Two Sides to the Same Story

One of the nice things about working for the BBC is that quite often, if you come across something and think “oh, that’s interesting,” you don’t have to just leave it there and get on with your day. You can actually help bring it to a wider audience who might also perhaps find it interesting, too.

 
Just over a week ago I saw a post on Facebook about a photographer in London who had bought some 1960s rolls of film and found that two of them had already been used back then. One of them contained some damaged pictures of the University of East Anglia campus in Norwich, with its distinctive ‘ziggurat’ halls of residence, and he was attempting to see if he could find out who might have taken the pictures back in 1968.
 
I thought this would make a nice little radio feature, so I arranged to interview the photographer, Attila Prester, as well as William Stileman from the UEA’s alumni department who’d been trying to spread the word and see if they could help to discover who took the pictures. They both gave very nice interviews, with Attila in particular being very moving and almost poetic in how he talked about the power of photography to preserve moments in time and transport us to long-lost places, and how the people captured in those images can somehow speak to us across the decades.
 
One of the upsides of the changes which have taken place in the local part of the BBC over the past couple of years is that if you’re doing a story for radio, it’s now a lot easier to also do it for online as well. So I also wrote a BBC News Online piece tied-in with the radio package, which made sense given it was a story about pictures; to have somewhere where you could actually show the photos was obviously beneficial.
 
It’s interesting, though, how even given that subject matter, it’s very clear to me that the radio package ended up being the far superior version. Now, there are obvious reasons for this – for one, you can get a lot more information into a five-minute radio package than you can a 500-word article. The whole thing has a lot more room to breathe, you can get across more of the feeling and the emotion, allow the people involved to tell the story in their own words, and help convey that sense of emotion with a little music. Writing may be my passion, but radio is my profession – and one I am very good at, too. I’m not saying this one was a perfect package, by any means – I ought to have done the narration, particularly the first link, much more slowly, with narrating too quickly being a regular failing of mine. But it is still a pretty good piece.

On a level of personal professional satisfaction, though, there is also the fact that while I nearly always have the final say over how a radio piece ends up, that’s not the case with an article. If I make something for radio, it will hardly ever be changed before broadcast, and if it were to be – if someone had a serious objection to part of it, or wanted it to be shorter, for example – they would almost certainly ask me to do the edit rather than doing it themselves. This has even been the case on the occasions when I have made things for national broadcast; very rarely has anything ever been particularly chopped and changed about after I’ve submitted it.

 
Writing for BBC News Online though is a very different beast. Partly this is because I don’t do it very often, and even though it can be an interesting and even a fun challenge to try and write something which fits in with the required style – I always regard myself as doing an impression of someone writing a BBC News Online article, rather than someone to whom it comes naturally! – obviously there will be nips and tucks and changes which whoever’s subbing it will do, to make it fit that style more properly. But also, there’s the plain fact that two different writers, or a writer and a sub or an editor, will nearly always have two different perspectives on how something ought best to be written.
 
But it doesn’t just come down to the different ways in which the different media are overseen and published or broadcast. Sometimes – and it can vary between one or the other depending on the nature of the story, the interviewees, and the material available – a story is just better told in one medium than it is in another. I think that the passion with which Attila speaks makes this a case where sound very much triumphs over text. But then again, we put the radio piece up on BBC Sounds and linked to it in the article, so hopefully anyone who read it and was sufficiently interested will have also had a listen to the radio version.

 
Have a listen yourself, and see what you think. Or should that be hear what you think…?

Flight Updates

If you thought I wasn't going to take each and every opportunity I could to chronicle all of the stages of my first professional piece of fiction's journey to publication in as much detail as possible here, then I'm afraid you were very sadly mistaken. Anyway, I'm comfortable in the knowledge that very few people actively read this blog, and that it mostly functions as a sort of chronicle for myself to look back on at various things I've done over the years, so I know I'm only writing to please myself anyway. Which is, as is often pointed out, often the best reason to write something anyway.

