UK’s Times Online is claiming a first by supplementing its Cannes Film Festival coverage with a free download of Michael Gill’s 1964 short film “The Peaches“. The 15-minute piece was the British entry for Cannes that year and was provided for Times Online by agreement with the British Film Institute (BFI) which holds the rights to The Peaches, one of 900,000 films and TV programmes in its National Film and Television Archive. (And some of that archive is being made available through Screenonline, funded by a $2.2m grant from the UK National Lottery’s New Opportunities Fund.)
The film stars Juliet Harmer with narration by Peter Ustinov and a cameo by AA Gill, now restaurant and TV critic for The Sunday Times. Times Online claims 3,500 downloads for The Peaches in the first day. Incidentally, the site’s music podcasts (interviews with bands and featured tracks) have officially clocked up more than 160,000 downloads since they launched at the end of January. The Times sponsors the BFI’s London Film Festival and Sony Ericsson is currently sponsoring Sounds, the site’s music podcasts.
This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.
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