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.

Aural History

Usually down the years with this blog, I have tended to write about exciting developments in my writing career as soon as possible. Partly to show off about them, of course! But also because I enjoy having this blog as a record. I do have a private diary as well, in which I write about what goes on in my life purely for my own personal posterity and interest to look back on. But somehow, having it all here as well, all laid out in neatly ordered little chunks as it develops over time, is also nice to have.

Which is all a very roundabout way of getting to the point and saying that something exciting has happened - or at least, is happening - and I haven't got around to writing about it here yet. I'm not exactly sure why. Possibly because it was a while after I knew it was happening before it was officially announced and I was able to talk about it. A little bit because I have been busy working on a new writing project over the summer. But I think mostly because I simply hadn't got around to summoning the effort to sit down and get back to the blog.

So, here I am!

Late last year, I happened to come into contact with Michael Stevens, the editor of BBC Audiobooks and their official range of Doctor Who releases. It transpired that he had bought, read and enjoyed Pull to Open, and we got to talking about some possible Doctor Who ideas I could perhaps be involved in for the audiobook range. Eventually, Michael decided that it might be nice to put out an audiobook release of Pull to Open.

Everything was agreed, I prepared a suitable abridgement, and earlier this year it was recorded - rather pleasingly, at BBC Audiobooks' studio at Television Centre, the building where back in April 1963 Sydney Newman and Donald Wilson had sat down and created the basic format of Doctor Who together in the first place. I was going to go along to the recording, which would have been very exciting, but sadly the practicalities of it all didn't work out in the end. Probably just as well for them - the last thing they needed was me hanging around getting in the way!

But it's all been successfully recorded, and is due to be released this November. The reading is by Christopher Naylor, well-known to Doctor Who fans as the actor who these days plays Harry Sullivan in Big Finish Productions' Doctor Who audio dramas, in place of the late Ian Marter. There won't be a physical release of Pull to Open - it's rather long, and would take up a fair few CDs! - but there is still a 'cover' for promotional and online shopping purposes, which I'm pleased to say has been adapted by the original team behind the Ten Acre version, Stuart Manning and Andrew Orton. But now with the official Doctor Who logo and the BBC blocks on it!

Yes, to paraphrase the wonderful Completely Useless Encyclopedia, I am now officially Worthy Of The Diamond Logo! And because of the unique way in which BBC Audiobooks works, a Penguin author, too... The audiobook went on pre-sale a few weeks ago and since then it's been bobbing about in the audiobook bestseller charts on Amazon in the "Film History & Criticism" section. Which it isn't either of, of course - but I'm not complaining!

On the Shelf

There's something which happened to me a couple of weeks ago which I've been meaning to mention here, but not got round to. I've finally been inspired to sit down and write about it today as it's a story I tell on an episode of a podcast on which I make a guest appearance, which was released this morning. The podcast is Gasbags from SOUNDYARD, run by my good friends and former colleagues Anna and Sophie. Gasbags is their own podcast about running the business, and their lives, and anything else which takes their fancy, and with Anna unavailable this week due to undergoing an operation, they very kindly and flatteringly asked me if I would sit-in alongside Sophie. As a sort of 'Guestbag', I suppose! You can have a listen to it here:

Anyway, on the episode I talk about the surprise I had earlier this month when I was rather aimlessly browsing the shelves of Waterstones in Norwich. I often think, whenever I am in a big bookshop like that, with all of those thousands of books and that unique 'new book' smell all around, what a fine thing it would be to have one of my own books on those shelves. I am pretty certain I may even have thought it when I walked into the shop that day.

Don't misunderstand me. I am very proud of the books that I have had published, and pleased with how they have been sold. There is no question that more people have found and enjoyed them through them being sold online than if they had only been available to stumble across by chance on the shelves of a bookshop.

And yet...

There is something a little special about the idea of having a book of your own on sale in a shop like that. I know I shouldn't think this, and others may rubbish it or even be offended by it. But I can't escape the idea, just speaking purely personally for myself, that in some tiny way it would make me feel a little bit more of a 'proper' writer.

