Movie Memories

This month marks the 30^th anniversary of the one and only bona fide new episode of Doctor Who to have been broadcast during the 1990s – the 1996 TV movie, starring Paul McGann, made in Canada for the US Fox Network as a collaboration between Universal Television, the BBC, and BBC Worldwide, as-was.

 
That anniversary is being marked in many and various ways across the Doctor Who world. One of these celebratory efforts is a Doctor Who magazine special edition, for which I was asked to write a piece. I was pleased to do so, as I am very fond of ‘the TV Movie’, as fans call it, for all sorts of reasons. While it certainly has its faults, and it was disappointing that it didn’t lead to anything further at the time, one of the reasons for my fondness is a nostalgia for the great excitement at the time that there was actually going to be some new Doctor Who.
 
I was 12 years old when the TV Movie came out, and by this stage very self-consciously a ‘Doctor Who Fan’. I’d been aware of and watched the series ever since I could remember, but when it finally slipped out of the schedules at the end of 1989 I was too young, really, to have had any proper awareness of it having come to an end.
 
Besides which, it was still part of my life, and of the TV landscape. I would see it on video from time to time, via tapes my older brother borrowed from his friend Damien. There would be reasonably regular repeats on BBC2 through the early-to-mid-90s, through which I saw several Doctor Who stories for the very first time. And by the mid-nineties I was also able to start buying my own copies of stories on video, with paper round money.
 
All of which may make it seem a little strange, looking at it from the outside, that I found the prospect of the TV Movie so thrilling. Pretty much every Doctor Who story I bought on video at that point was ‘new’ to me. But even so, I knew it wasn’t quite the same. As much as I enjoyed them, it wasn’t like having ongoing, Doctor Who around. The only ‘new’ Doctor Who there’d been since I’d become aware it wasn’t being made any more was the Children in Need special Dimensions in Time in 1993, which to a nine-year-old had been a crushing disappointment, just a few minutes of nonsense running around the Albert Square set.
 
I was a Doctor Who magazine reader from the end of 1994, so I knew there were all sorts of rumours, speculation, possibilities of something happening in America… And I have a memory of actually dismissing it when my mother told me one day in January 1996 that she’d read that Paul McGann had been cast as the Doctor. “Just another rumour”, I told her, or words to that effect, with the very smug, superior, know-it-all attitude of a fan who wouldn’t even be 12 until the following month.

 
At which point, of course, the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine turned up with the papers one morning. “With Paul McGann on the front,” as mum told me quite pointedly. Hah!
 
Poor old mum is a bit of a hero of this story, actually. Such was the fractured nature of the TV Movie’s production and its path to the screen that when its 30^th anniversary falls varies depending on how and where you saw it. It premiered in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada on May 12^th 1996; on the Fox Network in the US on the 14^th, and not on BBC1 until the late May Bank Holiday, Monday the 27^th.
 
Prior to that, BBC Worldwide had been hoping to cash in with a UK video release in advance of the UK showing. This was due to happen on May the 15^th, but was delayed due to issues with what edit exactly would be released and the certificate it would gain from the BBFC.

 

Although the internet was certainly ‘a thing’ by the spring of 1996 and I was aware of its existence and what it was, I was still a few years away from being online at home, and thus not at all plugged into the likes of the rec.arts.drwho newsgroup or other fan communities. Indeed, at that stage I wasn’t even a member of any ‘real world’ fan communities, and it did sometimes feel a bit like I was the only Doctor Who fan left in the world. Despite there being regular book and video releases, and a monthly magazine, and now a whole new TV Movie, etc.
 
Anyway, not having any idea the video release had been delayed, I had been able to persuade mum to drive us into Worthing after I got home from school, to head to Volume One on Montague Street, which was the place where I usually bought my Doctor Who books and videos. Only to be told that the video release had been delayed, which as you can imagine for a boy expecting to see a brand new episode of Doctor Who which he’d been looking forward to for weeks, months, since its announcement, and all day at school, was a bit of a blow.
 
Bless him, the bloke behind the counter in Volume One did give me one of their posters for the video release, which was nice of him. I have a vague memory we may have tried Smith’s as well, and if we did that we almost certainly would have tried Woolies too, ‘just in case’, but of course there was no joy. No new Doctor Who, at least not until the following week.
 
