 To commemorate the 20th anniversary of their first BBC appearance, the BBC (nicknamed "the Beeb") aired the two-hour radio special "The Beatles at the Beeb" in 1982, featuring a mix of BBC performances and interviews (the show was expanded to three hours when syndicated to other countries).The more comprehensive series "The Beeb's Lost Beatles Tapes" was broadcast by BBC Radio 1 in 1988 as 14 half-hour episodes.When gathering material for that series, only a small number of original tapes were found; many more performances were obtained from vinyl recordings of the programmes that the BBC Transcription Department had made to distribute to BBC stations around the world.