Episodes

Something Understood broadcast weekly from 1995 for 24 years (Chisholm, 2019) before new production was cut by the BBC. They kept the series running on repeats until Easter 2024 when it was apparently quietly removed¹ from the schedule. At 50 episodes a year, that might make for a catalogue of up to 1,200 programmes but I have only identified 750 so far (BBC, n.d.a, n.d.b; LOFTUS, 2007).

Acquiring a list of episodes

A list of episodes of Something Understood was obtained from the BBC’s Something Understood website (BBC, n.d.b). A database was constructed using a simple csv (comma-separated variable) text-based format which includes episode information and the BBC’s unique programme identifier² or PID. 646 episodes broadcast since February 2007 are listed and have their own page and PID. A column is derived in the dataset to provide a hyperlink to these programme websites. Links to BBC archive pages for episodes broadcast between 2 October 2005 and 29 March 2009 (BBC, n.d.c) are generated and displayed with (alt.). Data captured from these pages is in the Archive-details column: it comprises more running order than a description of the programme.

Earlier programmes were located in the BBC’s Genome project site (BBC, n.d.a) and LOFTUS (2007).

Cataloguing and describing episodes

Broadcast and production information, along with episode descriptions has been obtained between July and October 2021 for all of the 646 known episodes on the BBC Programme website (BBC, n.d.b). This process of cataloguing includes cleaning of the data on import escaping text where appropriate. This information has been cross-checked with the BBC’s Genome Project (BBC, n.d.a) and the Something Understood Archive pages (BBC, n.d.c). 750 episodes have been identified so far but the exercise is not yet complete (and may never be, I am doing other things at present).

It is possible that there are discrepancies between the production company records and the BBC’s index (BBC, n.d.a) but the latter is scraped from OCR³’d paper copies of The Radio Times with crowd-sourced corrections and additions, as well as more recent programme schedule information. Some manual correction of OCR scanning errors is required, mostly to spelling of names or obvious errors like “I caught a Rsh”.

BBC. n.d.a. “BBC Programme Index.” Accessed August 10, 2021. https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/search/80/20?order=first&q=Something+Understood&after=1995-01-01T#top.

———. n.d.b. “BBC Radio 4 - Something Understood.” Accessed March 2, 2021. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qn7f.

———. n.d.c. “Something Understood (Archive).” Accessed October 9, 2021. https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/religion/somethingunderstood_archive.shtml.

Chisholm, Kate. 2019. “The sense of an ending.” https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-sense-of-an-ending-25-april-2019.

LOFTUS. 2007. “Something Understood.” https://web.archive.org/web/20070210013419/http://www.yh19.dial.pipex.com/somethingunderstood.html.

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1. It is possibly significant that the last episode broadcast was a repeat of the last original episode made, with Sir Mark Tully himself “striking a valedictory note” with In My End Is My Beginning.

2. With the at least one of the repeats being aired in 2023-4, I noticed (in December 2023) that a new PID has been allocated, for which I have created a duplication in the database. I have kept these distinct for now, because in these cases, the BBC are maintaining separate episode pages, for example, Stories of the Nativity has b00wnrw8 and m001v7kd. These are the same episode, as far as I can tell.

3. OCR = optical character recognition scans