The BBC and Me

Today marks the 100^th anniversary of the BBC first going on the air. Exactly a century since Arthur Burrows read that same opening news bulletin twice in a row, once normally and then more slowly, so that listeners could write in and say which they preferred.

I had a BBC 100 programme on yesterday, but this is a more personal piece

Like everybody who has grown up in the United Kingdom in the hundred years since then, I cannot tell you when I first became ‘aware’ of the BBC. It has simply always been there – a part of the fabric of life in this country. Love it, hate it, be indifferent or ignore it, you always know it’s there.

I did love it, and from a very early age. As a young child I was an avid viewer of the Broom Cupboard days of Children’s BBC in the late 1980s and early 90s, and can remember having the absolute conviction that the BBC were the ‘good guys’ and ITV were ‘the enemy’. Where this came from, I don’t know. I’ve heard people talk down the years about households where children weren’t allowed to watch ITV because their parents for some reason or other disapproved of it. Whether that ever actually happened or not I don’t know, but our family certainly wasn’t like that. My mum was in many respects the model ITV viewer. But for whatever reason, I got it into my head as a child that I was on the BBC’s ‘side’.

Of course, Doctor Who may have had a lot to do with it. The BBC made Doctor Who, and so they had to be the ones on the side of the angels, right? That was certainly a reason why I became fascinated about how the BBC worked, and its history. Doctor Who is one of the most closely-studied and heavily written-about programmes ever shown on British television, and it was through reading books about the series and its history when I was growing up that I developed a deep interest in the BBC and the history of broadcasting in this country more generally.

I don’t think, though, that it ever entered into my head that I might one day be able to work for the BBC. It just wasn’t something that I ever thought about. I don’t know if I had a notion of what ‘type’ of person worked for the BBC, as such, but it never occurred to me as something I could try to get into. It seemed such a far-off distant thing, plus of course much of what I read about and found interesting about the BBC was in the past. The notion that the BBC might be a part of my future was too incredible to contemplate.

It was only after leaving university and being confronted with the reality that I now had to work out what to do with my myself that the BBC became a part of my life. While doing a very morale-sapping, boring day job four days a week I started volunteering at the BBC in Norwich on the other day in the summer of 2006. This meant that I was given an ID pass to get into the building – and when I was given it, I could not stop looking at it. Holding it in my hands and staring at it. I took photos of it, in case this didn’t last very long and they wanted it back, so that I could have some memento, some proof I’d once had it. That I had been a part of the BBC.

The BBC! Me!

I have proudly worn that pass into the building every time I have gone in there for the past 16 years. It’s a bit battered and marked now, and the photo resembles me less and less every year. But if I hold it in my hands and look at it, that logo there with my name, I still feel that same pride and disbelief. That I could have become a tiny part of this great organisation which I have loved since I was a child. That I work for the same BBC as all those people I have watched, listened to, looked up to and admired.

I had that same feeling of amazed excitement when I started getting paid shifts the following year, and then in early 2008 an incredible offer. There was a job they needed filling, full-time, for three months as someone had left and they weren’t sure what was going to happen to that particular role. They couldn’t guarantee it would last any longer than that, but would I come and do it…?

It did not seem a risk to me. Of course I said yes. The chance to say that I worked, even for just a few months, full-time for the BBC was irresistible. I was really, properly there. Even if this turned out to be the only exciting thing that ever happened in the rest of my life, it would be something to treasure and hold on to. That I worked for the BBC.

That three months has not, yet, come to an end.

The Eastern Daily Press kindly published a BBC 100 piece by me on Saturday, although sadly under the byline "Paul Haynes"!

For nearly 15 years now I have been in the incredibly privileged position, which I appreciate and value as being very rare in life, of not having to wake up in the morning and think, “Oh Christ, I’ve got to go to work today.” To be spared that crushing, soul-destroying heaviness of having to go and do a morale-sapping job I hate. Like any job, of course, life at the BBC has its occasional frustrations and annoyances. But never anything that lasts. Never anything that has ever made me not want to go back in.

I do understand how incredibly fortunate I am in that, and what a rare privilege it is – especially when it’s on the public payroll. There is always that dichotomy in the BBC, or perhaps any form of broadcasting, between doing something that you enjoy and doing something for the benefit of the audience – but especially so in the BBC when the audience are the ones directly paying for it. However, I like to think that I have always managed to resist ever becoming too self-indulgent, and that my instincts are not too far out of whack with what the listeners wanted in the role that I was in.