And that day, browsing the shelves of the TV and film section in Waterstones, suddenly and completely unexpectedly there it was. There *I* was. Nestled between William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade and David Hendy's book about the BBC, a copy of The Long Game. It took me a fraction of a second to process it, as I recognised the spine. A feeling of disbelief, and then pride. I didn't exactly shed a tear, thank goodness, but it did feel a bit of an emotional moment.

All those year, decades, of going into big, high street bookshops like that and fantasising about one day having something of my own on the shelves. And now, there it was.

It hit me all the more because of it being such a surprise. I had no idea Waterstones stocked it, and I hadn't gone there looking for it. I'd had absolutely no idea it was there.

Admittedly when I had another look last weekend, it was still there. I didn't know whether to be pleased, or disappointed that nobody had bought it! I suppose maybe I ought to have done to encourage them to stock more, but that would be a bit self-defeating! 

No, I did not offer to sign it!

Podcast Piece

 

It's been a quiet start to the year here on the blog, with almost a quarter of it now gone already and nothing said.

That's mostly because it has been a quiet time writing-wise - although that's in terms of it appearing, rather than me doing. In fact, some rather exciting things have been happening as regards my latest writing efforts, although nothing which I can say anything about for the moment. But, all being well, there should be a lot more to say over the course of the year!

However, the reason for breaking silence now is that I have this month had a small addition to the ranks of my professional credits. This was another piece for the Radio Times, this time one of the small capsule reviews they run on their podcast pages.

I was able to contribute a short item about Chris Skinner's Countryside Podcast, and as with my two pieces last year it was a great honour, a pleasure and a privilege to be able to write something for the Radio Times. 

Not much, of course, but they all count! And nice to be featured in an issue with such a striking front cover, too.

"The best of luck!"

 

I've been having a look back at my New Year's Eve post from twelve months ago, as is only natural as this year draws to a close, now into its final few hours here in the UK.

I mentioned in that post that in 2022 I'd written a draft of a new non-fiction book, and that "...it looks as if it may appear sometime in 2023." In fact, I was underselling things a bit there. At that point I was probably about 90% sure it would be published this year, and I was also pretty confident that it was quite good.

Pull to Open did indeed come out, somewhat delayed by various factors but it finally got there in August, and the response has been amazing. I'm very proud of the book, and incredibly pleased with how it has been received. There may, perhaps, even be something new coming on that score in 2024 - but once again I have to be slightly cagey about that, as nothing is anywhere near being definite yet.

In fact, there is more than one iron in the fire for exciting new writing possibilities in the New Year. Obviously I am well-aware that these things might not actually end up happening. They are only possibilities at the moment. But it is nice to at least have something to look forward to, in that respect; to be able to greet the passing of the year with the possibility of some fresh exciting prospects, rather than thinking all of the interesting things are now behind me.

Mind you, on that score, this time last year I was also talking about the radio documentaries I'd made. This year, there have been no radio documentaries, and sadly I don't think there ever will be again. That chapter of my career seems to be over and done with now. Treasure Quest also came to an end - a huge wrench for me, and for many others. Not just the closing of a chapter, but the closing of an entire book.

I spent most of the year at risk of redundancy, but I was luckier than many - after six job interviews, or 'boards' as the BBC calls them, I managed to hang onto a role. A very different one to what I was doing before, but I do appreciate that I am one of the fortunate ones. I do still have a job.

And it enables me to still do interesting things. Last year I was writing about the George Russell documentary I made - and this year I got to have even more of a play at covering Formula One. I even produced an F1-based radio show for a few months. I had a piece about the 60th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination go out on The World Tonight on Radio 4, and a Doctor Who 60th anniversary piece on the World Service - an anniversary which saw me appear on around thirty different BBC stations in total in one form or another.

I also wrote for the Radio Times, and for the BBC History website this year... Yes, it sounds as if I tot these things up as if they add some sense of value to my life. And hey, why not? It's as good a measure for me as anyone else's measures are for them.

