Aside from the regular day-to-day aspects of my job, my work this September has mostly been concerned with broadcasting anniversaries - which will probably come as absolutely no surprise to anybody who has ever had even the most casual glance at some of my blog entries here!
Last month I mentioned how I had been occupied with putting together a photo book to go in the guest area at work, telling the story of the first ten years of the BBC in Norwich to tie-in with the fact that it would soon be the 70th anniversary of the BBC setting up shop in the city. That anniversary fell on September 10th, and for it I made a short piece for the Secret Norfolk series on BBC Sounds, focusing on the original headquarters of the BBC in Norwich - the Georgian manor house at St Catherine's Close on All Saints Green in the city.
I also wrote an accompanying BBC News Online article, which contrary to what you might expect, and indeed contrary to the usual run of such things, I was actually asked to put *more* detail into about some of the BBC's early broadcasts from the city. Which, obviously, I was very happy to do!
What was particularly nice, though, was that the following day Look East found a bit of spare time at the end of their programme to do a short piece marking the 70th anniversary of BBC East. It was put together by my colleague Alex Dunlop, who had a chat with me just to check a couple of things about the history. While we were talking I mentioned how the person seen in the radio studio in the often-seen footage of St Catherine's Close from 1959 was David Bryson, the 'East Anglia Representative', the first head of the BBC in Norwich - and blow me but Alex actually gave him a name-check in the finished piece, surely the first time in decades that old Bryson's been mentioned on-air by the service he did a huge amount to set up and get going. He died relatively young in the 1970s, while he was still in his fifties I think, so it was nice Alex gave him a nod.
But as I mentioned at the start, that is not the only anniversary with which I have been concerned this month. The week beforehand, it was the 40th anniversary of Casualty, one of the BBC's flagship dramas. I had been able to go down to Caversham earlier in the summer to have a look at some of their holdings related to the early days of the series, and while there wasn't a huge amount I was able to make what I thought was a nice little piece for the CNS department which distributes national material to the BBC Local Radio network, and several radio stations ran it on the Friday and across the weekend.
Finally, I've been back on Flight into Danger again. As well as continuing to work on my book about the play which I decided to write in the spring, last week I went back to the material from the audio documentary I made about it for BBC Sounds back in April for it 70th anniversary - and which had prompted me to decide to write said book. I said at the time I could easily have done an hour on it, and with this Friday just gone having been the 70th anniversary of its UK transmission I put together a much longer edit and stuck it up on YouTube. Not only does it have much more material from the people I spoke to, but during the book research I learned of a 2002 interview with director David Greene in which he discusses the play and which I got permission to use both in the book and here.
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