Old Friends

I don’t remember how much of Our Friends in the North I saw first time around. I am sure that it wasn’t all of it – I am pretty certain I didn’t see the whole thing until it was repeated the following year. But I do know that I saw at least some of it on that first run in early 1996; and I know that something about it really drew me in.

 
It seems ridiculous to think back on. I was only 11 years old when it started – I turned 12 halfway through the run. A birthday which brought the disappointing gift of an office chair, which even at the time felt like some sort of indication that childhood was now well and truly over.
 
Our Friends in the North of course wasn’t aimed at me or anyone remotely like me, and I had no real conception of the wider background and politics behind its writing. Newcastle and London, the two cities in which the story is mainly set, were far-off places I knew little of. Probably the main thing I knew about Newcastle at the time was that its football team was, at that point, leading the Premier League and looking likely to win it that season. Oh, and that the people who lived there were referred to as ‘Geordies’, of course.
 
But none of that really mattered. Its author Peter Flannery himself has said, and was saying as far back as 1988, that what really mattered in this story were the characters, and it was their stories which fascinated me. Particularly Nicky, played by Christopher Eccleston, but I wanted to know what happened to all four of the leads, and in all of the supporting plotlines, too. Our Friends in the North had that most vital element for any story – it made me want to know what happened next.
 
I loved it still when I saw it again on DVD a few years later – in 2002, I think, a blink of an eye in some ways but a huge leap from 12 to 18. It’s always remained one of my all-time favourite dramas, and I think one of the greatest things ever produced by the BBC. It made me follow particularly Eccleston’s career with interest, and was a major reason I was so excited in 2004 when he was cast in the lead in Doctor Who.
 
So it’s long been a series I’ve been very interested in. I even created and wrote most of its Wikipedia page some years ago, back when I was heavily into doing that sort of thing – probably about 20 years ago, now. I used to do a lot of editing on Wikipedia, particularly on British television history, but while I enjoyed adding information and helping to create accurate pages about subjects in which I was interested, ultimately I drifted away from it as being slightly unsatisfying. I have too much an ego not to want my writing to be entirely mine under my name, and once it’s done I want it to stay as I wrote it, not to be able to be instantly replaced by someone else’s idea of how it should read. I do still use Wikipedia a lot and go in and fix errors where I spot them, but I haven’t done any actual substantial writing for it for a very long time.
 
Anyway, it didn’t seem likely that Our Friends in the North would ever cross paths with my professional career until last year when I realised of course that the 30^th anniversary of the programme was coming up this January. John Escolme, the History of the BBC manager, is always very kindly receptive to ideas for feature pieces for the website, so last summer I pitched him the idea of an Our Friends in the North 30^th anniversary piece to go up on the 30^th anniversary, January 15^th.

 

Knowing, from the DVD extras and Michael Eaton’s BFI book on the series from back in 2005, just how much drama there had been behind-the-scenes in actually getting the programme into production, I was confident there would be some interesting things to say about it. John agreed, and I was able to go down to Caversham a couple of times in the autumn to look through some of the extensive amount of paperwork the BBC Written Archives hold on the series.
 
Actually, though, it ended up being a slightly different article to the one I had originally thought I might write. Yes, some of those tales of the long delays to production are present in the files and are in the piece. But actually, it became less about that story – which is, after all, comparatively well-known – and more about what was happening in the BBC itself at the time. This was the era of ‘Producer Choice’, the Production / Broadcast split, and the beginning of the gradual closing down of the ‘television factory’ which the BBC had once been.

 
Obviously though there’s only so far you can go with that, in terms of both the amount of detail you can fit into a 1500-word article and the amount you want to put into what is, after all, supposed to be an article for a fairly general audience. But I was pleased with what I was able to do with it.

 

The piece seems to have gone down very well since it went online for the anniversary on Thursday, anyway. I’ve had various nice responses, both from within the BBC and via social media, and it’s certainly been one of the most widely-shared online pieces I’ve written, with the BBC Archive social accounts’ posts about it getting a lot of response. Now, admittedly I have no way of knowing how many of those people actually clicked through to the article to have a read of it, rather than just wanting to share or react to the post and image, but still – it’s a good sign!

 

I was also able to get a little bit of broadcasting out of it. Back in 2023 when I was the guest for CNS two-ways across BBC Local Radio for the Doctor Who sixtieth anniversary, one of the best interviews I did that day was with Anna Foster on Radio Newcastle. She’d been very interested, engaged and fun, so I decided to try dropping her a note to see if she’d fancy a two-way with me to promote the Our Friends piece. Fortunately she did and I went on her show, down-the-line from one of our studios in Norwich of course, on Thursday lunchtime to have a chat about thepiece.
 