Anybody who has enthusiastically followed Paul Kerensa's British Broadcasting Century podcast may well have been struck, as I was, by the words of Arthur Burrows on the BBC's 2LO station in London just after midnight on New Year's Day 1923 - the first ever New Year of the brand new BBC as a whole. Fitting that Burrows should be there to see the New Year in, as he'd been the first ever voice on the BBC the previous month.

I'd never heard this before Paul included it in his episode looking at that first BBC change of years - which by coincidence also happened to be an episode on which I made a guest appearance, talking about my book The Long Game. Anyway, Burrows' actual words from the night were never recorded, going out live into the ether and that was that. But we do know what he said, and Paul recreated the moment for the podcast.

"2LO wishes you a happy and prosperous New Year. May you have the best of luck - goodbye everybody, goodbye. And the best of luck!"

I was particularly taken with it was because of the way it captures two of those feelings of New Year's Eve and the passing of midnight. It feels, as the New Year often does, like one of those fleeting moments of camaraderie when we are all in this together. A sense of optimism and a willingness for everyone's hopes and dreams and ambitions for the next 12 months to be fulfilled, whatever they may be.

Before cold, hard reality sets in through the still, quiet dawn of January the 1st.

But still, I do like the sentiment. So, whoever you are, wherever you are and whatever you're doing - the best of luck!

A New World Somewhere

It's been many years, until now, since I last wrote for a fanzine. At least fifteen, I would say, and probably inching closer to twenty. There's no particular reason for this - I'm not anti-fanzine at all, and in my teens and early twenties wrote for them quite regularly, particularly for the Doctor Who Appreciation Society's Celestial Toyroom. It was certainly a boost to my confidence as a young and aspiring writer that other people thought my work worth publishing, even on an amateur basis. And it's always much better and more fun to write something which you know is actually going to be read by somebody!

It think it just happened that it became far easier to write for online - when I moved on from writing for CT I ended up writing quite a bit for the old Outpost Gallifrey Doctor Who fan site. It was a lot quicker and easier to get things put up, of course, and you got more of an instant reaction, so I sort of naturally fell into doing that. And then gradually did less and less fan writing at all as I became more involved with the BBC and my career there.

But anyway, all this serves as mere background to the fact that for the first time in many years, I have now written for a fanzine - although it seems almost disrespectful to call it that. Vworp Vworp! is an impressively put-together magazine, which comes out at irregular intervals and was originally based around Doctor Who Magazine and its comic strip. However, for the latest issue in this Doctor Who sixtieth anniversary year the sixth issue - more of a bookazine than a magazine, so laden with pieces is it - is all based around the show's very beginnings. If you're interested in that era, I highly recommend it - there are many fascinating articles on aspects you might not even have considered before, from a 'who's who' of writers whose names you'll know well if you have even a casual research interest in this era of British television history.

I was actually approached and asked if I would be interested in contributing a piece, given how I'd been researching the era for my own book Pull to Open. This, of course, I was very happy to do - as it gave me the opportunity to expand on a story I'd only had time to touch on briefly in Pull to Open itself. This was the story of director Rex Tucker, a name anyone interested in the creation of Doctor Who will recognise, and his efforts to get his own science-fiction serial The Seekers off the ground. What is that story? Well, I'm afraid you'll have to get hold of your own copy of Vworp Vworp! issue six to learn that!

Or Pull to Open, of course! Which continues to attract very kind comments from its readers. And perhaps even create exciting new opportunities for me - of which more, possibly, in the New Year, if anything comes of it.

But I think it's fair to say that the book has gone down better than I could ever have hoped. Since I last wrote on here I've been fortunate enough to appear on two further podcasts discussing it, The Doctor Who Literature Podcast and the Power of 3. And AJ Black very kindly included me on his list of his top-ten favourite books of 2023, alongside some very big hitters!

Pull to Open is, I hardly need say, still very much available from Ten Acre Films if you're interested in having a read!

Mopping Up... Or Moping Up...?

Am I just a worthless parasite, leeching off other people’s creativity?

 
It’s a paranoia which does seize me, sometimes. Not often; not all the time. But last night, watching last night’s very enjoyable return of Doctor Who, I was at one point towards the end overcome with that melancholy feeling of knowing I could never, ever do this. I could never do what Russell T Davies does.
 
