There was probably a good reason at the time for putting the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, but it escapes me for the moment. Technically speaking, it’s part of the Science Museum (as, for instance, is the National Railway Museum in York), so there may well have been some incentives dangled to build the museum outside London and bring tourists to sunny Bradford. Not that I have anything against Bradford- in fact, I find Bradfordians are nicer people generally than Leeds Loiners, and when I left an envelope full of papers on a Bradford bus last week, the bus company sent the envelope to me without being asked , but apart from one of the most beautiful clock towers in England, it doesn’t have much going for it unless you’re into rugby league or racial tension. It used to have a department store called Brown Muff & Co, but even that’s gone now. Unfortunately, the BFI then opened its own Museum of the Moving Image on the South Bank, so the NMPFT has always been a provincial poor relation. It closed in the late 1990s for a desperately-needed revamp, the best part of which was a scaled-down King Kong attached to the scaffolding at one point, but parts of it are still desperately stuck in the mid-1980s.

The NMPFT has always been free, however to keep costs down it tends to close on a Monday apart from Bank Holidays. However, the funding formula for national museums which came in a couple of years ago now requires all visitors to waste thirty seconds getting a free ticket, in my case from a young woman who seemed set for a long and successful career in paper-shuffling if the time it took her to acknowledge my presence is anything to go by. Given that free entry to national museums was one of Labour’s 1997 manifesto promises, it took them a few years to put it into effect because apparently the VAT regulations had to be changed; up until that point, if you charged admission you were considered a business and could claim VAT back, but apparently if you had free admission you couldn’t. Of course, having successfully implemented their manifesto promise, the government of the day then opened up all these Millennium Projects which cost a tenner a head to get in, but that’s another story.

The thing with the NMPFT is that there are one or two things which are very good and a lot which is badly dated. I tend to head first for TV Heaven, which is one of the very good things- a set of booths where you can watch a refreshingly broad variety of classic British television for free. When I went, the booths were all full, although it’s always interesting to see what other people are watching. One dad was introducing his kids to the joys of Basil Brush while another group were watching a black and white videotaped drama which escaped me- the choice is really that good. Of course, this being 2004, the large viewing room was occupied by youngsters watching Big Brother, apart from one young rascal whose discussion with the attendant went as follows:

Brat: Can you watch the Simpsons here?

Attendant: No, it’s just British television here.

Brat (to me, standing nearby): Are you a manager? Can you watch the Simpsons here?

Me (to the rhythm of child’s head making forceful contact with wall): No, you can’t watch the bloody Simpsons. If you want to watch the Simpsons, go to HMV and buy a bloody tape. It’s on bloody Sky three times a night anyway. Watch Rag, Tag and Bobtail. Watch Casanova ‘73. Watch the Horns of bloody Nimon, for God’s sake, but no, you can’t watch the bloody Simpsons.

When the child’s mother came running up to me shouting "No!" at the top of her voice I feared the worst, however she followed it up with "Punch ‘im in the kidneys. It’s all he understands". Which duty I relinquished to her maternal care.

Many of the exhibits in the museum are, sadly, showing their mid-eighties pedigree. There’s a studio set from a production of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ which was done years ago on ITV, and then there’s the Flying Carpet which, you guessed, is a very suspect CSO demonstration which makes ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ look as gritty and realistic as the Sweeney. And a lovingly recreated 1930s living room with a panel explaining how the television of the time didn’t provide news coverage- with a loop video of Neville Chamberlain arriving from Munich in 1938. Go figure. What’s amazing, though, is the glaring failure of the museum to keep up with developments in technology- for a national museum, there’s no mention of digital technology in what I would have thought would have been a prime site for the likes of Sky to sponsor some kind of display. Satellite broadcasting isn’t even much considered- less than it used to be about ten years ago, when there was a room with live feed from several European satellite stations. But as I say, it’s a poor relation and always likely to remain so- MOMI does the film and television side much better and rather less parochially, so there’s no need for your interested southerner to make the trip north in the way that people do go to York for the railway museum.

Similarly, the shop is patchy- plenty of film souvenirs of the kind found on Hollywood Boulevard, some books of arty photography and a selection of academic books on film and TV which is odd to say the least. I would have expected, for example, the full range of BFI film guides to be stocked, but they have a token dozen and no more. A couple of interesting BFI books about television drama, though, including one which bravely challenges the received wisdom on the "golden age" of the single TV play. The reputation of Play for Today, it argues, is based on about a dozen, predominantly filmed plays. Now 303 plays were made under the Play for Today banner, of which about just over 100 were filmed rather than videotaped. The archive status of anything made before about 1974 is going to be uncertain to say the least and filmed plays were more likely to survive simply by virtue of being on film- videotape being the preserve of the BBC Engineering department and frequently re-used. So it’s possible that we have a distorted idea of what the "golden age" was like because the likes of BBC4 tend to go back to the same set of filmed plays rather than the two-thirds majority made on videotape. It’s an interesting observation and one which would be interesting to put to the test.

To draw to a conclusion, the NMPFT is probably worth a visit, but only really once. There’s not much there that you can’t find out somewhere else, even from the comfort of your own computer, and while it’s nice to have it all in one place, the impression you come out with is how much better it could be.