Old Year's Night

A front page mention for my Boxing Day piece in the EDP

It's that time of year again - time to look back over what I have achieved over the past twelve months, and to wonder what the next year might have in store.

I fear I must report that, as with last year, not only am I no closer to achieving my dream of having a novel professionally published, I basically made no effort at all to achieve anything in that direction throughout 2022. I barely wrote any fiction at all - just a few fragments here and there for projects which will almost certainly never see the light of day.

However, I do have some excuse. Back in January, I set myself some targets for the year. Having decided after the success of The Long Game that, for the time being at least, it was far more worthwhile to put my efforts into non-fiction than fiction, I decided to have a go at writing another factual book. This I now have a draft of, it seems to have gone reasonably well, and fingers crossed it looks as if it may appear sometime in 2023 - more on that as and when.

So one target was to write a draft of a new non-fiction book, and I have achieved that. The other was related to my day job - I wanted to make two more radio documentaries. I had in mind from very early on what I wanted them to be, too. One about Banksy's "Spraycation" in the summer of 2021, to go out around the first anniversary of it happening and using bits of our live programming from the time to tell the story of what happened. The other was a local documentary for the BBC's centenary celebrations, and I managed to achieve both of these. In fact, I ended up not only making these two, but four documentaries altogether this year - also doing one the week the Queen died with some local remembrances and archive, and one for this Christmas looking back at local Formula One driver George Russell's first year with the Mercedes team. We even got to speak to George for this, which as a big armchair Formula One fan I enjoyed putting together.

I think, then, that I can look back on the year with some satisfaction. I was also able to carry on writing some other bits and bobs. I was flattered to be asked to make some more contributions to Doctor Who Magazine, and the Eastern Daily Press printed some more features of mine tied-in with some of our radio programmes. I even managed to squeeze another one of the latter in before the end of the year, with a Boxing Day piece about our Treasure Quest special.

This time last year I wrote that there was some exciting news coming up radio-wise, which was that in January my 2021 Nexus documentary got a national airing on 4 Extra, which was immensely pleasing - especially it getting good write-ups in The Times and the Radio Times.

So all of that was good, and once again I look back on a year when I have been very fortunate and can be satisfied that I was able to use whatever writing skills I have in a professional capacity. And yet...

I still have to face up to the fact that I am basically middle-aged now, and still after all these years of ambition I have never been able to earn any money at all from writing any fiction. You'd think I'd be able to get a little something in somewhere, but no. 

I just have to try harder, I suppose. I'm not sure what avenue I could pursue to try and achieve that during 2023, but getting back to fiction more generally will have to be on the list. After all, you can't become a novelist if you're not at least trying to write novels...

Happy New Year, everybody!

The BBC and Me

Today marks the 100^th anniversary of the BBC first going on the air. Exactly a century since Arthur Burrows read that same opening news bulletin twice in a row, once normally and then more slowly, so that listeners could write in and say which they preferred.

I had a BBC 100 programme on yesterday, but this is a more personal piece

Like everybody who has grown up in the United Kingdom in the hundred years since then, I cannot tell you when I first became ‘aware’ of the BBC. It has simply always been there – a part of the fabric of life in this country. Love it, hate it, be indifferent or ignore it, you always know it’s there.

I did love it, and from a very early age. As a young child I was an avid viewer of the Broom Cupboard days of Children’s BBC in the late 1980s and early 90s, and can remember having the absolute conviction that the BBC were the ‘good guys’ and ITV were ‘the enemy’. Where this came from, I don’t know. I’ve heard people talk down the years about households where children weren’t allowed to watch ITV because their parents for some reason or other disapproved of it. Whether that ever actually happened or not I don’t know, but our family certainly wasn’t like that. My mum was in many respects the model ITV viewer. But for whatever reason, I got it into my head as a child that I was on the BBC’s ‘side’.

