Just to let you know that David Allan, the man behind the trade test music tapes for BBC1 and BBC2 from 1959 - 1973 died aged 86 on January 27th 2012.

He began his time in Sound Archives in the 1950s and developed an interest in locating sources of foreign music recordings which could be used as non-needletime. Although much of his early work was for radio, television soon got to know of his speciality and asked him to provide the half-hour tapes of continuous music for the test card. This led to the creation of the Foreign Recordings Unit of which he was its first manager.

The success of the TTTs (trade test tapes) soon led to music publishers such as Mozart Edition, Berry and many others beating a path to his door and the department soon had an enviable library of some of the finest recordings.

The department, later rebadged International recordings was disbanded in the mid 1990s.