This time, I didn’t take any chances – after getting home from school I actually looked up Volume One’s number in the phone book and called to see whether they had the video in. This may not sound like much, but I used to be quite oddly nervous of using the phone. Not answering it, that didn’t bother me at all, but somehow I had this paranoid idea that calling someone, even a commercial business which advertised its number, was somehow intrusive and might, absurdly, make them angry or get me into trouble in some way. I realise that sounds ridiculous, but human beings are odd creatures.
 
Anyway, I plucked up the courage and was delighted to hear they did indeed have it. “Can you reserve one for me, please!?” I asked, desperately. “We’ve got loads,” the person on the other end assured me. “Yes, but can you reserve one for me!?”
 
It was a wet Wednesday afternoon, and mum never liked driving in the rain – she’d only passed her test about eighteen months or so before this – so she really wasn’t keen on heading into Worthing. “Do we have to?” she asked, although I suspect of course she knew the answer.
 
Yes. Yes, we do!

 

So into town we went, and Volume One did indeed have my copy safely reserved for me behind the counter. There probably were still loads out on the shelves, I don’t remember checking. I had my copy, and that was all that mattered!
 
I did genuinely enjoy the film, too, when we finally got home to watch it. I suspect I watched it quite a few times in the following few days, although some of the joy did begin to fade when of course it became obvious that this was to be a lone island in an ocean of no new Doctor Who. With no prospect of further adventures on the horizon anytime soon.
 
But it’s a time I can look back on now with great fondness, so I was happy to be asked to write a piece about the excitement among fandom in the build-up to the movie’s arrival. There are plenty of other reminds of those days in the new special too, of course, so if that’s something that appeals to you then do please give it a read.

Flight into Danger Revisited

I’ve written previously on this blog about my pride in having been able to write for the Radio Times, a magazine the history and heritage of which is very much threaded through the story of British broadcasting, and particularly so for that of the BBC which owned it for the first 89 years of its existence.
 
I’ve been pleased as well to have written a couple of other bits for them since then, and to have had the Wembley series so nicely reviewed in its pages last year. Now, I’ve been able to combine the two things: writing for the magazine myself, and documentaries I’ve made being written about in its pages. Because in the latest issue out today I have a piece about my Flight into Danger documentary on BBC Sounds.
 

This is nice for two reasons. Firstly, of course, it’s nice just to write for the Radio Times again; to once more be a tiny part of a publication with such a long and esteemed history. But it also feels as if it somehow connects what I’ve done to Flight into Danger’s UK showing all those years ago back in 1956. Only in a very small way, and I’m not at all trying to suggest that having made a radio documentary about something puts me on the same level as the people who made the actual programme.
 
But it was the Radio Times, with its preview piece in the week of the BBC broadcast of the play, which will have first introduced many if not most of Flight into Danger’s eventual British viewers to its existence. And so seventy years on, it feels slightly as if I’ve taken up that thread at the other end and have now been able to re-introduce the existence of the play to the magazine’s current readers.
 
The 1956 preview piece was written by Elwyn Jones, a distinguished and important figure in the history of BBC television drama, then just in the early stages of his career with the department. He had been working for the Radio Times himself, but was now working in television directly. On the BBC’s Programme-as-Broadcast documents for Flight into Danger he is listed as its ‘producer’. He wasn’t in any way involved with the original production, of course, but he seems to have been the one on the BBC side who made the arrangements for the recording to be shown here.

I’m not being so self-aggrandising as to suggest that my also having written a piece about Flight into Danger for the Radio Times somehow makes me in any way like Elwyn Jones. But it is pleasing to feel as if there is that one little element in common with someone who helped bring the play to British screens, thus setting in motion some of the most important events in Flight into Danger’s extraordinary afterlife and its impact on British broadcasting.

 
So anyway – thanks to all at the Radio Times for letting me write the piece. I hope you like it if you’re able to pick up a copy. The new issue is, as usual, on sale from now until Monday from all good newsagents, or digitally via Pocketmags.