Of course, Doctor Who may have had a lot to do with it. The BBC made Doctor Who, and so they had to be the ones on the side of the angels, right? That was certainly a reason why I became fascinated about how the BBC worked, and its history. Doctor Who is one of the most closely-studied and heavily written-about programmes ever shown on British television, and it was through reading books about the series and its history when I was growing up that I developed a deep interest in the BBC and the history of broadcasting in this country more generally.

I don’t think, though, that it ever entered into my head that I might one day be able to work for the BBC. It just wasn’t something that I ever thought about. I don’t know if I had a notion of what ‘type’ of person worked for the BBC, as such, but it never occurred to me as something I could try to get into. It seemed such a far-off distant thing, plus of course much of what I read about and found interesting about the BBC was in the past. The notion that the BBC might be a part of my future was too incredible to contemplate.

It was only after leaving university and being confronted with the reality that I now had to work out what to do with my myself that the BBC became a part of my life. While doing a very morale-sapping, boring day job four days a week I started volunteering at the BBC in Norwich on the other day in the summer of 2006. This meant that I was given an ID pass to get into the building – and when I was given it, I could not stop looking at it. Holding it in my hands and staring at it. I took photos of it, in case this didn’t last very long and they wanted it back, so that I could have some memento, some proof I’d once had it. That I had been a part of the BBC.

The BBC! Me!

I have proudly worn that pass into the building every time I have gone in there for the past 16 years. It’s a bit battered and marked now, and the photo resembles me less and less every year. But if I hold it in my hands and look at it, that logo there with my name, I still feel that same pride and disbelief. That I could have become a tiny part of this great organisation which I have loved since I was a child. That I work for the same BBC as all those people I have watched, listened to, looked up to and admired.

I had that same feeling of amazed excitement when I started getting paid shifts the following year, and then in early 2008 an incredible offer. There was a job they needed filling, full-time, for three months as someone had left and they weren’t sure what was going to happen to that particular role. They couldn’t guarantee it would last any longer than that, but would I come and do it…?

It did not seem a risk to me. Of course I said yes. The chance to say that I worked, even for just a few months, full-time for the BBC was irresistible. I was really, properly there. Even if this turned out to be the only exciting thing that ever happened in the rest of my life, it would be something to treasure and hold on to. That I worked for the BBC.

That three months has not, yet, come to an end.

The Eastern Daily Press kindly published a BBC 100 piece by me on Saturday, although sadly under the byline "Paul Haynes"!

For nearly 15 years now I have been in the incredibly privileged position, which I appreciate and value as being very rare in life, of not having to wake up in the morning and think, “Oh Christ, I’ve got to go to work today.” To be spared that crushing, soul-destroying heaviness of having to go and do a morale-sapping job I hate. Like any job, of course, life at the BBC has its occasional frustrations and annoyances. But never anything that lasts. Never anything that has ever made me not want to go back in.

I do understand how incredibly fortunate I am in that, and what a rare privilege it is – especially when it’s on the public payroll. There is always that dichotomy in the BBC, or perhaps any form of broadcasting, between doing something that you enjoy and doing something for the benefit of the audience – but especially so in the BBC when the audience are the ones directly paying for it. However, I like to think that I have always managed to resist ever becoming too self-indulgent, and that my instincts are not too far out of whack with what the listeners wanted in the role that I was in.

You can never please all of the people all of the time, of course, but I have been lucky enough to have been involved with some amazing programmes during my time with the BBC. I have written before on here about how special it has been to be involved with Treasure Quest, the Sunday morning show I have produced since just after I started working full-time at the BBC in Norwich. It’s an amazing thing to have been a part of – an out-and-out entertainment show, yes, but a very BBC one.

It may be primarily about having fun and playing the game, but every week through that format we publicise local events, charities and good causes. We’ve raised tens of thousands of pounds for Children in Need down the years, brought people together and cheered up their Sunday mornings. But also, of course – wow! I’ve been able to put together a programme which has messed about with putting presenters on trains, buses, and helicopters! Put them on-stage singing and dancing, through assault courses, up tall towers, and set them up being pulled over by the police or locked in guard cells by the army. We’ve put out books, CDs and calendars, and mounted our own stage shows; and we have a fanbase, a small but fervent one. It’s a producer-proof show, really – such a good idea that it only needed someone half-competent to steer it, and of course the reason the audience love it is because of the presenters. But I like to think I have put a lot into it and wrung everything out of it that I could have done, and put those presenters into situations which gave them the opportunity to really engage the audience in the way that they have.

