TV90

 

Today marks the 90th anniversary of BBC Television, with the service having been officially launched from Alexandra Palace in London on the 2nd of November 1936. It is, of course, an anniversary of which I have been well aware for a while - and has given me the opportunity to tell a story I have been looking forward to having the chance to tell for many months.

Early this year I read and very much enjoyed Magic Rays of Light by John Wyver, an excellent new book telling the story of British television from its earliest experimental days, through to the launching of the BBC service, and its shutting down for the duration of the war in September 1939. If you're interested, you can read my review of the book on Goodreads here.

There was obviously a huge amount of information in the book which was completely new to me - including the story with which John chose to open it. This was the story of George Boar, a pre-war television viewer who was both ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary because he was a working class farmhand living in the Suffolk countryside. And extraordinary because for such a person to own a television set in the 1930s was very rare indeed. Perhaps even unique.

George had only managed to afford a set because of an inheritance, and such was its rarity in that place at that time that he became something of a minor celebrity, with assorted press reports about the 'Television Man' of Long Melford. I thought it was a fascinating story, and with Suffolk being the next-door county to the one in which I work, and within the same BBC East region, I was reasonably confident I would be able to do something on it come the anniversary. George wasn't a viewer from day one, but it seemed an appropriate story of 1930s television to cover for the anniversary date.

Well, here we are, and I am pleased to say I have been able to put together an episode all about George for Secret Suffolk on BBC Sounds. John was kind enough to talk to me to share his research into George's story, and I have also been able to speak to a few people who either live or formerly lived in Long Melford - including one lady, Dorothy Theobald, who will be 100 years old in December and still remembers going to George's house to watch his TV set when she was a child.

The more I looked into this story and spoke to people about it over the past week, the more fascinating I found it. There are the headline aspects of it, of course - George's unusual nature as a TV viewer, the attention it brought him, and the incredible story of how when he told one journalist he wanted a wife to watch his TV set with he picked one out of 800 letters he received from women across the country. 

But there's also a very melancholy aspect to the tale, one you can't really get under the skin of from this distance. In 1939, George was the 'Television Man'. It had brought him a wife, and local fame. Everybody in Long Melford knew who he was, and indeed his story would remain a well-known one in the village for decades, even taught to the children of Long Melford Primary School for their history projects. Hundreds of villagers had at one time or another arranged to come and watch George's set, and put a few coins in the bowl in his front room for the privilege as a 'thank you'. He'd spent the equivalent of thousands of pounds on this huge great piece of kit and a sixty-foot mast to ensure good reception from Alexandra Palace. According to the Radio Times piece about him from early 1939, he'd even bought a second set - so presumably had still had some of that inheritance left over.

Then, suddenly, in September 1939... Nothing. Did he and his wife Betty go to turn on the set that night and were they puzzled to find nothing there? Did they scan the newspapers over the following weeks and months, hoping for some sign of television's return? Did they manage to maintain the set in good order, or did it gather dust as a useless encumbrance in the front room? Did that tall mast in the garden start to rust? Would the farmer whose cottage it was for whom George worked as a stockman demand it be taken down? 

We don't know whether George had enjoyed his status as the 'Television Man', although given he always seemed happy to speak to the press it's a fair bet that he didn't mind it too much. Had it made him feel a little special? Was it a comedown to suddenly no longer feel that way? Did he miss the certain status he had held within the village, as the perhaps slightly odd-seeming TV enthusiast?

We cannot know. I do know that George and Betty stayed together, and had two sons, and later moved to Harlow where he continued to work as a farm labourer. You'd think that his TV set and sixty-foot mast might have been mentioned in the press had he still been in Long Melford and the TV set still been working on the resumption of the service in 1946, and especially for the coronation in 1953. His mast would still have been very useful then, in the days just before East Anglia's Tacolneston transmitter.