Star Flight got what I'm certain is its first podcast mention just over a week ago, on an episode of Radio Free Skaro. This is a Canadian Doctor Who podcast to which I have been a listener, off-and-on, since around 2013 or so, and for which I have kindly been interviewed a couple of times, when The Long Game and Pull to Open came out.

On this occasion they were interviewing BBC Audiobooks editor Michael Stevens, during which he talked about the range and what they have coming up next year, with Star Flight getting a nice little mention. It was also brought up earlier in the episode, too, before the interview, when they do their news round-up at the start and talked briefly about it having been announced as an upcoming title. Not much, as there obviously isn't yet much to say, but some very kind comments about The Long Game and Pull to Open, which is of course much appreciated. You can have a listen to the episode here:

Aside from that, the website CultBox also put up a short news article briefly summarising the news of Star Flight and John Peel's The Mind Trap having been the first two BBC Audiobooks Doctor Who 'audio originals' announced for 2026:

But the main action, such as it is, has been over on Amazon, where after going up for pre-order Star Flight briefly reached the dizzy heights of number 6317 in the charts. Which, I admit, doesn't sound all that impressive, but when you consider how many thousands, probably millions of books and audiobooks are available via Amazon, I think it's pretty good going!

It also made number two their 'Hot New Releases' chart for Doctor Who books and audiobooks:

And got up to number four in their general Doctor Who books chart:

All of which I am, as you can imagine, pretty proud of and pleased with! I'm not sure there will be a lot more to say now until the cover artwork is released; I'm not sure when exactly that will be, but I have seen the draft and I am very pleased with it! I couldn't stop looking at it when it was first sent to me. It made the whole thing feel that much more 'real', of course.

Oh, something else I can share with you, as it doesn't give anything away, is a bit of the email I was sent with the contract to sign when I was commissioned to write the story. This was particularly pleasing as, because it's an audiobook, they obviously refer to it as a 'script': so I was being formally commissioned, by the BBC, to write a Doctor Who script, with the paperwork looking and feeling a bit like that for all those actual, proper, TV Doctor Who writers whose work I have watched, enjoyed, read about and written about down the years...

Taking Flight

I recall once seeing an interview with the comedian Peter Kay, in which he was asked about a poll having voted him the country’s funniest man. Kay dismissed the idea, pointing out that it’s an impossible thing to judge, and that the funniest man in the country could easily be someone like a milkman nobody’s ever heard of, perfectly happy telling jokes to his friends.

 
It's possible that the same could be true of writers. The greatest and finest writer of the most beautifully moving prose in the history of the English language could easily be someone who died in the 1930s having only ever written for her own pleasure, never showed her work to anybody, and whose name will never be known or remembered.
 
If you’re good at something, if you enjoy doing it, if it’s how you want to spend your time, do you really need the outside validation of others?
 
Perhaps for some people the answer is no, you don’t.
 
But I think to many of those for whom writing it an ambition, there is often a need for it. A craving, even. A desire, often a very strong one, for what you do to mean something to someone else. To have some external reassurance of the fact that you can do this, and you have not been entirely wasting your time.
 
All of this has, of course, been gone over many times, by far finer minds than mine. Perhaps most famously, by Orwell in his essay ‘Why I Write’, which I first read in my late teens and which certainly struck a chord with me for his confession that “Sheer egoism,” was one of the main driving factors behind it. “Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death… It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one.”
 
I’ve never really thought about it in terms of wanting to be remembered after death – what happens while I’m still here to enjoy it is far more important to me! – but that egotism he writes about is of course a factor.
 
The thing with writing is you can keep fooling yourself for your entire life that you might one day ‘make it’. Fairly early on, most people realise that they are never going to be an astronaut, or a footballer, or a pop star. But you can keep pretending into old age that you might, just might, one day write a great work of fiction which people will want to read.
 
I don’t remember precisely when I first knew that I wanted to be a writer. But it has almost always been there, from a very young age. When I was in the early years of primary school I found that I could write stories, I enjoyed writing stories, and to some degree at that stage I probably did it better than most of my peers did. It was something for which I had a talent, and which I was aware other people eventually made careers out of, so perhaps that was something I could do. Sometimes this sat alongside other ambitions – wanting to be a writer and a fireman, for example, or a writer and a Formula One team manager. But wanting to be a writer was always in there.
 
