transmission was achieved. Just go to the BBC Genome listing and click on the link to watch it on the BBC iPlayer - this is just one of the more than 8,500 radio and television programmes that you can now find while browsing through our listings.

In August 1965, David Attenborough took viewers along the Zambezi river from its source in the centre of Africa to the Indian Ocean.

"There is a magic, a special logic, in a journey that follows a river", he wrote, in a Radio Times article introducing the series. "Your path is not something devised merely to suit your fancy. It is dictated by the shape of the hills, the slope of the plains, the history of half a million years. The sight and the sound of waters beside you provide a daily companionship. Soon you come to regard the river as a personality."

50 years later, you can still undertake this 2,000-mile journey and watch the series, which is part of BBC 4's Attenborough Collection of programmes, letters and photographs showcasing the early work of the wildlife presenter.

And if you're a fan of all things David Attenborough, you an always search for his name and filter the search by "Programme Available" on the Advanced tab - we've done this for you here. You will find the TV programmes from his early years and some later appearances in radio programmes.

Let us know of other routes you've tried to find available programmes through BBC Genome listings - or if you found any archive gems or unexpected results.

Today, any Genome user can go into the database and sift through just under 4.5 million Radio Times listings for BBC radio and TV programmes broadcast between 1923 and 2009. It’s a rich resource for information, but what about the programmes themselves? Many of you have written, asking to watch or listen to them.

We know that the BBC has about 30% of the programmes listed in Genome in its physical archives, which amounts to more than a million hours of output, but many users will not realise that some of them are already permanently available to view or listen to on the BBC website.

In an effort to make this material easier for you to find, we have embarked on a project to link all of the radio and TV programmes which are already available on the BBC website to their Genome listings. This is just one part of a larger initiative to match Genome listings to programmes.

When I started the work to find the programmes, we weren't sure how many published programmes, which are available outside the 30 day catch-up period for programmes available on BBC iPlayer — we would find on the BBC website. Over the years, different departments have uploaded select broadcast programmes, and they sit under different collections on bbc.co.uk – sometimes categorised and alphabetised, sometimes not. We knew about the large and well-documented collections, and estimated there would be many more obscure, single programmes too.

Our guess when we started was that we might able to link about 3,000 videos or radio programmes – so far, we have found about 8,500 (282 television and 8,200 radio). And we're still working on more.
(Update, 03/08/2015: these numbers have now gone up to more than 300 television and more than 8,500 radio programmes, as we've been adding links and getting very helpful contributions from the public).

Some of the programmes available on the website are well advertised - such as Desert Island Discs, which is a comprehensive and large, single collection curated by the Radio 4 online team that goes back to the 1950s. It has been much talked of on Radio 4 and sporadically added to, as new archive material has surfaced. Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America is another large Radio 4 collection, in which archive material was provided by audience members who had recorded and kept hundreds of episodes of the programme. And BBC Four have a permanent archive collection of TV programmes available to watch on BBC iPlayer. Again, many BBC audience members will already know of the existence of these programmes.

Some material, however, remains harder to find.

In many cases, this content might be on an older version of the BBC website, as is the case with some of the programmes on the BBC Archive site — we are working to update these pages and preserve some of the now out-of-date material elsewhere.

This fascinating programme on the Supermarine Spitfire is a fine example. It was originally broadcast on a regional channel and only made it to national TV three months after its original broadcast date. It would be hard to stumble upon, although it does sit under a curated index.

So how do we, at Genome find these gems? Sometimes this process involves sifting through a chronological list of programmes, like the one you can find here, on the Radio 4 programme page. We have also been helped by developers who work with Genome, who have been able to capture the URLs of permanent programmes that I may not otherwise have spotted.

Then there has been the additional challenge of matching programmes to Genome entries. As those conversant with Genome’s database will know, the listings show what was scheduled to be broadcast – but this does not necessarily mean, in the event, that a specific programme went to air.

Sometimes this necessitated extra research to create an accurate picture of what went on, such as this Desert Island Discs, featuring Umberto Eco. BBC Genome contains two listings for the same programme – which was postponed after the first Radio Times edition had gone to print: http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/fac16c4f89c84edeab163a3c78ac29fc and http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/b1c4df5c8c63439ba5cdc7996afbcda5. Cross-checking these anomalies against contemporary records which show what was broadcast on the date, allowed us to confirm the actual broadcast date, and therefore create an accurate link between Genome and the programme page.

In some cases, a programme listed on the website may have been only one smaller part of an entire programme listing in Genome – such as this John Betjeman film A Bird's Eye View, which appeared as part of Festival 77 in August 1977. In cases like these, records of the BBC’s broadcast output, as well as extensive searches on Genome have yielded answers about times, dates and titles that have allowed us to produce the most accurate possible match between programmes and Genome listings.

When you now search for playable content on Genome, you will find that about 8,500 entries contain clickable buttons – directing you to programmes on bbc.co.uk. And the work continues, we are still turning up new programmes and will continue to add these to Genome (a hint: If you just want to browse the thousands of available TV and radio programmes, you can run an empty search and click on the "programme available" button - this will show you all the listings linked to programmes.)

As for my personal favourites, this episode of Desert Island Discs, featuring the brilliantly witty Tom Lehrer has to come high on my list. In response to Roy Plomley's standard opening question of what he would be happy to leave behind, Lehrer replies: "I'd hate to say dogs, because then everyone will write in..."

We hope you enjoy the archive as much as we have, and if you have seen a whole programme on the BBC website that you think we haven’t spotted – then let us know and we will add that to Genome too.