Perhaps he had already gone to Harlow by then. Or perhaps, the saddest thought of all, he and Betty excitedly tried to bring their set or sets back to life in 1946, and found the years of inactivity had taken their toll. The inheritance spent, no money to repair or replace. The 'Television Man' no more.

It's a mystery. And perhaps a play for someone to write someday. But what we do know and can say about George is fascinating - and I hope you will enjoy listening to the story on BBC Sounds.

Going Nationwide

A few weeks ago, I had an email on my work account from Paul Lee. He's a writer and researcher interested in various topics, who I don't really know as such but with whom I'd previously had a very small amount of contact online regarding archive television matters. TV history being one of his areas of interest.

One of his other areas of interest is the topic of ghosts, and he had emailed to send me a press release about a discovery he'd made. Not about ghosts, as such, but about a report into them - a report broadcast on the BBC's famous Nationwide programme in 1972, but which hadn't been seen since. Of course, any story involving the digging up of a bit of TV history is always going to be of interest to me, and as this one involved Norfolk it meant that I could do a bit on it for work.

What Paul had been able to do was to establish roughly when the Nationwide report had been broadcast, and arrange to go to the British Film Institute in London to look through their holdings of the programme from the relevant period. He went through episode-by-episode through the weeks in question, to see whether the edition in question and the report it contained on the mysterious goings-on at Bircham Newton in West Norfolk had survived.

It wasn't in the BBC archive - I'd checked myself to make sure. At the time, the main BBC archive didn't regularly preserve full editions of shows like Nationwide. Instead, they usually just archived the pre-filmed reports. While the studio item on the Bircham Newton case was a pre-recorded video insert, unsurprisingly that insert itself also seems to be long gone.

But while the main archive wasn't recording Nationwide, someone else was. I've not been able to ascertain exactly who or why, but the tapes at the BFI came from the BBC so I suspect they were reference copies made by the Nationwide production office themselves. They were recording the episodes off-air onto the Shibaden reel-to-reel video format, and apparently an almost complete, or at least very substantial, run of the programme's 1970s episodes survives in this format.

At some point these Shibaden reels were donated to the BFI, who in 2016 received a National Lottery grant to digitise these and other rare holdings which only survived on now-obscure formats. Which is how they were available for Paul Lee to go and have a look at, and where last month he was able to find the Bircham Newton report.

Thanks to the BFI I was able to get a copy, to combine with an interview I recorded with Paul to make an episode of our Secret Norfolk series on BBC Sounds. There's also an accompanying BBC News Online feature - both out today, of course, to coincide with Halloween. The perfect time, surely, to put out a ghost story!

September Stuff

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.

Paul Hayes · Casualty 40th anniversary package for BBC Local Radio

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.

Ten Years in Two Weeks

August is over, and what have I spent it doing? Well, a few bits and pieces, but a large chunk of it was spent putting together a book which very few people will ever read, and of which only one copy is ever going to be available.
 
Allow me to explain…
 
September will see the 70^th anniversary of the BBC setting up a full-blown broadcasting headquarters in Norwich – which is the outpost of the BBC where I work and have done for the best part of 20 years. There had been transmitter staff based in and around the city for some years before 1956, in the days when the BBC owned and operated the transmitters themselves, and in the run-up to opening the headquarters the recruited staff had been based in a temporary office in the city.
 
But it was on September the 10^th 1956 that the new BBC East Anglian HQ officially opened at St Catherine’s Close on All Saints Green in Norwich. Radio moved across the road to Norfolk Tower in 1980, but St Catherine’s Close would be the main BBC base in the city until 2003 – when the operation moved to The Forum on Millennium Plain, where we remain to this day.

Knowing that this anniversary was coming up, I wanted to do a little something to mark it. These days at work we have a small waiting area on the first floor for guests, next to the radio and TV studio section, which is also sometimes used as a kind of ‘common room’ area for staff to sit during breaks. I thought it might be nice to put some sort of photobook together celebrating our history in Norwich, which staff and guests could flick through when sitting down there either having a break or waiting to go onto a live programme or do a recording.