I enjoyed it, although I’m not massively pleased with how I came across. As too often when I do something live rather than as a carefully-constructed, built package, I spoke too fast, gabbled too much and repeated myself – very much like a bad Just a Minute contestant. You really would think I’d be better at this sort of thing by now…
 

 

But it was nice to go on, and intriguing to hear how bad they felt Daniel Craig’s accent was! Obviously I’m not in any position to be able to judge, but I’d never seen much criticism of the accents in the series before. I have, though, spotted a few more comments along those lines on social media since then – but also some saying how good they thought they were, too. So who knows…?
 
Anyway, it was good to be able to celebrate one of my favourite television dramas ever made, and a good start to the year writing-wise.

That Was 2025 That Was

As I believe I may have mentioned here before, I am not a huge fan of New Year's Eve. I am not opposed to the idea of celebrating it, of course, and have had some pleasant ones spent with friends in the past, mostly in my late teens and early twenties.

But it's a time when, obviously not uniquely, I become a bit introspective about the progress of my life, or lack of it. How another year has passed and I have not yet achieved what I want to achieve. The feeling of time slipping away from you, and leaving you still standing there wondering where the hell it's all disappeared off to so quickly.

No, stop, wait - I need more time!

So, more as a reassurance to myself than for anything else, I have decided to make this year's New Year's Eve blog entry a catalogue of the year; a reminder that I did manage to do some things in 2025, and even some things of which I was very proud, too.

January

A year ago, I set myself three targets for 2025. To find a publisher for my new non-fiction book, When Saturday Came. To make a series I had come up with for BBC Sounds called The Man Who Made Wembley. And to actually get a first draft written of a new attempt at a novel.

Well, two out of three isn't bad, as the saying goes. I did manage to find a publisher for When Saturday Came. I did make The Man Who Made Wembley.

But I did not write a novel, nor even come close to it. I have storylined one - well, most of one. And written a draft of the first chapter. But the actual writing of an entire draft is a target which is going to have to be shifted over to 2026, after what can only be called a miserable failure this year.

February

Nothing published, but two trips to the BBC Written Archives Centre in quick succession, which is something I always enjoy. One was to do some final research and fact-checking for When Saturday Came, to fill in a few gaps and bits and pieces concerning details about a few different programmes here and there. The other was on in-house business, looking at the BBC's Wembley Stadium files of the relevant period for The Man Who Made Wembley. This did help in several ways, most pleasingly enabling me to quote from a letter referencing a particular broadcast in the 1930s, asking if covering this particular event would be possible, and then actually being able to include a clip from a surviving excerpt of that very broadcast in the series itself.

March

Mostly continuing to work on Wembley, having conducted the interviews through January and February, I did most of the editing-together of it this month. Early in the month I also made a research trip to the British Library in London to look at some 1930s newspapers, and as is often the case with these things found myself distracted by some of the weird and wonderful adverts on display. For example, how did this work out for you, 1930s...?

April

My first professionally-released piece of writing of the year. In February I'd been asked if I had any ideas for a Doctor Who Magazine special celebrating 20 years of the Ninth Doctor. I came up with an idea of telling the story of some of the online reaction to Christopher Eccleston's casting in the part, as I knew I had some saved material from the old Outpost Gallifrey forum, the main place for online discussion of Doctor Who in those days, which didn't exist anywhere else. I think I made a pretty good job of it, and the special with the article in came out this month. I also finished off the editing of Wembley, recording the final voiceover with Thordis and pitching various tie-in online pieces and radio features.

May

Wembley month! We released it in early May to tie-in with the impending FA Cup finals at the stadium. I was very pleased with how the series turned out, and it was flattering to see that it did generate a fair amount of positive response. I wrote a BBC Sport Online piece, and The Sunday Times, The Observer and the Radio Times all gave it nice write-ups.

I also went out and did a spot of reporting this month, something I'd not done for some time - and for  radio, online and TV, to boot.

More unexpectedly, I made a one-off return to radio presenting this month, covering the Saturday afternoon sports show. It was good fun, and reminded me how much I miss working on programmes.

June

Not a huge amount to say about this month, although it was when I finally came up with what I thought was a decent idea for a new novel, the one I mentioned above having mostly plotted-out and written the opening of. I do still think it's a good idea, but the question really is whether I am a good enough writer to do it justice. Only time will tell.

