Some big, exciting news!

 

I have a book coming out!

Not a novel - but nonetheless, something I have worked very long and very hard on, and of which I am very proud. In the unlikely event that you read these blog entries closely and memorise the content, you may possibly recall that I have mentioned once or twice before a non-fiction Doctor Who project on which I've been working.

Well, this is it! It's called The Long Game, and is due to be released by Ten Acre on November 1st. You can see the wonderful cover above, designed by my publisher Stuart Manning and with the model kit illustration created by Andrew Orton.

It tells the story of Doctor Who between the failure of the first attempt to revive it with the broadcast of the TV Movie in May 1996, to the point at which it was recommissioned as an ongoing series by the BBC in September 2003. Telling the stories of the other proposals and failed attempts along the way; how those responsible for bringing it back came to be in those positions; and perhaps most importantly of all, providing the background and context of the changes that took place in the BBC over those years which eventually provided the environment which allowed for this to happen. The sort of thing that in Doctor Who sources is usually dealt with in a few pages, or which in non-Doctor Who histories doesn't touch on the series at all.

It's a process which has long fascinated me, and did so at the time. I remember not long after the series was commissioned, trying to piece together from the existing interviews and reports and sources the chain of events which had let to it happening. The years went by, more sources became available as it all started to become history, and in 2015 - purely for my own interest - I put together a timeline of the events from 1996 to 2003, using various books, articles, interviews, documentaries and assorted bits and pieces.

I put this online and got some very nice comments from people about it, and it made me wonder if there might be a book in it. It was a book which I very much wanted to read, but which didn't seem to exist - pulling together all the different strands into one narrative. So I decided to have a go at writing it myself.

Over the autumn and winter of 2015-16, I put together a first draft, but although I enjoyed writing it and I felt it was pretty decent, the main problem I had was that I just wasn't able to get hold of most of the interviewees to whom I wanted to speak about that time. It was almost all put together from secondary sources, and it was far too short - only about 55,000 words. I always meant to go back and have another go someday, but for a few years never got around to it.

Then last year, after the first lockdown started, I found myself with more free time than I had done in the recent past - like so many people did, of course. So I decided to give it another go. 

This time, it went far better than I could ever have hoped. Now, I'm not modest to a fault. I know I'm not completely hopeless at this stuff - I can write pretty decently. At this stage I had a track record of not just doing a fair few bits for Doctor Who Magazine, but also making many radio documentaries for the BBC. I'm good at this sort of broadcasting history research, and making it understandable and relatable to a wider audience.

But nonetheless, I was rather bowled over by how so many people who didn't know me at all were willing to speak to me, and to help with arranging interviews. I was able to talk to the likes of Lorraine Heggessey, Alan Yentob, Mal Young, Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter... Huge, important names in the history of not just Doctor Who but in the history of British television, and they were all happy to speak in-depth about those years and the process which led to the show's recommissioning.

In all I was able to conduct over thirty interviews, and along with a great deal of research in other sources it's ended up being a book which I think tells that story usually skipped over in a few pages in a new, detailed and cohesive way which I don't believe has ever been done before. We announced the book on Saturday, and it's been wonderful to see such a positive response to it - as I had suspected, there are indeed a great many Doctor Who fans who, like me, are interested in this whole process and how it all happened.

If that's you, then the book can be pre-ordered from the Ten Acre website by clicking here. I very much hope that you enjoy it, and I can't wait for you to read it!

Into the Nexus

There has been a lot going on. And oddly, it all goes back to my university days.

I say "oddly" because I am not someone who has a particular nostalgia for my time at university. Don't get me wrong, it was perfectly fine and nice, but I didn't find it to be the profound or formative experience that others do. Although it was very important to my life in that without it I would never have come to Norwich, and would never have ended up working for the BBC. So it had a significance I could never have guessed at the time.

I attended the University of East Anglia from 2002 until 2005, and while I was there I was a member of the student TV station, Nexus. I was even president of it in my final year, a disastrous turn of events which proved to me that I should never be in charge of anything, ever. Still, at least that was a lesson in itself, I suppose...

Anyway, the station was sadly in its dying days at the time. But it was clear that it had a long and interesting history, which I was fascinated by. We had all sorts of relics in the form of old photos and reels of tape hanging around in the studio / office; reminders of more glorious days past.

I explored this a bit at the time, but only really out of a casual personal interest. However, a couple of years ago, I wondered whether it might be possible to make a radio documentary about Nexus for the station. Telling its story. In fact, I even pondered the idea "aloud", as it were, in a comment on a YouTube upload of a 1970s Nexus programme...

