Charlie Bit My Finger joins Bfi archive with 400 online videos
bfi has added more than 400 British online videos and memes from 30 years of internet history to its National Collection. Fifty of the works are now available on BFI Replay, putting a slice of online culture into a free streaming service instead of leaving it spread across platforms and uploads.
Charlie Bit My Finger And Bfi
The collection includes Charlie Bit My Finger – Again!, the 55-second clip uploaded to YouTube on 22 May 2007 by Howard Davies-Carr, showing three-year-old Harry Davies-Carr putting his finger in his one-year-old brother Charlie’s mouth before getting bitten. Howard said in an accompanying video, “Would I change anything now, knowing what I now know about the Internet? For me, the whole experience has been incredibly positive.” He also said he had received “great, positive comments” from around the world.
Charlie Bit My Finger – Again! later became YouTube’s most-viewed video, which is why its arrival in the National Collection carries more than nostalgia. The BFI is treating a once-ordinary home clip as a durable screen record, the same way it would handle a film print or broadcast artifact.
Liz Truss Lettuce Stream
Another standout is the 12-hour 2022 livestream Will Liz Truss Outlast This Lettuce?, which the BFI said became the longest moving image held in the BFI National Archive. The institute described Liz Truss as the UK’s shortest reigning Prime Minister, a line that places the work squarely in recent political internet history rather than novelty territory.
The range is broader than viral comedy. The collection also includes The Nick Clegg Apology Song: I’m Sorry from 2012, a 2019 news report from an Extinction Rebellion climate change protest, and Olive and Mabel, Episode 1 from 2020, in which Andrew Cotter commented on a competition between his labradors during the covid-19 lockdown. It reaches from the 1997 film Eschaton: Darkening Twilight by Hugh Hancock to the British Museum’s 2025 film How to Make a Roman Gladiator Helmet, from Scratch.
From Twitch To TikTok
The BFI said it preserved these works because “UK produced online moving image works” are “today’s most dynamic, influential screen form.” That remit covers Twitch streams, TikToks, ASMR videos and unboxing videos, along with Dreaming Whilst Black by Adjani Salmon and Natasha Jatania, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared by Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling, Jonti Picking’s Adobe Flash animation Badgers, a 2014 Zoella video, the first Charity Shop Sue video from Selina Mosinski, a 2015 clip of marine biologists removing a plastic fork from a sea turtle’s nose in Costa Rica, and educational films by Lucy Edwards, Catherine Warr and Hannah Witton.
The project sits inside a major two-year heritage effort supported by the BFI Screen Heritage Fund with National Lottery funding. The practical result is simple: 50 works are already accessible on BFI Replay, and the archive now gives British online video the same institutional shelf space that older screen forms have long enjoyed.