July

John Higgs' big mainstream you-can-buy-it-in-bookshops Doctor Who non-fiction book Exterminate! Regenerate! had come out earlier in the year, but this was when I read it. This was notable for me as, much to my surprise, not only were my books The Long Game and Pull to Open quite heavily cited, I even got a nice mention in the text. And I'm even in the index!

August

One of the things I'm most proud of from this year is making a nice chunky radio feature telling the story of 'Anglia for Africa', the local version of Live Aid which had been put on in Norwich in August 1985. It seems to be a pretty much forgotten event, but having happened to see a reference to it online earlier in the year I decided the 40th anniversary would be a good excuse to do something about it. So I did a long radio package and a tie-in piece for BBC News Online, both of which I was pretty pleased with.

September

The great excitement - the revelation of a secret I'd been sitting on for a long time, that I had written a Doctor Who audiobook for BBC Audiobooks! After all this time, my first actual, professional fiction commission!

October

Another nice radio and BBC News Online piece which pretty much came out of nothing, really. I'd seen a post on Facebook about a photographer who was trying to identify who took a photo on some old film he'd bought which showed a view of the University of East Anglia in Norwich in the 1960s, and again I was able to turn it into a radio package and a tie-in article. I was also able to make another research trip to the BBC Written Archives Centre this month, for something which should be my first published piece of next year.

Oh, and this was the month when, excitingly, I did finally find a publisher for When Saturday Came!

November

Various things of interest this month. The cover was revealed for Star Flight, my BBC Audiobook due out next year. I'd seen the draft a few weeks before and couldn't stop looking at it, and nor could I when the final version was released with all the gubbins on the front. Including the diamond logo!

I also did another radio package-News Online combo with which I was pleased, telling a story I'd been meaning to tell for years, since another Written Archives trip for an old documentary project back in the pre-covid days. This one was football-related, telling the tale of how Great Yarmouth Town had come to be the first Norfolk football club ever to appear in a live televised game, long before Norwich City.

Then towards the end of the month, three things in one day. On the 25th, the 75th anniversary of the first episode of Whirligig, I had a piece published by BBC History about that show. On the same day, I also put up a video I'd made on YouTube, my first crack at a proper TV history video, The Story of Whirligig, telling the tale in a bit more detail. And just to cap it off, this was the day I was able to announce to the world that my new book When Saturday Came would be coming out from Telos Publishing in 2026.

 

December

My last professional piece of the year ended up being for the same publication as the first, another Doctor Who Magazine special, this time on the UNIT team. 

There have been other bits and pieces across 2025, too. A full 52 weeks' worth of archive packages for the Saturday daytime show (well, 50 weeks' worth of packages and a couple of weeks where I went over and linked it all together live in the studio). A piece for the Norwich Society. And getting to produce again, covering one of the Saturday shows in November. So it's not a year I could complain about not doing things in, things that I enjoy and believe I am good at.

I do remain frustrated with myself that I didn't knuckle down and do more work on the novel. I do hate the fact that I can never seem to unlock the secret combination within my mind which makes it the most exciting, most natural thing to want to write at any given time. But then again, it appears the number of writers who can do that with novels seem to be a tiny proportion of them anyway. The lucky bastards.

But it's still no excuse. I can't just end up sitting here moping about it every 31st of December. Otherwise when it really is my last ever one I'll still be wondering why I didn't at least try harder. I may not have the talent, but having the application at least is entirely in my own hands.

Whatever happened to...?

It's turned out to be rather a good year for various writing bits and pieces of mine, and this month has seen that rounded off with my final professional piece of 2025. If you've ever taken even the most casual look at this blog over any period of time, it will probably not surprise you to learn that this is another article for Doctor Who Magazine.

A few weeks ago, I was asked if I had any ideas for a forthcoming special edition they were putting together all about UNIT - the fictional military taskforce dealing with alien threats to Earth, which has been a part of Doctor Who off-and-on since the late 1960s. This magazine was released on December 4th, tied-in with the current broadcast on Sunday nights on BBC One of the Doctor Who spin-off The War Between the Land and the Sea, in which UNIT features heavily.

Always, of course, pleased to be asked to do something for them I pitched three ideas, one of which they liked and asked me to write for the special, with a slight tweak to expand it out a bit.

