Paper Talk

It turned out that last week ended up being quite a prolific one for my appearances in assorted publications - not only the mentions of the Nexus documentary in the Radio Times and The Sunday Times, but I also had a newspaper feature I'd written published and was the subject of another.

Last week, last Wednesday in fact, saw the 65th anniversary of the first ever East Anglian regional TV opt-out on BBC Television, on January the 26th 1957. Not perhaps the most notable of anniversaries, but always being one for a bit of broadcasting history - especially for broadcasting history connected to the bit of the BBC where I work, and which nobody else is likely to notice or even mark - I decided to make a radio package about it to go out on our afternoon show. This was particularly driven by the fact that some audio from the broadcast actually still exists, albeit in quite poor quality.

The piece duly went out on Wednesday, but while I'd been making it I came up with the idea of seeing if the Eastern Daily Press might be interested in a feature about it, too. I submitted this to them earlier this month but wasn't sure whether or not it was going to be any use to them. As it turned out, however, they actually ended up running it on Tuesday - and it also appeared in Norwich's Evening News, and in the EDP's Suffolk sister paper, the East Anglian Daily Times, the first occasion upon which any of my work has appeared there. You can read the piece online on the EDP website by clicking here.

So, with the Nexus documentary having gone out on 4 Extra on Tuesday, I managed to be a writer and a broadcaster on the same day without having lifted a finger during the course of the day at doing either!

Then on Wednesday I had a message from Paul, an old friend of mine back home in Sussex, telling me that a piece about me and The Long Game had appeared on the website of one of my old local papers, the Worthing Herald. I'd actually written to them a few months ago thinking I might perhaps be able to get a bit of local publicity down there, but nothing had appeared so I'd assumed it hadn't been of any use or interest.

Then suddenly last week they evidently decided it was, and the piece appeared - I believe also in the print edition, although I haven't actually been able to see a copy of that. If anyone has one, or a scan, do please let me know!