Flight into Danger

A promotional poster for my Flight into Danger documentary, created for me by Andrew-Mark Thompson

I can’t say for certain when I first heard of Flight into Danger. I am reasonably sure, though, that it must have been in the book The Doctors: 30 Years of Time Travel by Adrian Rigelsford, which I would have purchased with saved-up paper round money sometime in the mid-1990s, probably from The Works discount bookshop on Montague Street in Worthing – which in my memory often used to have remaindered copies of those Boxtree books.
 
The Doctors is fairly well-known as a book with a lot wrong with it, and I certainly wouldn’t now recommend it to anyone as a serious or reliable source of information. But nonetheless, in spite of all the much-catalogued flaws of the book and its author, I do have a certain nostalgic affection for it. One of the things I liked was the way in which, like the infinitely superior Doctor Who: The Sixties, it brought in background information about some of the wider television context and history important to the creation of Doctor Who – information which was often hard to come by as a nineties tweenager in a pre-internet household.
 
And one of those bits of context and history was a brief mention of Flight into Danger, and the part it played in Sydney Newman ending up working in the UK.
 
So I’d known from that point what an important part of the story of the creation of Doctor Who it was. Therefore, it was something I came back to many years later, in 2022, when I was working on my book which eventually emerged as Pull to Open – telling that origin story and trying to place it in the wider background and context which I’d long found so fascinating, and which I thought other people might do as well.
 
I therefore did quite bit of research into the play, and particularly how it was received here in the UK, when writing the chapter about Sydney Newman’s background and career and how he’d ended up coming to work in Britain and eventually at the BBC. It was clear that Flight into Danger was indeed very important to all of this, but I also found it a fascinating subject in and of itself – not least, of course, because its part in Newman’s career was only one aspect of the play’s afterlife.
 
In case you didn’t know – and I feel if you’re reading this blog entry that’s exceedingly unlikely, but here we go anyway – Flight into Danger ended up, via its movie remake Zero Hour!, being remade as Airplane!, one of the most famous comedy films of all time.

 

But there were other stories which sprang from it, too. Its star James Doohan going on to become famous as Scotty in Star Trek. It starting Arthur Hailey’s professional writing career, beginning his journey to becoming a multi-millionaire bestselling novelist. And also, the fact that Flight into Danger was just so enigmatic. You couldn’t get it anywhere – it’s not on any streaming service, it’s never had a home media release, and I later discovered it hasn’t been repeated on television at all since 1982. The television history of Canada certainly seems to be a very under-researched subject compared to those of Britain and the US. Added to that the gravitational pull of Airplane! having pretty much blotted out the original source material from history, and it became something I wanted to know much more about.
 
So, even though it wasn’t strictly necessary for the Newman chapter in Pull to Open, while I was working on the book I approached the CBC archives and enquired whether it would be possible to purchase a copy of Flight into Danger directly from them for personal research purposes. I hadn’t expected any kind of positive response, but to my surprise they actually agreed to sell me a copy – for $300. Certainly the most expensive fifty minutes of television I have ever purchased!
 
But it was well worth it, and of course having actually seen the play and owning a copy of it made me want to both look into it more and try to tell its story more widely. At the time of Doctor Who’s 60^th anniversary in 2023, when Pull to Open had come out, I actually tried pitching a Flight into Danger article to some of the broadsheets, convinced that the joint Airplane! origin story and Doctor Who angle would make for an interesting story which most people wouldn’t know about. But sadly, none of their features editors agreed with me!
 
That, then, seemed to be that. But the idea of doing more on Flight into Danger always nagged at me a little, in the background, because I thought it was a story worth telling and one which I could do a decent job of doing so.

 

Towards the end of last year I realised, of course, that April 2026 would see the 70^th anniversary of the play’s original broadcast, and I decided to have a go at doing something through my work at the BBC. I didn’t know exactly what form it might take, but I knew that I would be able to get something out, even if it was just a short package for CNS, the part of the BBC which provides material on national stories and interesting feature items to the BBC Local Radio stations.
 
This all gained more impetus when I discovered that Corinne Conley, the co-star of Flight into Danger, was not only still alive but still performing – I came across a recent YouTube video of her taking part in a poetry reading. After emailing the producer of that particular production, I was able to establish contact and she agreed to record an interview with me at the end of last year about her memories of Flight into Danger, via Zoom from her home in California.
 
