At its best, British swing music could match anything that the American bands of the 1930s and 40s could do. The BBC holds a golden cache of jazz history in its archive which has never been commercially issued. Yet the fact that they are there at all is a tribute to the determination of the musicians themselves to fight the ambivalent attitude of the BBC mandarins to this suspiciously modern American music. Alyn Shipton tells the story of swing at the BBC with the help of letters and memos from the time and some of the most unrepentantly up-beat, socially dynamic and irrepressibly danceable music ever recorded in the Corporation's Studios. Producer Martin Smith