 
It’s very unlikely that anyone would ever publish any kind of commercial book on the history of the BBC in Norwich. The market would be far too small, and the interest from the wider broadcasting history community too limited. There has been the odd book down the years on some of the bigger regional bases such as Manchester, but generally speaking BBC regional history is not a rich seam for publishers to mine, for obvious and understandable reasons.
 
But I knew that I could put something together – I had the knowledge and the access to the material, even if not the design and layout skills. Originally my idea was to do something taking in the whole seventy years, but it quickly became apparent that this would be impractical. It would be far too much to cover, and actually – paradoxically perhaps – the earlier years are far better-represented, at least in terms of what we have in Norwich and what I’ve seen at Caversham, than for example the 1970s.

 
Plus there’s also the fact that if you start doing more recent years, you might risk accidentally upsetting people if they or their work aren’t included. So I thought the first ten years would be a good cut-off – especially as it pretty much forms a distinct era in the history of the BBC’s East Anglian operation. Eric Hammond, the Engineer-in-Charge in Norwich who really helped build the whole thing, retired at the end of 1965, and David Bryson, who was editorially in charge as the ‘East Anglia Representative’, left in 1967. So 1956-1966 forms a nice initial era.

 

A lot of the material I had already gone through before for some of my radio projects telling aspects of BBC East’s history, so I had a pretty good grasp of what was available and what the story was. It was just a matter then of putting the whole thing together.
 
It took about two weeks all-told, laying out all of the images and writing the captions. There isn’t a huge amount of text, but overall it runs to about eight thousand words in total throughout the book. Because I have no design skills I put the whole thing together very simply in Word, although the cover was done in Acrobat using a template from the Lulu print-on-demand website through which I created the finished copy.
 
I have been frustrated by the limitations of my own abilities with design and not spotting issues which I ought to have spotted when going through –  I thought – the thing very carefully before having it printed. But overall, once it arrived and it existed as an actual, physical book, I was pretty pleased with it.

 

Nobody would ever make a coffee table book on the history of the BBC in Norwich for real. But I feel proud to be able to celebrate the achievements of those who built the foundations of this outpost by having put together something which at least gives an idea of what such a book might be like.
 
So, if you ever happen to be in as a guest for a BBC radio or television programme in Norwich, do please give it a look!

A couple of BBC bits

 

To round off July, I thought I'd catch up with a couple of bits of writing I unexpectedly ended up doing for BBC News Online this month.

The first actually resulted, indirectly, from the Mr Pastry piece I did for Secret Norfolk and News Online in June. A man called Philip Yull heard the Pastry episode of Secret Norfolk, found it interesting and emailed the station to ask if we might be interested in another little story from the county's history.

This one was from back in 1976, when James Hunt - in the very year he won the Formula One World Championship - had come to Norfolk to take part in a rally, and ended up crashing into a tree... along with his co-driver for the event, Noel Edmonds.

I happened to be working when this email dropped into the inbox and immediately thought this might make a Secret Norfolk episode. So not only did I email Philip back to ask if he'd be prepared to have a chat about it, I also decided to take the chance of emailing Noel Edmonds' agent to ask if he would too. And he said yes!

Emma who does Secret Norfolk was keen, News Online liked the idea of a tie-in piece, so the whole thing came together in just a few days. BBC Sounds piece, radio package cut-down of it, and News Online article.

There's something quite nice about getting a feature done like that just off-the-cuff, without extensive planning, and it still turning out quite well. But the other bit I did this month had an even shorter timespan.

After the death of Sir Garfield Sobers, my colleague Matthew who was on weekend news recorded a chat with our former colleague, now retired, Richard Bond, about a story they'd discussed in the newsroom in the past - when Richard had met Sobers when he was a child, and his father had invited him round their house when he was playing a match in Norfolk.