I’m middle-aged now, and I have been very fortunate indeed to have had a life in which I have been able, while not exactly making a full-time living from it, to tell stories as part of my professional career. By writing non-fiction books, feature articles, and making radio documentaries. Forming narratives, telling stories, making people interested in knowing what happened. Keeping them following along to the end of the tale.
 
But it’s not quite the same as writing fiction.
 
I am better – much better, really – at writing non-fiction and putting together radio features than I am at writing fiction. When I am constructing those narratives, I do it well – I do it bloody well, actually, so there – and I do it confidently, like crafting some intricate piece of needlework. But despite all these years – decades – of trying, I have never been able to find the same sense of fluency with fiction. Not as an adult. It’s like trying to do the stitching one-handed.
 
I have never stopped trying, though. Because I am under that delusion I mentioned earlier, that I might one day crack it. That I might somehow suddenly stumble across the idea, the way of doing it, which will give me the golden ticket to the chocolate factory of having a novel published. Now I’m in my 40s the rational part of me has started to think that if it were going to happen, I’d have done it by now. That I have reached the extent of my limitations as a writer.
 
But even with that rational part tugging away at one corner of my mind, I can’t just stop. Wanting to be a writer, wanting to be a novelist, is a key part of who I am. Even if I tried, I don’t think I could make it go away. The ideas would always be there, simmering away, and I’d always be thinking maybe this one, maybe this time…
 
It’s true, though, that I have tried a lot of ideas. Serious ones, silly ones. ‘Literary’ ones, trashy ones. Contemporary, historical, science-fiction, horror, first person, third person… I have never found the right formula to make it click. The story which will make people want to know what happens next, and be well-written enough to bring them along on the journey.
 
But…
 
But…
 
But…
 
I have mentioned on this blog more than once over the past few months that I was sitting on a secret. A commission. A real-life, actual commission to write a piece of fiction. Not a novel, something shorter, but still…
 
It was finally announced by the publisher and went up for pre-order online earlier this month so, as the saying goes, I’m “so glad I can finally talk about this.”
 
I realise it sounds incredibly mercenary to think that making money out of something gives it value. But it’s not really about the money, as such, as nice as it would be to be able to make a full-time living out of writing. (I definitely don’t think I will ever reach that stage). But it is that sense of validation, as I mentioned earlier. That someone, with no reason to think favourably of me for any reason, took a look at a submission of mine and decided it was up to a professional standard.
 
So yes, finally, after all of these decades of trying, I am going to be the author of a professional work of fiction. And what is it, you may ask…?
 
Well… I suppose it was inevitable. It’s this. Of course it’s this. What else, really, was it ever going to be…? 

 

Coming in 2026, from BBC Audiobooks – Doctor Who: Star Flight!

From Norwich, it's the Gig of the Week!

As I usually mention on this blog whenever it happens, every so often I get the chance to write a feature for the website at work, usually from a radio piece which I have put together. More often than not this will be to do with a story I have had my eye on for some time and have known about for a while. But there's a piece I've written which has gone up today which is about an event I had never heard of until earlier this year.

There has, of course, been a lot around this summer about the 40th anniversary of Live Aid. I knew that back in 1985 many people across the country had been inspired by it to put on fundraising concerts of their own for the cause, mostly small affairs in village halls and the like. But what I had never heard of until I happened to see a post about it on a Facebook group of was Norwich's version - a mammoth 12-hour gig in Earlham Park, with thousands of people in attendance and featuring acts such as Hawkwind, Amazulu and The Supremes.

I was intrigued both by the fact that it had happened at all, and the fact that it seems to have slipped out of the folk memory - especially given the fact that the far smaller 'North Walsham Live Aid' from later in 1985 often seems to get a mention around the time of the Live Aid anniversaries. (Or it does when you work for the local radio station, anyway!)

