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!

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!