So if I’d done nothing else in the BBC I could be incredibly proud of Treasure Quest. But it’s been so much more – all the features, items and documentaries I’ve had the opportunity to make. The hundreds, thousands of live programmes I’ve had the chance to produce. The difference we’ve been able to make to real lives in real ways, whether working into the night as the flood waters rose or helping someone work out how they were going to get food when they couldn’t leave the house in the early days of lockdown.

None of this is done alone, and although I am at heart a highly individualistic – even self-centred – person, some of the very finest moments at the BBC are when we come together to work as a team. On those flood nights or election nights or those big, set-piece Treasure Quest shows. During lockdown. Or even when it’s just the two of you, you and a presenter, getting the breaking items on the air or seeing the calls roll in because you’ve entertained and engaged people.

I’ve had the chance to present shows to a large chunk of England and to make programmes at the home of the BBC itself, Broadcasting House in London. I’ve produced podcasts downloaded by thousands of people all over the world and helped write articles which have been read by over a million. I have had the opportunity to do all of these incredible things because I am a part of the BBC, and the presence of those three little letters is what makes it magic. I am sure I could probably have had fun and enjoyed myself and done creative things if I had worked in commercial radio. But it would not have been the same. I am not saying this is some universal truth, or that everyone ought to feel this way – this is specific to me. It’s being part of the BBC which makes it special. Which gives a pride I don’t think I’d feel if I were working for any other organisation.

I was even once, just for five minutes in August 2021, responsible for the output of that very same station which Arthur Burrows opened back in 1922. Which had gone from being 2LO to the London station of the Regional Programme to the Home Service and eventually BBC Radio 4. I became a part of that when I made a piece for the Today programme. I was a link in that national chain which stretches back for a century.

I do not know whether the BBC will be around for another century. I do not even know what the future might hold for it in the rest of this decade. What form it should take and how it ought to be funded are not arguments which I can or should be a part of. If it were up to me, of course, I would like everything to stay the same, simply because that’s the nature of my personality. But I am grown-up enough these days to recognise that that’s neither possible nor desirable, in any area of life. Everything changes, and has to change.

The future of the BBC will be decided by those whom it serves. There has for a long time been a broad consensus in favour of it, and if we are still wanted and needed then hopefully that consensus can continue. But whether it can or it should is for others to decide.

If it all came to an end tomorrow, I would be devastated. I know that I would never again be lucky enough in life to find myself not just in a job that I enjoyed, but in a job that I was proud to do. The special part of my life would be over. But everything has its time, and everything ends, and the best parts of all our lives are finite.

I would still, though, have that feeling I had when I was asked to come and work for the BBC full-time back in 2008, when it might have been just for a few months. That it was worth it – so worth it. When the time comes, I will be able to look back and say that “I worked for the BBC.” That I achieved something in life, that I had a job which really meant something – to me, at any rate, which is all we can ask of in our work.

“The BBC,” someone once said, “will never love you back.” But I have never needed it to. I have given a lot to the BBC, but I have always felt that I have got so much more back than I have given. Both as a viewer and listener long before I ever worked there, and in the friendships that I have made there, the things I have done and the opportunity I have had to be creative every single day – and to be part of something greater than anything else someone like me could ever have been involved with otherwise.

Happy birthday, BBC. Thank you for everything.

Tales of the Century

Today marks the start of the centenary celebrations of the BBC - an organisation for which I am very proud to be able to say that I have the privilege and the good fortune to work.

It's exactly 100 years since the BBC was founded, although the proper on-air anniversary of the first BBC broadcast is not until next month - November 14th, to be precise. I'm working on a programme in my day job marking the centenary in our own little corner of the country, but today is a good excuse to be able to say that I've also been able to play a very small part in another aspect of the centenary celebrations.