Having one of the stars of the actual programme made the whole idea feel so much more alive, and I could feel the thing coming together in my head. Despite having no actual commission to do anything for anyone, I was still confident I could get find some sort of outlet, probably via BBC Sounds, and my confidence built when I was able to record interviews with all of the other guests I’d wanted – Airplane! co-director David Zucker, Sydney Newman biographer Graeme Burk, film and TV expert Melanie Williams, and pilot Emma Henderson.
 
It turned out that Flight into Danger’s writer Arthur Hailey had been from Luton, so I was able to produce a short, 20-minute audio documentary for my BBC East colleagues at BBC Three Counties Radio, for their Secret Bedfordshire series on BBC Sounds, thanks to their Sounds producer there Jane Killick. I was also able to do an accompanying BBC News Online article, and a more specialist feature for the History of the BBC website – for which I was able to access some of the files relating to Flight at the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham.

 

All of this has finally gone online over the past few days, and gratifyingly seems to have gone down well with those who are interested in such aspects of television history.
 
And yet…
 
It still doesn’t feel finished, somehow. I still think there is so much more that could be said about Flight into Danger, greater detail which could be gone into. Something longer to be written.
 
So I have started having a poke around… a deeper dive into the research… Putting a few bits of prose together.
 
Because I think that my next non-fiction book may have to be the story of Flight into Danger. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it almost certainly will be – if, that is, I can persuade anybody to publish it!
 
But before I do that, I’ll have to get the thing written first…

Fying High

 

It's here!

Star Flight was released on Thursday, and although of course most people will probably buy it to stream or download, it also exists as an actual, physical version on CD. Which I was able to get a copy of on release day - rather pleasingly, World Book Day. And even though it's not a book-length story, audiobooks still count, so it was nice to be able to welcome a new member of the 'family' on that day of all days.

Also out on Thursday was the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine, which contained a review of Star Flight. It's not a bad verdict at all, although it's fair to say I was a little disappointed that their reviewer David Richardson didn't enjoy the story as much as the online reviewers I mentioned last week. Interestingly, his main issue was that it didn't quite feel true to the era of the programme in which it was set - something which one of those reviews last week praised it for. Which just goes to show how people can have very different views of the same piece of writing! And proof, perhaps, if proof were needed that you shouldn't allow yourself to get either too downhearted nor too carried away by the reviews.

But I am pleased that - so far! - nobody has given Star Flight a real pasting. Mentioning the DWM review also gives me the opportunity to correct a small but important error which creapt into it, which really does need to be noted. The sound design work on the story is, rightly, praised - but credited to David Darlington, when in fact sound design was by David Roocroft.

I should also, of course, thank Christopher Naylor for performing the reading, Morrison Ellis for producing the whole thing, and Lee Johnson for doing the cover. And Michael Stevens, John Ainsworth and Steve Cole for giving me the opportunity and getting it into a fit state for publication. So, thank you all!

It's still strange, and rather wonderful, to think that I have written an official Doctor Who story for the BBC, and that it is out there in the world and a part - a tiny part, I know - of all that history. I thought I'd feel more emotional when I put the CD on and heard my name being credited over that music, but it was actually the end which really got me in that sense. Hearing the sound of the TARDIS over my description of it in the closing moments of the story. That's when I really felt it, if that doesn't sound too sappy.

Well, even if it does sound too sappy, I've said it now - so there!

Something else I've been very pleased with myself about is that Star Flight has spent much of the past few days at number one in Amazon's chart of Doctor Who books and audiobooks. Which is, admittedly, probably not surprising when it is the latest available Doctor Who release, but still an achievement in which I take some pride. After all, how often in your life to you get to have a chart-topper of any sort? Never mind one in a chart of one of your great passions in life. I quite like the little "No. 1 Best Seller" tag which got added to the Amazon listing, too!

Look, these sorts of things don't happen very often in your life - probably never again will I have anything like this - so I am determined to enjoy it while it lasts, okay...?

Flight Mode

It's March, which is an exciting month for me - not generally, I mean, but specifically this one. March 2026. Because this is the month - indeed, this week will be the week - which sees the release of my first professional work of fiction, my Doctor Who audiobook Star Flight for BBC Audiobooks / Penguin Random House.