It's a nice little story, and on the Monday after I asked my colleague Dave who's in charge of all things Norfolk for BBC News whether he was getting it written up for online. He did like the story but didn't have anyone spare to do it. As that day was a relatively quiet one on my shift, I knew I probably had the time to give it a go so I asked if he'd mind if I put together an online article from Matthew's interview with Richard. He didn't mind, so that one ended up coming together just on the day. A bit of a contrast from my usual weeks or months of putting something together, but that was one of the reasons I wanted to do it - to test the skills of trying to put something decent together just in a couple of hours, while doing the actual work I was being paid to do in between.

A Piece of Pastry

This is a slightly curious one. An article which wasn’t my idea and which it would almost certainly never have occurred to me to write, but which has ended up becoming one of the most-read pieces of work I have ever done.

 
A few weeks ago my colleague Emma, who among many other things produces the Secret Norfolk series of feature pieces and mini-documentaries for BBC Sounds, asked me if I might make her an item for that series about the actor and comedian Richard Hearne – a household name in Britain for many years in the mid-20^th century for his Mr Pastry character.
 
Emma had been speaking to Paul Dickson, who runs walking tours of Norwich city centre exploring its history and heritage, about some possible subjects he might be able to help with for Secret Norfolk episodes and he had suggested Hearne as an interesting candidate. Emma knows of my great interest in and work related to television history, and thought I’d be the perfect person to do such a piece.
 
I was aware of Hearne, and probably had been ever since I’d heard former Doctor Who producer Barry Letts tells his well-worn anecdote about sounding him out for the part of the Fourth Doctor in the 1993 Radio 2 documentary Doctor Who – 30 Years. I’d also researched some of his work, a little bit, as his early 1960s Saturday teatime sitcoms feature in my forthcoming book When Saturday Came about the history of the BBC Television’s children’s shows in that slot from 1950 to 1963.

 

But he’s not someone I would have necessarily gone out of my way to make a radio piece about or write an online feature on. However, I was more than happy to do so when Emma asked me if I’d fancy it. I was able to put together what turned out to be a nice little Secret Norfolk episode, talking to Paul Dickson out-and-about on the streets Norwich and using a bit of archive of Hearne speaking about his life and career on BBC Radio 4 in 1968.
 
I hadn’t initially thought there was any mileage in a tie-in News Online feature, for the simple reason that it wasn’t in any way, shape or form ‘news’. This wasn’t an event or a happening, it was simply interesting. However, the news editor had expressed an interest in an article and, while there was no ‘hook’ for it, after making the Sounds piece I decided I could probably do something as a light weekend feature.
 
This I duly did, and after going up last weekend it’s proved that there are actually a large number of people who remember and / or are interested in Mr Pastry, as it’s done great guns on the stats. Interestingly, over the course of the past week it’s pretty much doubled what it got on the first day, which is unusual and surprising and probably comes from it being shared on Facebook nostalgia groups and the like.
 
On the one hand, it’s slightly dispiriting to find that something I put together comparatively quickly can get a much larger readership than something I originated and very carefully researched and crafted over a long period of time. But on the other, it’s just nice to do something which interests people and which they want to read!
 
So, here’s to good old Mr Pastry.

Penny, the Pylon, and Me

At my secondary school, which I attended all the way through from year seven to sixth form, at the beginning of every school year you’d be issued with a school diary. I expect many if not most other schools of the time had something similar – an A5-sized, spiral-bound thing probably about half an inch thick, mainly made up of weekly planner pages for recording homework, etc, but also with your timetable, staff list, school rules, a map of the school site and where each classroom was, and all that kind of thing.
 
Almost everyone would heavily-customise these – i.e. scribble all over them – but many of us would also stick various things onto the clear plastic ‘covers’ which protected the front and back pages. I would usually add various pictures cut out of newspapers and magazines – Formula One cars, Daleks, and other bits and pieces reflecting my interests.
 
In my final year at school, the last year of sixth form, one of the pictures I had stuck to the front of my diary was a print-out of a photo I’d taken myself.
 