You can never please all of the people all of the time, of course, but I have been lucky enough to have been involved with some amazing programmes during my time with the BBC. I have written before on here about how special it has been to be involved with Treasure Quest, the Sunday morning show I have produced since just after I started working full-time at the BBC in Norwich. It’s an amazing thing to have been a part of – an out-and-out entertainment show, yes, but a very BBC one.

It may be primarily about having fun and playing the game, but every week through that format we publicise local events, charities and good causes. We’ve raised tens of thousands of pounds for Children in Need down the years, brought people together and cheered up their Sunday mornings. But also, of course – wow! I’ve been able to put together a programme which has messed about with putting presenters on trains, buses, and helicopters! Put them on-stage singing and dancing, through assault courses, up tall towers, and set them up being pulled over by the police or locked in guard cells by the army. We’ve put out books, CDs and calendars, and mounted our own stage shows; and we have a fanbase, a small but fervent one. It’s a producer-proof show, really – such a good idea that it only needed someone half-competent to steer it, and of course the reason the audience love it is because of the presenters. But I like to think I have put a lot into it and wrung everything out of it that I could have done, and put those presenters into situations which gave them the opportunity to really engage the audience in the way that they have.

So if I’d done nothing else in the BBC I could be incredibly proud of Treasure Quest. But it’s been so much more – all the features, items and documentaries I’ve had the opportunity to make. The hundreds, thousands of live programmes I’ve had the chance to produce. The difference we’ve been able to make to real lives in real ways, whether working into the night as the flood waters rose or helping someone work out how they were going to get food when they couldn’t leave the house in the early days of lockdown.

None of this is done alone, and although I am at heart a highly individualistic – even self-centred – person, some of the very finest moments at the BBC are when we come together to work as a team. On those flood nights or election nights or those big, set-piece Treasure Quest shows. During lockdown. Or even when it’s just the two of you, you and a presenter, getting the breaking items on the air or seeing the calls roll in because you’ve entertained and engaged people.

I’ve had the chance to present shows to a large chunk of England and to make programmes at the home of the BBC itself, Broadcasting House in London. I’ve produced podcasts downloaded by thousands of people all over the world and helped write articles which have been read by over a million. I have had the opportunity to do all of these incredible things because I am a part of the BBC, and the presence of those three little letters is what makes it magic. I am sure I could probably have had fun and enjoyed myself and done creative things if I had worked in commercial radio. But it would not have been the same. I am not saying this is some universal truth, or that everyone ought to feel this way – this is specific to me. It’s being part of the BBC which makes it special. Which gives a pride I don’t think I’d feel if I were working for any other organisation.

I was even once, just for five minutes in August 2021, responsible for the output of that very same station which Arthur Burrows opened back in 1922. Which had gone from being 2LO to the London station of the Regional Programme to the Home Service and eventually BBC Radio 4. I became a part of that when I made a piece for the Today programme. I was a link in that national chain which stretches back for a century.

I do not know whether the BBC will be around for another century. I do not even know what the future might hold for it in the rest of this decade. What form it should take and how it ought to be funded are not arguments which I can or should be a part of. If it were up to me, of course, I would like everything to stay the same, simply because that’s the nature of my personality. But I am grown-up enough these days to recognise that that’s neither possible nor desirable, in any area of life. Everything changes, and has to change.

The future of the BBC will be decided by those whom it serves. There has for a long time been a broad consensus in favour of it, and if we are still wanted and needed then hopefully that consensus can continue. But whether it can or it should is for others to decide.

If it all came to an end tomorrow, I would be devastated. I know that I would never again be lucky enough in life to find myself not just in a job that I enjoyed, but in a job that I was proud to do. The special part of my life would be over. But everything has its time, and everything ends, and the best parts of all our lives are finite.

I would still, though, have that feeling I had when I was asked to come and work for the BBC full-time back in 2008, when it might have been just for a few months. That it was worth it – so worth it. When the time comes, I will be able to look back and say that “I worked for the BBC.” That I achieved something in life, that I had a job which really meant something – to me, at any rate, which is all we can ask of in our work.

“The BBC,” someone once said, “will never love you back.” But I have never needed it to. I have given a lot to the BBC, but I have always felt that I have got so much more back than I have given. Both as a viewer and listener long before I ever worked there, and in the friendships that I have made there, the things I have done and the opportunity I have had to be creative every single day – and to be part of something greater than anything else someone like me could ever have been involved with otherwise.

Happy birthday, BBC. Thank you for everything.