It will be out there in the world from this coming Thursday, the 5th. But excitingly, it is already out there in some senses - because the first reviews have begun to appear. And the good news is, so far... they're very good indeed.

This is, admittedly, only from a sample size of two. But they are both very positive, extremely flattering reviews. The kind of thing which makes you stand up and pace up-and-down the room when you've read them. Or makes me as the writer of the work in question do so, anyway! Of course, I know that not every review will be this positive, and if you allow yourself to get too high from the nice verdicts you're also running the risk of allowing yourself to be brought down too much by the negative ones.

But what the hell. I've waited a very long time for this, so I am determined to enjoy it while I have the chance!

The first review to appear was by Tony Fyler for the website Mass Movement. I was nervous opening the link, but almost immediately reassured, and indeed fairly staggered, by the first paragraph which declares that Star Flight "drips competence and class from every syllable". Blimey! And at the end, "leaving you feeling breathless and satisfied and eager for more," too. 

Then a few days later came Rod Bell's review for the Flickering Myth site. This was another review which was also far better than I could have imagined: "Paul Hayes knows exactly what he is doing," indeed! Bell even draws a comparison with TV episodes such as Blink and The Girl in the Fireplace - admittedly, purely in terms of this being, like them, a one-off self-contained story rather than part of some grand larger narrative. But still, if you know your Doctor Who you'll know that even to be mentioned in same breath as such episodes is pretty dizzying stuff.

There were two things I was particularly pleased about with both of these reviews. One was that the work of Star Flight's reader Christopher Naylor and producer Morrison Ellis has been rightly recognised and praised. The second was that both reviews felt that the story does give a sense of character to the original TARDIS team who are its stars, and feels as if it does a good job of fitting into their era. "This never feels like an interchangeable 'Insert any Doctor here' adventure," writes Bell in his Flickering Myth piece. "It feels lived in."

That is one of the things I very consciously tried hard to do with Star Flight - I mean, self-evidently, of course, it's what you have to do with a shared universe story like this. Write the characters as recognisably the ones people know from their television stories. I know I shouldn't take too much pride in this, given it's a bare minimum requirement for such a piece, and I have effectively been training for this for decades. With so much television material on which to base the characterisations of the First Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara, it ought to be easy for any fan. But I'm still pleased it seems to have worked.

Of course, there will be bad reviews to come, and people who simply don't enjoy Star Flight. For whom it's not their cup of tea. I understand that.

But I had occasionally thought, down the years, about what might happen if I ever got an opportunity like this. To write an actual, real-life Doctor Who story. And I have worried that I might blow it, and write The Worst Doctor Who Story Of All Time. That nobody would like it at all, and it would be the final proof that I don't have a clue what I'm doing when it comes to writing fiction. These two reviews, at least, prove that I haven't done that. That I have written something some people will enjoy.

And that's an enormous shot in the arm. A boost in confidence for my other efforts at writing fiction, too. Because despite the decades I have spent as a Doctor Who fan, this wasn't easy. It didn't just role off the laptop. It took effort, and work, and revision, and sometimes I get dispirited when my fiction writing seems to need so much of that.

But if I can come up with something people seem to enjoy, which seems to work, like this... Well, then perhaps I shouldn't get so down on my other efforts. Perhaps I really can do this, after all.

An Unexpected Article

After I had done my piece on Our Friends in the North for the History of the BBC website last month, John who runs that section of the BBC site asked me about any other ideas I might have for further pieces for this year. He sent me the list of BBC anniversaries for various services and programmes coming up throughout 2026, and I did have a few ideas – but then realised there was one anniversary approaching which I had already, sort-of-accidentally, done the research for and could write a piece about.

 
When I was on one of my research trips to the BBC Written Archives Centre back in 2024 for my book When Saturday Came, which will be out later this year, one batch of files I had asked to see were those relating to the 1956 serial Jesus of Nazareth. This went out on Sundays, rather than Saturdays, so was not directly connected to what I was researching. But I had noticed that for the eight weekends Jesus of Nazareth ran, the usual Saturday programmes such as Whirligig had been moved to Fridays, and the Saturday children’s slot had been filled with showings of Westerns on film.
 