The piece I have ended up writing for them is called Old Soldiers Never Die, and looks at how some of the UNIT characters who were a regular part of Doctor Who in the early 1970s have subsequently had their lives explored in various spin-off books, audio dramas, straight-to-video productions and even stage shows.

It was, as these things always are, good fun to research and to write, and has undergone only a few minor changes here-and-there in the subbing process before appearing in print, which is always a good sign that you have actually come up with something close to what they wanted! A nice little bit to end the year with.

I always feel priviliged to be able to write for Doctor Who Magazine, and never take it for granted. I've been lucky enough to be an occasional contributor to the magazine and its specials for over ten years now. Hopefully that can continue for... well, as long as they want me and as long as I can keep coming up with good ideas for them!

I do have one feature which should be coming up next year about which I am particularly pleased, dealing with something not often covered in the pages of the magazine. It's one I am really looking forward to putting together - but more on that in 2026, which looks as if it could end up being a busy and exciting year, writing-wise.

Another Saturday in November 1950

Two weeks ago, I wrote a piece for the BBC website all about something the Corporation had shown on television on one particular Saturday afternoon in November 1950. This was on the 75^th anniversary of that broadcast.

 
Today, I have written a piece for the BBC website all about something the Corporation showed on television on another Saturday afternoon in November 1950. This is, obviously, also on the 75^th anniversary of that particular broadcast.
 
No, this isn’t my new very niche specialism. I am not intending to keep writing indefinitely about BBC Saturday afternoon television 75 years ago at fortnightly intervals – although wouldn’t that be fun? The fact that I have ended up writing pieces this month about those two particular Saturdays in BBC Television history all those years ago is a coincidence, although today’s piece is related to something I have been working on for two years now.
 
Because today, I am very pleased to be able to announce my forthcoming new non-fiction book – When Saturday Came. The story of the BBC’s Saturday teatime children’s slot from the point at which they originally began showing regular programmes there – 75 years ago today – up until the demise of the original Children’s Department in 1963 and the handing over of the slot to the Drama Department.
 
It's something I became interested in while I was working on my previous television history book, Pull to Open, about the creation of Doctor Who in 1963. While researching that book, I began to become interested in what had come before – what had been in that slot in the years before Doctor Who was created to fill it.
 
The more I thought about it and looked into it, the more I began to realise this was an interesting story in and of itself. The story of various programmes which had been very popular in their time but have now been largely forgotten. The story of the rise of television from a minority luxury to a mass medium; of the arrival of competition for the BBC in the form of the ITV companies; and of the rise and fall of the original BBC Children’s Department, created in 1950 and closed down at the end of 1963, later being revived as a separate entity in 1967.
 
So in January 2024 I started writing, and spent much of that year working on the book. This year has been mostly spent doing some additional research, editing and refining the manuscript, and trying to find a publisher. The latter, I am very pleased to say, I have managed to do – I have signed a contract with Telos Publishing, well-known among those interested in the subject for their TV history titles, and the book will be released by them sometime next year.
 
It seemed a shame, however, to let the 75^th anniversary of the launch of Saturday teatime programmes with the very first episode of Whirligig go by without marking it in some way. So, taking advantage of the research I had done for the book, I have been able to celebrate the occasion and share some of that research in a couple of ways.
 
Thanks to John Escolme at BBC History – or rather, who is BBC History – I have been able to write a piece about Whirligig for the ‘History of the BBC’ section of the BBC website, which you can read here.
 
But also, I have tried something a little out of my comfort zone. I have dabbled a bit in video editing here and there for small projects from time-to-time, but now I have had a go at making something a bit chunkier – a 20-minute documentary telling the story of Whirligig. In many ways it’s basically an illustrated radio programme, really; you could listen to it rather than watch it without really missing anything. But I thought putting it on YouTube was the best place for people interested in the subject to actually be able to find it, and if I was putting it there I had to give them something to look at! I think it’s come together okay – it’s not amazing, but not awful, either. I am not very skilled at video editing, and often find it to be very frustrating and time-consuming, but here’s the programme if you fancy a watch:

 

So, happy 75^th birthday Whirligig. Here’s to 2026, and much more about that programme and many others in When Saturday Came. A book of which I am extremely proud, and which I hope you will enjoy if you’re interested in British television history.

A Saturday in November 1950

If you’re anything like me and hang about in the same corners of social media and follow the same sorts of people there – basically, I suppose, if you’re interested in the history of British broadcasting in some way – then there is a certain topic which has been coming up a great deal lately, and creating a lot of discussion. Namely, the current policies and future direction of the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham in Berkshire.

