That was also their golden era for quality products.
I cannot claim to know why they did this, but my educated/experienced guess as a long-time game developer is that _someone_ thought it would be best for the teams not to rely upon existing projects when creating new ones.
Imagine if painters always started from their previous painting rather than a blank canvas; or if a home developer always started with prefabs of their previous home. You'd get American suburbs and Ikea prints.
The BBC used to have a policy of wiping tapes for reuse, seems crazy in retrospect but there you go. Sometimes people just don't realise what they've got.
The BBC did that to save money for new magnetic tape used for archiving. They thought that parts of their archives were just not valuable enough to preserve and chise to overwrite them instead. Unfortunately, some of the overwritten material turned out to be much more interesting and valuable in retrospect, for example a host of Doctor Who episodes which are now lost completely.
Context that's often forgotten here is that the BBC typically didn't even have the contractual right to rebroadcast these programmes (the actors' union would have stipulated a maximum number of broadcasts, for example two within 7 days).
And video releases weren't yet a thing even if the rights could have been secured, so the apparent value of these archives was minimal.
"Talent unions were highly suspicious of the threat to new work if programmes were repeated; indeed, before 1955 Equity insisted that any telerecording made (of a repeat performance) could only "be viewed privately" on BBC premises and not transmitted"
I'm trying to work out if there's a misunderstanding here, as this only applies to repeat performances, not presumably the original performance. So I wonder if recording at all at that time was not standard practise. I tried to work out in what circumstances telerecording was actually used for at that time, havent found much, but found this interesting white paper on recording the Queens coronation.
I cannot claim to know why they did this, but my educated/experienced guess as a long-time game developer is that _someone_ thought it would be best for the teams not to rely upon existing projects when creating new ones.
Imagine if painters always started from their previous painting rather than a blank canvas; or if a home developer always started with prefabs of their previous home. You'd get American suburbs and Ikea prints.