Oh, I might have more regard for some of the other institutions, you understand, but I believe that it is the BBC that has provided me with the most joy over the years, despite the fact that they never saw fit to put me onto their payroll.
Quite right too.
I'd probably have been utterly hopeless.
Anyway, the point of the Genome project is to provide access to the archives of the Radio Times and opened the floodgates for the nation to wallow in nostalgia and, perhaps start to fill in the gaps in the archive where individual episodes or entire series are "Missing" to use the vernacular, by indicating to the world what is currently "Lost" if they just happen to have a few old tapes of TV or radio programmes knocking around.
"Missing" is, of course, a euphemism for "Junked" or "Misplaced" or "Wiped" and refers to the huge act of cultural vandalism that took place whenever expensive videotapes were re-used back in the 1960s and 1970s because it was in the Public Interest to save money when it was the licence fee that was being spent, and when storing such ephemera was not considered cost-effective when such things, especially in a bright new era of Colour Television, were unlikely ever to want to be seen again.
Within a decade, along came home video and the sudden resurgence of interest in old television from a generation for whom the words "another bloody repeat" (one of my dad's expressions) would have little meaning, and interest in the culture of the past - a place which was already becoming "another country" - was booming.
But the work of a generation of actors and comedians had already been decimated (and more) by the time that happened, especially during an era when, as the makers of the new versions of some lost "Hancock's Half Hour" episodes mentioned on the radio a few days ago - a producer might just go and grab the first available tape off the shelves and record over it.
ITV are not without guilt in this area as well, by the way, as many of their series have huge gaps in their archives, too, not least two personal favourites, "Callan" and the first year of "The Avengers". Interestingly, ITC's film-based output is a lot more fully preserved, not least because much of it was made available for overseas sales, and film was generally more marketable than videotape because it was a more "universal" medium.
Anyway, one of the bigger "selling points" for this new project, as far as the news media and the general public was concerned, anyway was the ability for people to look up what was on TV on the day that they were born (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-29647931), or in relation to other significant dates in their lives - as long they fell between 1923 and 2009 anyway.
So, thanks to the new BBC Genome project, I now know that I was born during the Fourth Test, on the morning of the fifth day of an England v Australia Test Match which was being played at Old Trafford... (a game, incidentally, described as having been "the dullest of draws") and suddenly things in my life actually start to make a lot more sense, given that I'm a Manchester Lad with a bit of an unhealthily obsessive interest in Test Match Cricket.
Perhaps ironically, within a week of this project being announced, a couple of missing episodes of the ITV series "At Last, The 1948 Show" turned up in David Frost's family archive... which at least proves that the hunt goes on, and that occasionally something "new" (Well "old", obviously, but you know what I mean...) will turn up.
Now I do love a good "find" - it gives me hope that other "Lost Treasures" might yet prove to be somewhere out there after all.
I could also burble on and complain about my "At Last The 1948 Show" DVD now being out of date, but, under such circumstances, that might seem churlish. It's probably simply best to just enjoy that fact that something that once was lost is found again, and wonder what's going to turn up next.
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