I thought this was worthy of further investigation, so decided to see if I could track down some of those involved to interview them for a piece for the 40th anniversary - which is today. The result was a package which ran on my friend Thordis's programme today, and is also available via BBC Sounds - although the online version is slightly different as we can only use production library music on online pieces, not the commercial tracks I used on the radio version.

I've also written a tie-in piece for BBC News Online, which went up this morning. This, however, was only possible thanks to the wonderful photos provided by one of my interviewees, Mark Hodgson. It was his post on Facebook which had first made me aware of the existence of the concert, and fortunately I know Mark slightly - he was one of the people I spoke to for my documentary about the old UEA TV station, Nexus, back in 2021.

So I was able to drop him an email asking both if he'd be willing to be interviewed for his memories of being in the crowd that day, and for permission to use some of his photos in a News Online piece. Very kindly he said yes to both, which is particularly fortunate as without his photos there wouldn't be an article. I'm quite pleased with what I've written, I think it's a nice little piece which tells a decent story, but without Mark's photos to it wouldn't have been publishable. I was very fortunate that he not only took some excellent pictures that day, but all these years later had digitised them in such high quality and given his permission for the BBC to use them. Thanks, Mark!

Ex-cite-ment

Regular readers of this blog – are there any such people? Do comment down below if so, I’d love to know – will be very well aware, in an eye-rolling, ‘here he goes again’ type way, that despite my great ambition being to write fiction, the only area of professional writing in which I have had any success at all so far is with non-fiction. Indeed, until recently the only writing I’d ever been paid for at all was exclusively non-fiction. That has now changed, although I can’t yet talk about what the professional piece of fiction is, as it hasn’t been publicly announced.

 
But there is, however, one thing about writing non-fiction which it does have that fiction can’t really be said to. And that is the fact that what you have written can sometimes turn out to be useful for other people.

Now of course many – probably most – people will read a work of non-fiction simply because they are interested in the subject itself, to take pleasure in finding out more about it or reading a well-constructed narrative outlining its story, or a particular element or phase of that story. But there are also people who, obviously, read a work of non-fiction in the course of their own research into a given subject, for something they are working on themselves.

 
This is one aspect of writing non-fiction which I really like the idea of. The notion that someone might read The Long Game or Pull to Open and use something they’ve found there in their own work. That something I have researched and written about, maybe something I put in one of those books which doesn’t appear anywhere else, will make them go ‘Ah!’ and give them something interesting and maybe even important to include in whatever they may be writing themselves.
 
The reason this comes to mind now is because I have just finished reading Exterminate! Regenerate!, a new mainstream Doctor Who non-fiction book by John Higgs, published by a big publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. A book likely to have a far wider reach and much larger readership than my Doctor Who books, but which it turns out The Long Game and Pull to Open were both read by Higgs during the research for.
 
There are bits and pieces, facts and quotes, from the books cited by Higgs throughout the relevant sections of the book, something I find very pleasing. The fact that I was able to research, collate and write about information which has then gone on to be useful for another writer. But more than that, I even get a couple of mentions in the text, too – being rather flatteringly referred to by Higgs as a “dedicated and talented” historian of Doctor Who. Alongside Richard Bignell, no less – a far more knowledgeable and esteemed researcher of the programme’s history than I!

I’m even in the index, which is a first, and will probably turn out to be a unique experience. It may sound like a weird thing to say, but I’m quite chuffed about that – being an index entry in a book like this!
 
But anyway, yes, it’s nice to feel useful. Or at least, I think so. I remember, about 20 years ago now, I read a biography of a particular historical figure, and I used the book to make some improvements to that person’s Wikipedia page, with the book properly cited. This prompted an angry comment from the author on the article’s talk page, furious as he saw it that his book had been ripped off and plagiarised. I didn’t understand it – you can’t copyright facts, after all, and they were sourced to the book – and thought anyone interested enough to read the page would then be more likely to read the cited book. But he was deeply unhappy. So, feeling very bad about the whole thing and not wanting to upset him, I reverted the edits and removed my improvements to the article.
 