 
Obviously, as a member of BBC staff it would not be appropriate for me to enter into that debate in a public forum. All I can say on the matter is that I have been lucky enough to be able to visit the WAC many times over the past ten years, for various research projects both for and outside of the BBC, and I can vouch for the fact that it really is all of the things its advocates claim it to be. A wonderful resource for all kinds of research into the social and cultural history of the United Kingdom in the 20^th century, staffed by a dedicated, kind, and extremely helpful team. It’s one of my favourite places to go, and whenever I visit I always feel very privileged to be given access to the incredibly valuable material which they hold there.

The BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham, on my May 2019 visit. I normally like to take a picture of the place whenever I go - I think just in case I never have the opportunity to go again!

The reason I mention all of this is because one of the things which has often been discussed in the recent campaign concerning the future of the WAC is how the ability to research there can be a very organic process which can lead to unexpected discoveries. So it was for me when, six-and-a-half years ago, while looking through one of the files which had been provided for me on a research trip, I came across a fact which made me think, “Oh, that’s interesting – I must do something with that one day!”

In the reading room at Caversham, May 2019

The file in question was the BBC Television Outside Broadcasts Department’s football file for the 1950-51 season. It was one of several I was looking through that particular day in May 2019, covering the first seven football seasons from the resumption of BBC Television in 1946. I was there researching the life of Jimmy Jewell, the BBC’s first regular TV football commentator who had also refereed an FA Cup final and briefly been the manager of Norwich City. I was working on a documentary about his life which eventually went out that August Bank Holiday and, if you’re interested, is still available to listen to via BBC Sounds.

 

I noticed among those lists of and documentation about BBC Television’s early football coverage that one of the games on which Jewell commentated was an FA Cup fourth qualifying round match between Tooting & Mitcham United and Great Yarmouth Town, on the 11^th of November 1950. Working for BBC Radio Norfolk, the name Great Yarmouth obviously caught my attention. And I realised that this would have been the very first time a Norfolk football team had ever appeared in a live television game – long before Norwich City, who you would perhaps have expected to have claimed that statistic.
 
So I tweeted out the fact that day to the interest of a small handful of people, and made a mental note to see if I could put a little something together around it for the 70^th anniversary of the broadcast in 2020. 2020 being what it was, I unfortunately ended up completely forgetting all about it by the time November rolled around that year, much to my annoyance once I remembered that I had, er, forgotten.
 
“If I’m still working here in five years,” I decided, “I’ll do something about it for the 75^th…”

 

Well, here we are, and here I am. Six-and-a-half years on from sitting in the reading room at Caversham thinking to myself, “Oh, that’s interesting,” I have at last finally been able to do something about it.
 
And I’m rather pleased with what I have been able to do. It’s the tiniest little fact, relevant only really to people in Norfolk and to those interested in niche titbits from broadcasting and football history, but hey – that’s one of the things that’s great about the BBC. That we can serve such audiences. That we do serve such audiences. Yes, we are all of the big things. But sometimes it’s nice to be the little things, too.
 
So I have made a radio piece combining the information and background from the files at Caversham, some more recent research into local newspaper archives, and some new interviews with a couple of people connected with the club, along with a tiny bit of illustrative archive. Including, just to bring things full circle, a clip of Jimmy Jewell on commentary duty, although sadly not from this particular game which was, like so much at the time, broadcast live and never recorded. There and gone in the instant it happened.

But remembered by me, on the BBC, today.

 

I’ve also been able to write a tie-in feature for BBC News Online which, through the necessity of the differing requirements for the two media of course, is a little drier and more plain, but with which I am also quite pleased. Mainly because this one hardly got edited at all in the subbing process, which perhaps shows that I am starting to get the hang of doing these things!
 
All of this thanks to those wonderful files at Caversham, and the ability to research and to explore there.

Flight Cover

 

Well now... Here is something very exciting. Another development this week with Star Flight, my forthcoming Doctor Who 'audio original' for BBC Audiobooks - the release of the cover, illustrated by Lee Johnson!

I was shown the draft a couple of months ago, but it is nice to now have it out there in the world. Particularly so with all the gubbins on it - my name, and of course the logo! As well as the confirmation, which I've also known for a while but haven't mentioned because it hadn't yet been announced, that it will be read by Christopher Naylor. He also did the reading for the BBC Audiobooks version of my non-fiction book Pull to Open, with which I was extremely happy. So needless to say I am very pleased that he is also going to be on narrating duty here.