I surmised that this was because Jesus of Nazareth had been given two days of camera rehearsal ahead of its live transmissions at Sunday teatimes, instead of the usual one on-the-day set of studio rehearsals. This would mean it was occupying Studio E at Lime Grove, then the children’s studio, on Saturdays and hence why the usual Saturday programmes would not have been able to use it and that day’s children’s shows for those eight weeks had to be on film.
 
In the end, the production files for Jesus of Nazareth didn’t contain any information about this – although I was eventually able to confirm my suspicion as being correct from another source. But as is so often the case on a visit to Caversham, even though it wasn’t the direct subject of my research, I found the Jesus of Nazareth files fascinating to read through. Indeed, it’s something you often have to stop yourself doing when you’re on a research visit there – pausing to read in depth. With so much material to get through, it’s more often a case of ‘photograph first, read later’.
 
But because I did find a lot of the material so interesting, despite not having any real use for it I had photographed quite a lot of the documents in those files. Which I realised last month meant that, with the 70^th anniversary of the serial’s first episode coming up on February the 12^th, I could put a nice little article together with some of the interesting titbits from those files, without having to go anywhere to do any new research.

 

You occasionally get little reminders in life of how much you have changed as a person over the years; changes you might not be conscious of day-to-day, but which make you stop and look back and realise how you are a different person, in at least some ways, to the one you were years or decades ago.
 
Doing this piece was one such moment for me, because I know for certain that my younger self – as a child, a teenager, and well into adulthood – would have been pretty disgusted with the idea of having my name associated with anything to do with Jesus. I have been an atheist for as long as I can remember, and when I was younger I would have found the prospect of writing an article on a series with a subject matter like this deeply embarrassing.
 
These days, I am a little more relaxed about the whole thing. Still very much an atheist, of course – although, given I do mark Christmas, I suppose if pressed I would have to confess to having a kind of secular Christian background. And I did go to a Church of England primary school – so I know all the greatest hits, if not the album tracks and b-sides.
 
But now as a middle-aged man I can separate the two. I can find the production history of Jesus of Nazareth interesting, while still not having any great enthusiasm for the subject matter. And it is a very interesting story to tell – the first dramatic depiction of the adult Jesus on British television; one of the first, if not perhaps the first, children’s series to have foreign location filming; and among the earliest BBC drama serials, children’s or otherwise, to survive in full.
 
So I am glad that I read those files, and pleased with how the article turned out. It actually ended up going online a few days ahead of the 70^th anniversary, as I had been invited onto BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme the preceding weekend to discuss it. (I did it from the studio in Norwich, of course, rather than actually going up to Salford for early on a Sunday morning!) It was only a short item, a few minutes, but it was nice to be on national radio in a professional capacity, and pleasing to hear how engaged the great Edward Stourton was with the whole thing. To the extent of echoing the praise for Caversham when I gave them a mention – so it was all worth doing to get them a nice little plug, if nothing else!

Old Friends

I don’t remember how much of Our Friends in the North I saw first time around. I am sure that it wasn’t all of it – I am pretty certain I didn’t see the whole thing until it was repeated the following year. But I do know that I saw at least some of it on that first run in early 1996; and I know that something about it really drew me in.

 
It seems ridiculous to think back on. I was only 11 years old when it started – I turned 12 halfway through the run. A birthday which brought the disappointing gift of an office chair, which even at the time felt like some sort of indication that childhood was now well and truly over.
 
Our Friends in the North of course wasn’t aimed at me or anyone remotely like me, and I had no real conception of the wider background and politics behind its writing. Newcastle and London, the two cities in which the story is mainly set, were far-off places I knew little of. Probably the main thing I knew about Newcastle at the time was that its football team was, at that point, leading the Premier League and looking likely to win it that season. Oh, and that the people who lived there were referred to as ‘Geordies’, of course.
 
But none of that really mattered. Its author Peter Flannery himself has said, and was saying as far back as 1988, that what really mattered in this story were the characters, and it was their stories which fascinated me. Particularly Nicky, played by Christopher Eccleston, but I wanted to know what happened to all four of the leads, and in all of the supporting plotlines, too. Our Friends in the North had that most vital element for any story – it made me want to know what happened next.
 