“It’s a pylon,” Penny, my closest friend at the time, would point out, deeply unimpressed. “Why do you have a pylon on the front of your diary, Paolo?” My “pylon” was, as I recall, the subject of much withering contempt from her throughout that school year.
 
It was not, of course, a pylon. Oh no. It was something much more exciting. A transmitter mast.

 

I was not so much interested in the technology or the architecture of the mast itself, but what it represented. This was a photo of the transmitter mast at Alexandra Palace, the birthplace of the BBC Television Service.
 
I had been invited there by Simon Vaughan of the Alexandra Palace Television Society for an event they were putting on in the old Studio A on September 10 2001. As I recall it, I had emailed Simon via the APTS website a while beforehand when I had been researching an article on RUR, the first piece of television science-fiction, which had been broadcast from the Palace in February 1938.

 
Simon had kindly helped me out with my query and we had corresponded via email and he asked me if I’d like to come along to the event – very kind of him, considering I was probably quite an irritating 17-year-old at the time. Well, I was definitely 17 anyway. I am pretty sure the term had actually already started, and I skipped a day of sixth form to go – but it doesn’t seem to have done me any harm in the long run. I mean, look – the BBC website says I am a “media historian” and everything! And I suppose I do have a media studies A-Level, so that justifies the description. Right...?

 

It was a fascinating day. I remember the sense of being somewhere special, where television in Britain had properly begun, in those very studios. We went into B, and also up into one of the old galleres… I don’t think I properly appreciated at the time just what a privilege it all was. Also to meet Arthur Dungate, well known in TV history circles for chronicling his days at AP on his website, and hearing many of his stories.
 
There is a sense of magic which clings to the Palace, if you’re interested in television history. I think it’s partly because much the architecture is relatively unchanged from the time the BBC service was based there. So as you walk up the hill and stand on the terrace and see London spread out into the distance, it’s possible to imagine what it might have been like to be one of those heading up to work there in those early days, when the entire BBC Television staff was based there and it had a collegiate, pioneering feel.
 
But the service itself also had a sense of enticing enigma to it. As I wrote earlier this year in a review of John Wyver’s book Magic Rays of Light on Goodreads, this was a full-blown television station – well, sort of – the world’s very first such regular service, and yet only the tiniest fragments of it survive to give us only the vaguest, tantalising impression of what it might have been like.
 
That sense is also there with the service’s revival after the Second World War; the way after being dormant for so long, the personnel regathered and they picked up and started again.
 
My fascination with those early days led me on another trip to the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham last month, to research another piece for the History of the BBC website. That was because today marks the 80^th anniversary of the resumption of BBC Television after the war, and I have written an article about that return.

 

I was also able to get hold from the BBC sound archives of something I hadn’t actually realised existed until I was researching this piece – about ten minutes’ worth of audio recordings of bits of the re-opening programme. The full programme itself is long gone; in some ways you could say it never existed, disappearing into the ether live as it was broadcast. But having these audio fragments gives a closer sense of what it might have been like than you can get simply from reading the scripts and other documentation.
 
So I was able to use some brief clips from those surviving audio fragments to make a short radio package on the anniversary for the BBC’s CNS department, which provides the local radio network with feature material and guests and items related to national stories.

Paul Hayes · Return of BBC Television in 1946 - BBC Local Radio 80th anniversary report

 
Quite a few of the stations have run it on Friday and over the weekend, and nosily tuning around on BBC Sounds to see what they made of it it’s been pleasing to hear a few of the presenters sounding genuinely impressed with it – that it gave them “goosebumps" or that it was a “privilege” to have played it.
 
It’s a nice reassurance that I do have an ability to write and edit items which can have an effect on people. As I think I have mentioned here before, my main aim with this sort of thing is always just to create something which makes people think “that’s interesting,” and it seems I might have achieved that here – even for some of those who would not normally be grabbed by the subject.