BFI to digitise 100,000 British TV programmes

We are, but these tapes aren't. They won't be on handy cassettes that can just be 'rammed' into machines.

Also VT machines from the sort of era we're taking about needed supervision and considering the age of them now will probably need some upkeep

Does bfi have links to the local archives?

I suppose it depends what it's on in the first place - going back to something on the Beta family, then a will take care of a lot of the grunt work of sticking tapes in machines for you. (As I discovered in a past life, the annoying bit then becomes finding the right box for the right tape when you're unloading it).

I can't quite get the gist of the article.
Does it mean that the BFI are digitising private collections, non-itv/bbc, that are still analogue such as Kaleidoscope and TV-am? Or are the 2 inch collections at bbc/itv still not complete?

The BFI has long maintained its own archive of UK television and to this day continuously records the main UK channels so I assume this its own archive.

Under the terms of the 1990 Broadcasting Act (renewed and extended in the 2003 Communications Act) the BFI National Archive is the official National Television Archive, as designated by Ofcom. The Archive is funded by broadcasters to select material from the current output of ITV, Channel Four and Channel Five, recording off-air to broadcast (currently digibeta) and viewing (DVD) standard for preservation and access. The copies we acquire are exactly as they were seen by the public. We currently select about 12.5% of output, including main daily news bulletins, major fictional and factual programmes and a representative selection of everything else. We record this as regular complete days of output, with all commercials, promotions and so on. Complete initial digital capture has allowed us to be more selective in recent years.

We also have an agreement with the BBC, which has an obligation to preserve its own output, to provide access to all BBC programming, and we record viewing standard copies of all BBC channels. Broadcasters are also keen to offer us specific material, especially on obsolete video formats, from which we make selective acquisitions. Our long-running campaign, Missing Believed Wiped attempts to locate and recover programming ‘lost’ from the official archive collections, with irregular, but often spectacular success.

So the commercial channels all pay the BFI to archive their most important materials yet still more often than not seem to head to Youtube if somebody dies.