In April this year I decided to finally try and do something about it, and asked one of my bosses if I could give it a go. He said yes, so I set about trying to get permission to use clips from Nexus archive material - there'd be no point in doing it if I couldn't do that. This done, I then spent most of the summer putting the programme together, tracking down interviewees, recording chats with them and sorting through bits of archive. The resulting programme went out on Bank Holiday Monday, the 30th of August, as Nexus: Norfolk's Forgotten TV Station, and seemed to go down very well. I was able to speak to all sorts of interesting people, and I think I managed to do a decent job of making the Nexus story accessible and interesting to people who had no connection at all to the station or the UEA.

But that's really only half the story...

The weekend before it went out, the Eastern Daily Press once again kindly published a piece I wrote about the station to preview the programme. They again made it the cover feature on their Weekend supplement, with a four-page feature inside which you can read online here.

That was a general overview of the station, but I also knew that there was one particular aspect to the story which might make a good 'hook' to help promote the documentary with, which I gave to my colleagues at BBC News Online for a separate piece which they put up on the Friday before the documentary aired.

I remember when I first joined Nexus in the autumn of 2002, one of the people running it at the time telling me very proudly about their "famous Morecambe and Wise interview", but they never actually tried to do anything with it. It just sat there on an ancient, unplayable old Sony reel-to-reel tape, onto which it had been copied from the 1973 original sometime in the mid-seventies.

When I was more involved in running Nexus in 2004, I arranged with Paul Vanezis at BBC Birmingham to send it there to see if he could get anything off it. He told me at the time that he'd tried it on two different machines, but couldn't get anything off it on either of them, so it seemed to sadly be junk.

Later that year, however, I was sorting through the Nexus VHS archive, and I came across a compilation tape which someone had put together in 1983 of some of the best bits from the old reel-to-reel tapes, when they still had the ability to play them. It was a sort of "best of" of the past decade of Nexus... and it opened with a two-minute clip from the 1973 Morecambe and Wise interview.

I remember this snapped on rewind at the time, and I had to open up the case to repair the tape - in fact, I think I remember having to completely unspool the whole thing and spool it back into a new case! Once it was playable again I took a duplicate copy which I kept, purely out of interest in the station's history.

Fast-forward 17 years, and this summer I managed to digitise my copy of the tape, and there were Eric and Ernie still present and correct at the start of it. Sharing their thoughts on Monty Python's Flying Circus...

For the programme, I was able to both get hold of the original interviewer, Colin Webb, and put in a ludicrously optimistic bid to get Sir Michael Palin's reaction to the video... who said yes! I knew of course this made it a great chance to promote the documentary, but I never imagined it would end up going as big as it did.

The online article, which I helped my colleague Zoe Applegate put together, went up on the Friday morning...

It gained over a million views that day, at one point reaching No. 2 in the "most read" charts on the site...

It got Monty Python trending on Twitter in the UK...

And it got picked up by almost all the newspapers the following day. The Times even interviewed me about it for their feature! It was madness!

Perhaps the most pleasing of all for me personally, however, was that I'd also made a national version of the radio piece and sent it to the Today programme on BBC Radio 4... Who liked it, and ran it on the Saturday morning. It's difficult to explain quite how proud this made me. I love working at Radio Norfolk, of course, but Radio 4 is... Well, it's the original BBC. It's the descendant of 2LO, through the Regional Programme and the Home Service. An unbroken line of nearly a century, and on that day, just for five minutes, it was made by me.

I was all over the bloody place! I did an interview for my colleagues at BBC Three Counties Radio after they'd spoken to Eric Morecambe's son Gary, who lives on their patch. My colleagues at CNS, the part of the BBC who provide national and shared material to BBC Local Radio, sent out a version of the piece on the Monday morning which about twenty-odd stations ran... 

It's so strange how what was the documentary I've so far made with perhaps the most niche subject matter ended up getting by far the most publicity of any programme I've ever made. I'm certainly glad I made and held onto that VHS tape all those years ago, anyway!

Life's rather good at the moment, writing-wise. I've also just been commissioned to do a paid article, which I'm working on this week, and there may soon be something even bigger to tell you all about... Sometimes, when I am writing to potential interviewees for an article or the like, I'll introduce myself as "a writer and broadcaster". Which sounds ridiculously grand, but at the moment, just for a while, I feel as if I'm actually living up to that billing.

Oh, and that 1970s open-reel tape which had the entire Morecambe and Wise interview on? It turns out that all the publicity around the surviving clip ended up revealing that the reel actually still exists, so an attempt may yet be made to try and get the full recording off it.