Fire, Fire!

I seem over the past couple of months to have become in the day job a kind of unofficial correspondent on the anniversaries of ‘notable fires in Norwich which had a profound social or cultural effect on the city, but in which nobody was hurt or killed.’

 

Or at least, that is to say that I have made radio pieces and provided online articles regarding two of them. Which, in that very niche field, is still more than average!
 
The most recent was on Friday, which was the 40^th anniversary of the fire which so seriously damaged the old City Stand at Carrow Road that it had to be demolished and rebuilt. This was an event of which I was aware, but which I hadn’t realised the anniversary had been approaching until I received an email a few weeks ago from Bob Ledwidge, the BBC reporter who was actually on the scene that early morning forty years ago reporting on the fire for television.
 
I’ve known Bob a bit for some years, and as one of the founding members of staff at BBC Radio Norfolk he was very complimentary about the programmes I put together for the station’s own 40^th anniversary back in 2020. Knowing my fondness for archive material and my ability to weave a good tale out of it, Bob suggested that I might be interested in doing something on the anniversary of the fire.
 
This seemed like a good idea, and I was able to pitch the idea to the breakfast show to make them a piece. But in addition to that, I also made a longer version, a 10-minute mini-programme really, for our Secret Norfolk local history series which is available online via BBC Sounds. I’m rather pleased with it, and you can have a listen to it here:
 

 

I also provided some copy for my colleagues at BBC News Online to be able to put up an article on the anniversary of the fire, although in this case my byline is more of a courtesy than anything else – it’s more that they used my copy to make their own piece rather than it being something I could be said to have written. Which is obviously fine, I should add – they know rather more about writing News Online pieces than I do!
 
All of this comes only a couple of months after I did the same thing for the anniversary of another notable Norwich fire – the burning down of the old city centre library in August 1994, which eventually resulted in its replacement by the building where the BBC is based in the city and thus in which I now work, The Forum.
 
This was a fire which had a huge impact on the city – a real sense of social and cultural loss, and an event still very strongly remembered by anybody who was living in the city, and probably much of the surrounding county, at the time.
 
I provided the same set of material for this as I did for the Carrow Road fire anniversary on Friday, but my sense of satisfaction with it all was probably the opposite way around. The News Online piece ended up being pretty close to what I had actually written, so it feels much more like something I can justifiably say is ‘by’ me. But although I was pleased with the radio piece when I’d made it, I realised  very soon afterwards that I’d actually done a pretty bad job of it.

Almost nothing of BBC Radio Norfolk’s own coverage of the library fire that day exists – in fact, I was only able to find a single, very brief excerpt in an episode of the BBC Television book programme The Bookworm from later that year. So I mostly had to use a mixture of national radio and regional television material to help tell the story.

 
But stupidly, it was only once the piece was finished and had gone out that I thought to check that day’s output from BBC Radio 5 Live, which is easily accessible on the BBC’s internal archive system. And there was a huge amount on there – live reports, recorded reports, voice pieces, all from BBC Radio Norfolk personnel and much of which had almost certainly originated from the station’s own output that day. I was particularly angry with myself because I’d also been frustrated at the lack of material from the library fire when making my BBC Radio Norfolk 40^th anniversary series four years ago, and if I’d thought to check 5 Live then it would have been a much stronger opening to the third and final episode of that than what I was eventually able to cobble together.

 

I was so angry with myself about all this that my colleague Matthew Gudgin – who’d actually been reporting on the library fire that day in 1994 – took pity on me and used some of the material from 5 Live in the news and on the afternoon show on the anniversary day. So it didn’t go entirely to waste!
 
But the frustration came from the fact that there will almost certainly never be a chance to do the job again properly. No reason to make the far superior piece which the 5 Live material would enable. And I missed out on not making that much better piece simply by not having thought of something obvious which should have occurred to me four years beforehand, and would still have made a difference even had it occurred to me one day sooner than it did.