I loved it still when I saw it again on DVD a few years later – in 2002, I think, a blink of an eye in some ways but a huge leap from 12 to 18. It’s always remained one of my all-time favourite dramas, and I think one of the greatest things ever produced by the BBC. It made me follow particularly Eccleston’s career with interest, and was a major reason I was so excited in 2004 when he was cast in the lead in Doctor Who.
 
So it’s long been a series I’ve been very interested in. I even created and wrote most of its Wikipedia page some years ago, back when I was heavily into doing that sort of thing – probably about 20 years ago, now. I used to do a lot of editing on Wikipedia, particularly on British television history, but while I enjoyed adding information and helping to create accurate pages about subjects in which I was interested, ultimately I drifted away from it as being slightly unsatisfying. I have too much an ego not to want my writing to be entirely mine under my name, and once it’s done I want it to stay as I wrote it, not to be able to be instantly replaced by someone else’s idea of how it should read. I do still use Wikipedia a lot and go in and fix errors where I spot them, but I haven’t done any actual substantial writing for it for a very long time.
 
Anyway, it didn’t seem likely that Our Friends in the North would ever cross paths with my professional career until last year when I realised of course that the 30^th anniversary of the programme was coming up this January. John Escolme, the History of the BBC manager, is always very kindly receptive to ideas for feature pieces for the website, so last summer I pitched him the idea of an Our Friends in the North 30^th anniversary piece to go up on the 30^th anniversary, January 15^th.

 

Knowing, from the DVD extras and Michael Eaton’s BFI book on the series from back in 2005, just how much drama there had been behind-the-scenes in actually getting the programme into production, I was confident there would be some interesting things to say about it. John agreed, and I was able to go down to Caversham a couple of times in the autumn to look through some of the extensive amount of paperwork the BBC Written Archives hold on the series.
 
Actually, though, it ended up being a slightly different article to the one I had originally thought I might write. Yes, some of those tales of the long delays to production are present in the files and are in the piece. But actually, it became less about that story – which is, after all, comparatively well-known – and more about what was happening in the BBC itself at the time. This was the era of ‘Producer Choice’, the Production / Broadcast split, and the beginning of the gradual closing down of the ‘television factory’ which the BBC had once been.

 
Obviously though there’s only so far you can go with that, in terms of both the amount of detail you can fit into a 1500-word article and the amount you want to put into what is, after all, supposed to be an article for a fairly general audience. But I was pleased with what I was able to do with it.

 

The piece seems to have gone down very well since it went online for the anniversary on Thursday, anyway. I’ve had various nice responses, both from within the BBC and via social media, and it’s certainly been one of the most widely-shared online pieces I’ve written, with the BBC Archive social accounts’ posts about it getting a lot of response. Now, admittedly I have no way of knowing how many of those people actually clicked through to the article to have a read of it, rather than just wanting to share or react to the post and image, but still – it’s a good sign!

 

I was also able to get a little bit of broadcasting out of it. Back in 2023 when I was the guest for CNS two-ways across BBC Local Radio for the Doctor Who sixtieth anniversary, one of the best interviews I did that day was with Anna Foster on Radio Newcastle. She’d been very interested, engaged and fun, so I decided to try dropping her a note to see if she’d fancy a two-way with me to promote the Our Friends piece. Fortunately she did and I went on her show, down-the-line from one of our studios in Norwich of course, on Thursday lunchtime to have a chat about the piece.
 
I enjoyed it, although I’m not massively pleased with how I came across. As too often when I do something live rather than as a carefully-constructed, built package, I spoke too fast, gabbled too much and repeated myself – very much like a bad Just a Minute contestant. You really would think I’d be better at this sort of thing by now…
 

 

But it was nice to go on, and intriguing to hear how bad they felt Daniel Craig’s accent was! Obviously I’m not in any position to be able to judge, but I’d never seen much criticism of the accents in the series before. I have, though, spotted a few more comments along those lines on social media since then – but also some saying how good they thought they were, too. So who knows…?
 
Anyway, it was good to be able to celebrate one of my favourite television dramas ever made, and a good start to the year writing-wise.