Now, he’s a genius of course, so it’s true that most people can’t do what he does. So there shouldn’t be any need to feel bad because I don’t have his talent and ability. His insight. And I long ago realised that I would never be involved in actual Doctor Who itself. That it wasn’t something to which I was naturally suited; wasn’t an industry which I had any clue as to how to find any sort of place for myself in.
 
And that’s fine. That’s okay. Doctor Who is my favourite thing in all the world, but just because you love something doesn’t mean you have to be a part of it. Football fans know they will never be a member of the team, no matter how much it means to them, and how deeply embedded it is in their lives.
 
Doctor Who is designed to be watched, and enjoyed. Indeed, that’s its sole reason for existing. The purpose of putting on a show is to get an audience, to paraphrase Eric Maschwitz. And there is something about Doctor Who, as with so many shows whose audiences are so passionate, which fires people up to be creatively engaged. So many of us do so according to our own talents. Whether that be making music inspired by it, or creating art, or writing stories, or making reaction videos, or yes, studying the history and wanting to find out more about how it was made, and sharing that history with others. Sharing that love and enthusiasm.
 
Which you’d think would only be a good thing… But that worry does take hold of me, every now and then. I’m so proud of writing books and articles about this show, making radio pieces about it. Proud that I can be a tiny little part of it in my professional life, be engaged with it and share that engagement. But is it all just worthless? Would I not be better off trying to create and do something of my own? Am I just a laughable figure, building so much of my life around something to which I have made absolutely no contribution whatsoever, and have never had anything to do with?
 
I think part of this latest mood of introspection was brought on by my final radio piece about Doctor Who of the anniversary week. I’d had the idea to do a piece about overseas fans of the show; getting an outside perspective on this thing which is such a part of British popular culture. I pitched the piece to PM on BBC Radio 4, and to my surprise and excitement they liked it and went for it. I worked hard on it, I think I did a pretty good job with it, but eventually it ended up just falling off the bottom of the show at the end of the week.
 
Now, I should make it very clear this is not supposed to be a moan about PM, or anything remotely like that. I am well aware that when you make a light piece for a serious news programme like that, you are always at the mercy of events. That’s the very nature of the beast. I absolutely understand the precarious nature of that, and that there were and are far more important things going on in the world. I’m not for a moment saying they were in any way wrong to drop it. Had I been in the producer’s chair, I’d have done exactly the same.
 
Yes, dropped by Today and by PM in the same week. At least I’m being dropped by the classy programmes!
 
But it made me introspective because it would have meant so much to me, to have had a piece about Doctor Who, that show I have loved so much and for so long, going out on a network programme. To be a little part of the anniversary on one of the national stations. Even after, across the anniversary period, ending up in either live or recorded form, as an interviewee or a package maker, across about 30 other BBC stations.

And it made me wonder… is that really healthy? To be so invested in something so completely outside of my control. To be a middle-aged man so desperate to pick up a few crumbs and scraps from the network table. If you were good enough for this sort of thing, Paul, you’d have been doing it regularly by now. Not just occasionally getting almost-somewhere-close when there happened to be one of the very few subjects you can make something to network standard about.
 
And even stepping back from that moping, I had a hell of a week – the Kennedy piece went out on The World Tonight on Radio 4, and a version of my CNS Doctor Who piece went out on the World Service. That’s not bad going at all.
 
Here is that PM piece by the way, if you fancy a listen. I rather like it, and I was at least able to get it out on several of the BBC Local Radio stations on Saturday, via my colleagues at CNS. So my interviewees did get to go out on the BBC's airwaves, which I was pleased with:

 

But it’s all so dependant on other things. Other people’s decisions. On events, dear boy, events. And all of this – studying Doctor Who’s history, writing about it, making radio pieces about it – can make you feel like a hanger-on. Or a vampire. Feasting on the lifeblood of something created and maintained by others.
 