Obviously outright plagiarism, and sources not being acknowledged, is an absolute no-no, and if I found someone had done that with material I’d written I’d of course be very upset, and angry. But using your writing as a useful reference source… Well, I just find that flattering, and immensely pleasing. After all, that’s sort of what the whole point of writing a non-fiction book is. To get more information on a subject about which you’re passionate out there into the world. It would be very selfish indeed if you wanted that to stay purely within the confines of your books, rather than taking on a life of its own and being part of the general pool of knowledge about whatever particular subject it is.
 
So, thanks to John – and I’m very glad I was useful!

St Catherine and All Saints

Very unusually for me – indeed, I think almost certainly uniquely for me, past, present, or future – this particular piece of writing began with a church service.

 
Not one which I was attending, I hasten to add. But last autumn, soon after the Look East 60^th anniversary and all the various bits and bobs which went on around that, my colleague Andrew was attending a regular Sunday service at his local church. Also among the congregation was a member of the Norwich Society who, having seen some of the mentions of the Look East anniversary, wondered whether Andrew might possibly be interested in writing something about the history of the BBC in the city for their twice-yearly journal, Aspects of Norwich.
 
Andrew said he didn’t really think it was something for him, but that he knew a man who might be interested…
 
So it was that he put me in touch with them, and I was very pleased to be able to contribute an article.

I thought it would fit best to base the piece around the story of the BBC’s first proper headquarters in Norwich, at St Catherine’s Close on All Saints Green, which became their first East Anglian radio HQ in 1956 and then had a regional television element added to it three years later. Overall the BBC were there for 47 years, through until 2003, and I thought a piece about the early days and the establishment and early growth of the BBC presence in the city might be interesting.

 
I was particularly pleased to do it because it meant I was able to provide a home for various bits and pieces of information which I thought were interesting which I’d come across while researching some of my previous programmes about local BBC history, either at Caversham or in our own files which we hold in Norwich. Things there wasn’t really the time or space for in those programmes, or which were a bit niche for something being broadcast for a general audience, but which would work nicely in a dedicated history piece for a specialist readership.

It also meant a chance to share some pictures which, similarly, wouldn’t really have a home elsewhere. The kind of thing which if this were Broadcasting House in London, or the BBC in the likes of Glasgow or Manchester or even Birmingham, would probably find their place in a dedicated book about the history of the Corporation there, but which in Norwich there isn’t really the market for. The history of part of an important institution which, inevitably being a small and unfashionable part of said institution, still falls through the cracks.

 
I think it’s quite a nice piece in-all, and the Society seemed very happy with it, although I haven’t actually had any feedback from any of the readers of Aspects of Norwich. But then again, no complaints, either! If you fancy a read, Aspects of Norwich is available in various local bookshops, as well as directly from the Society’s website.

Wembley Words

In my previous blog entry, about the series I produced for BBC Sounds called The Man Who Made Wembley, I mentioned the pleasing news that on its first weekend of availability, the series had been given a nice little notice in The Observer. Just a brief mention at the end of a round-up of other sporting-related programmes, but nice to have - even if, as I mentioned before, they did get the title slightly wrong!

However, it turns out that The Observer wasn't the only national publication of which The Man Who Made Wembley caught the attention. Because the following weekend, it got another little write-up in the Sunday press. This time in one of the supplements in the Sunday Times, their Culture magazine, in a piece written by their regular radio and podcast reviewed Clair Woodward - who also, back in 2022, gave my Nexus documentary a nice review, too.

With due acknowledgement, and of course thanks, to those two newspapers, however, best of all came the other week when the podcast page of the Radio Times highlighted the series. Not only that, but reviewer David Hepworth actually made it his 'Pick of the Week'. I think "breezy series" is a compliment - it must be, given the context, and I'll take it as one anyway!

Oh yes, and the BBC Sport Online piece I wrote to tie-in with the series also made it into the round-up of their "most engaging football content" for the season just gone. Which is pretty good going, given that neither the piece nor the series really features football all that much at all! I'm not sure whether they judged that in terms of readability or raw figures, but I'm pleased with how the piece did on both counts - it got over 300,000 views and the stats seemed to show that people who clicked on it were reading through most or all of it.