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.

Bring Me The Head of BBC1

I’ve got a piece in the latest issue of Doctor Who magazine, which came out last week – a write-up of an interview which I actually conducted six years ago. I’m glad I’ve finally been able to bring more of it to print than has been the case before, and I wanted to write a bit here about the interview and, particularly, its subject.
 
I’m not sure when I would have first heard of Alan Yentob. I was interested from a young age in the behind-the-scenes goings-on of the television industry, particularly at the BBC. And of course, especially so when it was anything related to Doctor Who. So I suspect it may well have been his teasing little cameo at the end of the Doctor Who anniversary documentary 30 Years in the TARDIS on BBC1 in November 1993, when I was nine years old, although I can’t say for sure.
 
But certainly from that point he was someone I was aware of and, in that strange way that you can form a view of someone that you don’t know at all, he was someone who I ‘liked’. Especially as I grew older and moved from my childhood and into my teens, where that interest in television history started to combine with views – let’s face it, usually naïve and pretentious ones – about how it was made in the present.
 
Yentob, from what I could tell from a distance, seemed like one of the ‘good guys’; a kind of tie to an old-fashioned version of the BBC despite being dressed in a smart nineties suit. Someone who had the sense of being a creative person, a programme-maker at heart, in a rather bleak-seeming modern broadcasting world of business units and management consultants. I remember being disappointed when he didn’t get the Director-General job in 1999.
 
But Yentob did, of course, remain an important figure at the BBC; both under Dyke and for several years beyond. His career as a staff member at the BBC had an incredible span, from the late 1960s into the 2010s, and he was still going into the 2020s as a freelance presenter rather than an executive. Half a century and more, a BBC man all the way through, from trainee up to the most senior ranks, as the Corporation changed almost entirely all around him.
 
When I was working on my book which eventually became The Long Game, I knew that he was someone who had been involved in both ends of the story I was telling – the journey of Doctor Who from the aftermath of the 1996 TV Movie to its recommission as a BBC series in 2003. So I also knew that he was someone to whom I wanted to speak, to get both his specific insights on those two events and his more general recollections of the BBC at the turn of the century; the latter of which subject forms the key background and context of the book.
 
But how to contact him, when I was an absolute nobody and a nothing who didn’t know anybody who might know him?
 
I tried a standard-format BBC email address construction, of course. Even though he was no longer staff by this stage – I was approaching most of my interviewees in spring of 2020 – because he still presented Imagine… I thought he might have a BBC address still, and the email did go through – although possibly it disappeared into the ether. I looked at the credits on the most recent Imagine… episodes, picked a likely candidate, guessed another BBC email address formation and asked one of the producers if she might pass on the request for me – which, slightly surprisingly, she agreed to do.

 

It felt unlikely any of this would get me anywhere. But then, suddenly, on May 12 2020, a month after I had first tried contacting him… this:
 
Hello Paul
Apologies for what i  now discover has been a marathon attempt to get in touch . Although this email address is still intact , I rarely access it because it is overwhelmed with unsolicited commercial material .
Re Doctor Who ...
I am happy to have a phone conversation but as you know Jane Tranter and  Russell Davies are the principle movers and shakers in its revival .
Despite the Lockdown , i am very busy over the next ten days but should be free to speak soon after .
i can’t promise that i can answer all your questions , but why don’t you send me a rough outline of what you would like to cover. As i have now tracked your emails you can continue to use this address and i will make sure to look out for them .
Best wishes
Alan
 
Blimey. Actual, real-life, Alan Yentob was prepared to speak to me, someone with at the time next to no track record other than a handful of articles for Doctor Who Magazine.
 
We arranged for a phone interview at the end of the month. This being May 2020, it was deep into lockdown at the time, but I was still going into work rather than having to do everything from home. I arranged to take my lunch break at the time he said he’d call, and commandeered the meeting room, which was obviously not often being used at that point, and sat there nervously at the big board room-style table; phone resting ready to put on loudspeaker, and digital recorder running to capture the conversation.
 
(Yes, I work at a radio station, and yes, I could have arranged to do it properly through one of the studios, but it wouldn’t have been right – this wasn’t a work project, this was an entirely outside thing, so it was important to do it on my own time with my own resources).
 
We ended up chatting for half an hour, about Doctor Who, the fraught state of the late 1990s BBC drama department, the granular details of early 2000s commissioning processes, and the intricacies of relationships between production, broadcasting, BBC Films and BBC Worldwide. I thought it was interesting that he was aware – although he had said this before, I think in the Seven-Year Hitch documentary about the TV Movie – that he had been regarded by Doctor Who fans in the nineties as someone who was on the side of the angels as far as the show was concerned.
 
But the bit of the interview which most sticks in my mind is when he asked me how many episodes of Doctor Who there had been, first time around. I was taken a bit off-guard by this and suddenly doubted myself about the precise figure, so I approximated it to over six hundred – which prompted a pause, and then a slightly incredulous:
 
“Are you serious!?”

 

I also remember it wasn’t the easiest of interviews. Not because he wasn’t forthcoming or polite, but because he had clearly spoken about Doctor Who so often before that he had certain mentally-prepared answers, and initially was replying with these composed thoughts rather than answering the actual questions I’d asked. It was one of those interviews where it’s a bit like the old turning-an-oil-tanker metaphor; you had to gradually bring the conversation around to what you actually wanted to discuss. But certainly when we got to those specific areas he wasn’t evasive about any of it.
 
I was incredibly fortunate with The Long Game that despite these people knowing nothing about me at all, and that I could have been a mad fan with a crayon for all they knew, I was able to speak to almost everyone I wanted to for the book. Everyone I got was a punch-the-air moment, but Yentob was definitely one of the special ones.
 
But it was only when his death was announced a year ago, in May 2025 five years on from our interview, that I realised just how important to that book Alan Yentob actually was. And is. He’s someone most of those with an interest in the subject will have heard of, and have some awareness of what a major figure he was in the BBC at that time. And because of the narrative of the book he’s the first interviewee, quoted on the second page – so it almost immediately gives the reader, hopefully, the realisation that this is a proper, serious book. It’s got Alan Yentob in it.
 
As with any interview of this type, especially for a book, there were only certain bits and pieces which I ended up using; there was a quite a lot which was interesting, but not strictly relevant for The Long Game. Earlier this year, I realised that with the 30^th anniversary of the TV Movie coming up, a production with which Yentob was of course very much involved with the path to the screen of, Doctor Who Magazine might be interested in a full version of the interview.
 
The editor Jason liked the idea, and it’s out there on the newsstands now. It even gets one of the cover lines. I think the young me of thirty-odd years ago would have felt very pleased and proud of himself – and the middle-aged me feels pretty happy about it, too.

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...?