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!