Looking East

If you've taken probably even the most casual look at this blog, then one thing will perhaps have become very clear - I have a very great interest in the history of the BBC. It's a subject I find deeply fascinating, and something I very much enjoy researching, writing about and, when I get the opportunity, making radio features about.

So when my colleagues at Look East, the regional TV news programme which operates out of the same BBC office in Norwich where I work, had its 60th anniversary coming up, I couldn't resist sticking my oar in. Fortunately for me, some of the bosses on that side of things were happy for me to do so, to the extent that I was even able a couple of weeks ago to take a trip down to one of my very favourite places, the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham in Berkshire, to see what I could see in some of the relevant files which they hold there.

This resulted in an online piece which was published yesterday, on the actual day of Look East's anniversary. Something I learned during all this being that the commonly accepted date, even as recorded in some of the files held at the BBC in Norwich, is wrong. Look East was indeed planned to start on September 28th 1964, but a technical fault meant that this didn't in fact happen. That episode never made it to the air, viewers in the East of England got Midlands Today instead, and Look East finally got going the following day.

It's a bit of an odd anniversary in some respects, as it's an anniversary of the programme title, rather than of the actual programme itself. The BBC began broadcasting East Anglian news bulletins from Norwich in October 1959, but these were brief, straight-forward affairs basically only there so they could claim they'd started before Anglia Television. Indeed, the script to DG-designate Hugh Carleton Greene's introduction to the first ever one makes a point of saying it's the first live broadcast from any TV studio in East Anglia. Which it was - by about three weeks!

On September 17th 1962 this then became a full-blown regional magazine programme of the kind we have today, in common with most of the other regions around the country who all mostly started then, moving up from being a bulletin to being a magazine. This was initially East Anglia at Six, then in 1963 became East at Six-Ten, before finally in September 1964 another change of timeslot meant they gave up being beholden to the time for the title, and plumped for Look East instead.

Anyway, I've had a good time researching and writing about all of this, and nobody from Look East seems to have become too annoyed with me doing it despite the fact that my closest connection to the programme is once having had my hand photographed to be used in a graphic! 

I also managed to do not one, not two, but three completely different radio pieces related to the anniversary. You can hear one of them in expanded form as part of our Secret Norfolk series online here:

It occurs to me that this is actually the second time this year I've written a piece for BBC News Online about local BBC history, but I had completely forgotten to mention the previous one on here. It was back in February, when my colleague Jill Bennett retired after 44 years at BBC Radio Norfolk, and I was asked to write something to mark the occasion. You can have a read of that one here.

Part of the reason I enjoy doing these is, as well as simply the love of BBC history, it's fun to look into and celebrate and help to record those parts of the Corporation's story which, frankly, aren't as well recorded. Very few people stop to tell the stories of local and regional parts of the BBC, and when they do they tend to be very anecdotal. Which can be useful up to a point; but there is so much memory, so much information out there which has been lost forever, when people in those buildings up and down the country have down the decades chucked out those old documents or even those old recordings in office moves. It's nobody's fault; it's enough of a job doing the work in hand without stopping to consider posterity. But I like to at least try and make the effort, whenever I have the chance, in the little corner of the BBC here in Norwich where I have been lucky enough to find a place.