I, obviously, cannot stop staring at that cover and grinning to myself!

Something else about which I was also very pleased this week was the little piece about Star Flight in 'Gallifrey Guardian', the news section of Doctor Who Magazine. Aside from having been an occasional contributor to DWM for a decade now, I have been a reader of the magazine for the best part of 31 years. So to see in those pages news about a Doctor Who story written by me makes me very proud, as I'm sure you can imagine.

But that wasn't the only nice thing about this month's issue of the magazine. This edition is primarily focused around an interview with Carole Ann Ford, who played Susan, the Doctor's granddaughter, for the first year of Doctor Who's run. 

In both the interview feature itself and some of the supporting pieces about the creation of development of the character of Susan in 1963, Benjamin Cook who wrote the pieces has used Pull to Open as a source and quoted from it quite extensively. I mentioned recently here how I always enjoy the feeling of something I've written being useful to other people in their own work and research, and that's very much the case here. Seeing it referred to like that gives the feeling that I have, indeed, written a 'proper' book!

Two Sides to the Same Story

One of the nice things about working for the BBC is that quite often, if you come across something and think “oh, that’s interesting,” you don’t have to just leave it there and get on with your day. You can actually help bring it to a wider audience who might also perhaps find it interesting, too.

 
Just over a week ago I saw a post on Facebook about a photographer in London who had bought some 1960s rolls of film and found that two of them had already been used back then. One of them contained some damaged pictures of the University of East Anglia campus in Norwich, with its distinctive ‘ziggurat’ halls of residence, and he was attempting to see if he could find out who might have taken the pictures back in 1968.
 
I thought this would make a nice little radio feature, so I arranged to interview the photographer, Attila Prester, as well as William Stileman from the UEA’s alumni department who’d been trying to spread the word and see if they could help to discover who took the pictures. They both gave very nice interviews, with Attila in particular being very moving and almost poetic in how he talked about the power of photography to preserve moments in time and transport us to long-lost places, and how the people captured in those images can somehow speak to us across the decades.
 
One of the upsides of the changes which have taken place in the local part of the BBC over the past couple of years is that if you’re doing a story for radio, it’s now a lot easier to also do it for online as well. So I also wrote a BBC News Online piece tied-in with the radio package, which made sense given it was a story about pictures; to have somewhere where you could actually show the photos was obviously beneficial.
 
It’s interesting, though, how even given that subject matter, it’s very clear to me that the radio package ended up being the far superior version. Now, there are obvious reasons for this – for one, you can get a lot more information into a five-minute radio package than you can a 500-word article. The whole thing has a lot more room to breathe, you can get across more of the feeling and the emotion, allow the people involved to tell the story in their own words, and help convey that sense of emotion with a little music. Writing may be my passion, but radio is my profession – and one I am very good at, too. I’m not saying this one was a perfect package, by any means – I ought to have done the narration, particularly the first link, much more slowly, with narrating too quickly being a regular failing of mine. But it is still a pretty good piece.

On a level of personal professional satisfaction, though, there is also the fact that while I nearly always have the final say over how a radio piece ends up, that’s not the case with an article. If I make something for radio, it will hardly ever be changed before broadcast, and if it were to be – if someone had a serious objection to part of it, or wanted it to be shorter, for example – they would almost certainly ask me to do the edit rather than doing it themselves. This has even been the case on the occasions when I have made things for national broadcast; very rarely has anything ever been particularly chopped and changed about after I’ve submitted it.

 
Writing for BBC News Online though is a very different beast. Partly this is because I don’t do it very often, and even though it can be an interesting and even a fun challenge to try and write something which fits in with the required style – I always regard myself as doing an impression of someone writing a BBC News Online article, rather than someone to whom it comes naturally! – obviously there will be nips and tucks and changes which whoever’s subbing it will do, to make it fit that style more properly. But also, there’s the plain fact that two different writers, or a writer and a sub or an editor, will nearly always have two different perspectives on how something ought best to be written.
 
But it doesn’t just come down to the different ways in which the different media are overseen and published or broadcast. Sometimes – and it can vary between one or the other depending on the nature of the story, the interviewees, and the material available – a story is just better told in one medium than it is in another. I think that the passion with which Attila speaks makes this a case where sound very much triumphs over text. But then again, we put the radio piece up on BBC Sounds and linked to it in the article, so hopefully anyone who read it and was sufficiently interested will have also had a listen to the radio version.

 
Have a listen yourself, and see what you think. Or should that be hear what you think…?