2014 was a momentous year for the Scottish electorate and for BBC Scotland. Following a two-year campaign, the people went to the polls in September 2018 to vote on whether or not Scotland should be an independent country. BBC Scotland covered the campaign more extensively than any other broadcaster, producing news bulletins, debate shows, specially commissioned television and radio programmes, and online content. Some of this footage, along with television material from the broadcaster’s own archive was re-used in documentaries made by the in-house Referendum Unit to tell the story of the journey to referendum. In this book I will use two of those documentaries as case studies, seeking to answer Helen Wheatley’s question ‘what do we make of the television archive? (CST online, Wheatley, 2020). In response, I will examine what BBC Scotland archivists and programme-makers made of the referendum archive both conceptually and physically, investigating how television material was archived, chosen for inclusion in a new programme, and used to reconstruct and re-contextualise the past in the edit room. By tracing the journey of referendum footage from source to archive shelf and onwards to the documentaries, I will demonstrate the power of television archive material as a memory tool, showing how its use in new television programmes can play a crucial role in shaping our understanding of the past and present. Studying broadcast television archives and their contents also gives us the opportunity to think about ‘the unseen that structures the seen’ (Ellis, FIAT/IFTA, 2023)—the absences, working practices, and restrictions that structure what we can see in an archive. With this in mind, I will also examine the organisational structure of BBC Scotland’s television archive and the working practices of its archivists to find out what role absence and availability plays in what ends up on screen, thus shaping the story told about the referendum by BBC Scotland.