I once watched an interview with the great Mark Lewisohn, one of the most esteemed and respected chroniclers of British popular culture in the second half of the 20^th century, especially regarding The Beatles. He’s even worked for The Beatles on all sorts of projects, helping to chronicle their history as accurately as possible and preserve for ages the facts rather than the anecdotes. And even he, possibly the most highly-regarded person working in that field, related how he was once told by one member of the band, dismissively: “you weren’t there.”
 
As if that makes any study conducted by him somehow invalid.
 
No, he wasn’t there, and would never claim to have been. If you’re writing history you can’t pretend to know precisely how the particular people involved thought and felt. But you can try your best to relate what happened, often with a far wider overview of the situation and with far more information available to you than anybody involved would have had at the time.
 
Russel T Davies once wrote in Doctor Who Magazine that the problem with telling stories of working on Doctor Who, and this probably holds true for people’s involvement with any kind of popular endeavour, is that as time goes past you start to remember and tell the tale of the anecdote rather than what happened. To go back to The Beatles example, we saw the reassessment of their late era which took place when a much wider selection of the footage shot for Let It Be was made available in Peter Jackson’s Get Back. Ringo Starr himself was surprised, remarking that for years he’d been remembering the film of Let It Be rather than what actually happened.
 
The same is true in Doctor Who. Sydney Newman, when he started giving interviews about the creation of the show in the 1980s, would tell the story of how he was asked to come up with something more appealing that fusty old Dickens adaptations, the ‘classic serial’, for Saturday teatimes.
 
Except that isn’t true.

There’d been no classic serials on Saturdays for years by the point that Newman arrived. They were already well-established on Sundays, where they remained for many years afterwards. It was true that he didn’t like them, but they proved too popular for him to kill off and obviously 20 years later he confused his memory of disliking the classic serials with the start of Doctor Who, and had the one related to the other in his memory.

 
Does pointing this out mean I like or respect the work of Newman any the less? Of course not. Does it diminish him in anybody’s eyes? Not a jot. I think it’s far more interesting, though, and revealing, to know what actually happened. For the record, we don’t actually know why Stuart Hood and Donald Baverstock decided they wanted a new type of children’s serial for the Saturday teatime slot, but looking at what was actually there shows us it was often a rag-tag assortment – film import westerns like The Lone Ranger and The Range Rider; US cartoons such as Top Cat and Deputy Dawg; home-made comedies like Just William and Mr Pastry; and short-run BBC-made serials, most popularly the returning adventures of Garry Halliday.
 
I can’t tell you what Newman, Hood or Baverstock thought of these. But I can tell you what happened – they were abandoned and replaced with Doctor Who.
 
And there are people out there who enjoy reading this kind of history. I know, I have been one of them for decades. I know because I’ve had lots of lovely reviews and kind comments for my work. So it’s not as if there isn’t an audience for this. That there aren’t people who enjoy it…
 
But I still have that doubt. That nag. That paranoia. That those who can do, and those who can’t write about it. About whether it’s a worthwhile pastime. Or whether I am, as I say, just a parasite, feeding off the success and the creativity of others.
 
Do people who write about other areas of non-fiction worry about this, I wonder? Do people who write military history find themselves seized with guilt at building their work on the misery, the suffering, the death of so many people? Do sports writers worry they can never truly know how it feels to be on the pitch, and that they are laughed at by those who do? Do authors of true crime histories feel they take advantage of the fate of their subjects?
 
I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. But is it worse when you’re writing about something creative? Often, writing about writers?
 
I enjoy doing it, don’t get me wrong. I do it because I enjoy it. This isn’t a feeling which occupies me constantly. But it does nag at me, every now and then. Especially when watching something like last night’s Doctor Who, knowing that’s something I could never, ever do. That I could never be involved with.
 
Oh, there was one more online piece, by the way, from my local BBC News Online colleagues, based on my Radio Norfolk Doctor Who piece from Thursday. They put it up yesterday with a co-byline for me, although that’s just a courtesy thing out of kindness – you couldn’t really say I wrote much of this. But it is funny that it has Martin’s name on it too, as that’s what ended up happening with a Doctor Who piece he made from my radio material ten year ago as well.
 
The more things change…