But Dick Fiddy, television consultant to the British Film Institute, takes a more nuanced view. "The BBC constantly faces a hostile press who are desperate to point the finger at any perceived waste," he says, "and that's one of the reasons why they were so diligent in wiping this material. It's seen as cultural vandalism now but at the time it was seen as good financial housekeeping. If the press had found out that the BBC was sitting on 67,000 tapes that it no longer had the rights to broadcast, but that the tapes themselves were perfectly reusable, how long would that have gone uncriticised?"