This week's selection comes from Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English.

This short exchange during a conversation between two young females talking about life and relationships offers a fascinating glimpse into how our linguistic choices reflect our identity. One of the speakers, a British Muslim, uses the phrase bringing home the bacon which instantly sparks off giggles as, culturally and linguistically, it somehow encapsulates her reflections on her joint British and Muslim identity. The phrase she chooses could not be more quintessentially English – the first citation recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the 1924 PG Wodehouse novel, Ukridge.

Bringing home the bacon

Photograph of participants

This extract is taken from the Listening Project – a collection of over 1000 conversations contributed by members of the public on a variety of topics of their own choosing. Listen to the full conversation between Afshan and Olivia here. 

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This week's selection comes from Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds.

Coming face to face with a wild orangutan is something most nature lovers can only dream about. In this evocative interview extract, wildlife sound recordist John Paterson vividly describes a chance encounter with a curious female in Borneo's Danum Valley.

An encounter with an Orangutan_John Paterson (C1627_3)

Orangutan illustration from Brehms Animal Life (courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library)

These critically endangered primates can only be found in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra and are the subject of several conservation programmes whose work attempts to counter the effects of poaching, habitat destruction and the illegal pet trade.

More interviews with wildlife sound recordists, from scientists to hobbyists, can be found here.

Follow @CherylTipp and @soundarchive for all the latest news.

This week's selection comes from Dr Rob Perks, Lead Curator Oral History.

In this moving testimony recorded for ‘Lives in the Oil Industry’ project, oral historian Hugo Manson talks to Bob Ballantyne (1942-2004), a survivor of the Piper Alpha North Sea oil rig disaster in 1988 which killed 167 people.

Bob Ballantyne – surviving the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster

Piper Alpha Disaster Memorial (Elliott Simpson)

The full interview can be consulted at the British Library and is part of Lives in the Oil Industry, a joint National Life Story Collection/Aberdeen University project, begun in 2000, to record the major changes which have occurred in the UK oil and gas industry in the twentieth century, focussing particularly on North Sea exploration and the impact of the industry on this country.

Follow @BL_OralHistory and @soundarchive for all the latest news.

It's not always realised that the British Library has a substantial moving image collection – around 170,000 items. A great many of these are television programmes in digital form and instantly accessible for researchers in our Reading Rooms on any Library computer. All you have to do is find the record on our Explore catalogue, click on 'I Want This', and play. Because of rights issues, we cannot make our television holdings available online offsite, but onsite there is much to discover, of which below is a quick guide.

If you are in a British Library reading at one of our computer, choose your subject through Explore, pick Online: Reading Room only under Access Options, select Moving Images under material type, then at the next page click on I Want This. If an instant access copy is available it will say 'Play this (at British Library only)'

Television news

We have been recording television (and radio) news programmes since May 2010. Currently we record from 22 channels, adding around 50 hours per day. This includes all the main news programmes from the BBC, ITV, Channel and Sky News, plus selected programmes from CNN, Al Jazeera English, RT (Russia Today), France 24, China's CGTN and Nigeria's Channels 24. We make extra recordings of breaking news stories and major stories such as the Olympic and Paralympic Games, general elections and the EU referendum.

We aim to record the same programmes each day, so as well as the main news broadcasts we have good runs of series such as HARDtalk (BBC), Daily Politics (BBC), Listening Post (Al Jazeera), Dispatches (Channel 4), and The Pledge (Sky News). We also record satire shows such as Have I Got News For You (BBC) and News Thing (RT), and just now we're recording many extra programmes relating to the UK general election, including party election broadcasts, debates, speeches (given in full on BBC Parliament) and manifesto launches.

There are currently around 90,00 programmes available, all of them instantly accessible onsite. You can view the programmes within hours after broadcast on our Broadcast News service, available on any British Library terminal, or we upload new programmes to the catalogue at the end of each month.

Our onsite Broadcast News service provides instant access to tens of thousands of news programmes, and a growing number of non-news programmes as well (see the Other Television option, bottom right)

Other television

We have many other television programmes, mostly relating to sound and performance, which we have collected since the 1980s. From 2015 onwards these are all available digitally with instant onsite access. Currently we focus on what are our main moving image collecting areas: current affairs,  performance and oral history. We also record programmes relating to other areas of curatorial interest, including wildlife, literary adaptations, and programmes that connect with major exhibitions that we have held (e.g. Magna Carta, Shakespeare).

Programmes you will find include Later with Jools Holland, Storyville documentaries, Arena and Imagine arts documentaries, Gogglebox, Stacey Dooley Investigates, broadcasts from festival such as Glastonbury and Reading, BBC4 music documentaries, Springwatch, Upstart Crow, Wolf Hall, docudramas such as Damilola, Our Loved Boy, all of BBC4's Keith Richards' Lost Weekend, awards ceremonies, the Proms, the Eurovision Song Contest, and much more. If you want to find them all in one place, visit the Broadcast News service, available on any British Library terminal, and click on the 'Other Television' option.

If you want to know more, or have any problems accessing our instant access videos, contact our Listening & Viewing Service. They can also tell you about accessing our analogue TV collection (search for titles on the SAMI catalogue). We're also adding more and more archive video titles, which will need to be the subject of another post. But please remember, we can only offer access onsite, and on British Library terminals, not your own devices.

This week's selection comes from Andy Linehan, Curator of Popular Music Recordings.

‘Rock Island Line’ was the hit single that sparked the Skiffle craze amongst British youth in the late 1950s. Skiffle was a pared-down mixture of jazz, blues and folk influences played on a mixture of tea-chest bass, washboard, guitars and banjo. Its simplicity made it accessible and appealing to the new generation of British teenagers. Lonnie Donegan’s recording of ‘Rock Island line’, an American folk song popularised by Leadbelly, inspired a host of British musicians including Cliff Richard, Jimmy Page, John Lennon and Paul McCartney to form their own groups and laid the foundation for decades of successful British Rock and Pop music. 

Rock Island Line_Lonnie Donegan and his Skiffle Group

The Skiffle phenomenon is the subject of the forthcoming book 'Roots, Radicals and Rockers: how Skiffle changed the world' by musician Billy Bragg.

Follow @BL_PopMusic and @soundarchive for all the latest news.