This is a remarkable find: http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax
It's published with a heap of disclaimers, most importantly perhaps that it is only an index, and has no links to the programmes themselves, but half an hour's play with it gave me an inkling of how useful it could be. It has lots of intriguing features, such as links out to Wikipedia, tag clouds, an "appears-with" feature (I was mostly searching for people), FOAF and Atom feeds.

