The Beeb's Lost Beatles Tapes

British music documentary radio series

The Beeb's Lost Beatles Tapes was a music documentary series presented by Richard Skinner, comprising 14 half hour episodes, broadcast on BBC Radio 1 between 1 October – 31 December 1988. Each episode was broadcast on Saturday evening with a repeat on the following Monday.

The series presented rarely broadcast and unreleased BBC recordings of The Beatles made between 1963 and 1968. This included sessions from Saturday Club, Easy Beat and Pop Go the Beatles. As well as the songs, the programme included much of the Beatles' chat and interview material from the various programmes, much of it involving Brian Matthew and Kenny Everett. There are also contemporary interviews with people who were involved in the original programmes. Howlett had previously co produced a two hour programme for Radio 1 in 1982, The Beatles at the Beeb, which was the first airing of some of the same material, but focused on the early years and used only radio programme sources. The programme title is something of a misnomer, since the tapes were not lost but simply shelved for many years. Much of the session material featured on the programme, including some of The Beatles' chat, was finally given an official release on Live at the BBC in 1994 with additional recordings published in 2013 under the name On Air – Live at the BBC Volume 2. The tapes were found in Park Mount Drive, Macclesfield in the late 1970s. John Beeling, a director for the BBC, accidentally met a collector called Mike Adams, who had recorded nearly every broadcast of the Beatles since 1961. Kevin Howlett, one of Britain's top producers, produced a new series using these tapes along with additional material. Howlett later wrote a book called Beatles at the Beeb which credits Adams and others. It was later edited and improved when the Beatles at the Beeb album was released. In May 2012, Unicorn Records released an eight CD box set of the entire fourteen part series, presented in a high gloss box containing eight CD mini jackets; although only available through the grey market, this marked the first release of its kind since its original broadcast in 1988.