The BBC have produced a special episode of Doctor Who for the anniversary, which is being broadcast this coming Sunday, the 23rd. To tie-in with this, the latest edition of Doctor Who Magazine comes with a special supplementary magazine called Doctor Who: A  BBC Production, telling the story of the BBC's history during Doctor Who's time in production and the background and context of the influence of the wider changes at the Corporation on how the series was made.

I was very fortunate to be asked to write a piece for this, looking at the BBC in 2000s. The magazine is available now from WH Smith's, supermarkets, and of course online from the publishers Panini.

Guest Stars

I imagine any reader of this blog, if there are any such people - and hello to you if you're out there and indeed reading this! - must be tiring of me chronicling my Doctor Who Magazine contributions here. But sod it - this blog is for me really, I doubt anyone is reading, and it's still a pleasant and flattering novelty to be paid for professional writing work!

So just a quick note to point out that I have some pieces in the latest Doctor Who Magazine special edition, which was published earlier this month. This particular special highlights some of the guest stars who have appeared in the programme down the decades - 100 of them, in fact. 10 of them received feature profiles in the publication, and I was asked to write five of these.

One of the five was on Kylie Minogue, who graces the front cover - meaning that I can, for the first time, claim to have written a DWM cover feature!

The Spare Part People

Another month and, I am very pleased to be able to say, another piece in Doctor Who Magazine. Issue 580, which came out last week, has in it a feature I was asked to write about the Big Finish Productions Doctor Who audio play Spare Parts, marking 20 years since its release. Once again I was very flattered to be asked to write a piece, and it was great fun to put together, speaking to various fans and admirers of the story about just why it holds such a strong appeal and has been recognised almost since the start as one of the finest Big Finish stories.

As always, DWM is available from WH Smith's, many supermarkets or online.

Ice Cool

I'm very pleased to have another little professional writing update.

I was recently asked to write another piece for Doctor Who Magazine, this time for their latest special edition which was released earlier this month. It's another in their Chronicles series of year-themed specials, which I was fortunate to write a piece for the 1983 edition of last year.

This time around 1967 is the year in focus, and I was asked to contribute an article about the actor Sonny Caldinez, who died in April at the age of 89. As well as being an actor he was variously a wrestler, a stuntman and a bodyguard throughout various stages of his life, and appeared in five Doctor Who stories - the first two of which came in 1967, hence his inclusion here. Four of those appearances were as an Ice Warrior, hence the title of this entry... geddit!?

As always, it was a great honour and a privilege to be asked to do a piece. I still can't believe the incredible good fortune I have to occasionally be able to write pieces about Doctor Who... and get paid for it, too!

Anyway, as always, the magazine is available from WH Smith's, various supermarkets and the Panini website.

Restoration of the Daleks

The new issue of Panini's Doctor Who Magazine, number 578, came out last Thursday, and I'm fortunate enough to have written a piece for it. Not to do with the new Doctor casting on the front cover, but very exciting to be in a 'new Doctor' issue!

My piece is about the restoration work which has been carried out on the two 1960s Dalek movies, for their new 4K re-release. I must admit that these films are not exactly my favourite iteration of Doctor Who, but I do have a certain nostalgic affection for the second one, on the basis that it was one of the first - if not the first - Doctor Who VHS tape I ever owned. It was given to me by my brother's friend Damien when I was very young, perhaps as young as six or seven.

In fact, I even still own the tape - sort of. It's been in my parents' attic for the past 18 years or so, but oddly enough I came across it just the other week when I was visiting them. I wanted to retrieve some books from a big box full of my things in the attic, and among the assorted odds-and-ends I had to move out of the way to find the books I wanted was that very VHS tape, thirty-odd years since I first owned it!

One particularly nice thing about doing this piece was that it wasn't something I pitched - I was specifically asked to do it, which is always very flattering. Always an ego-boost to be actually sought out and commissioned to do a piece of professional writing!

Anyway, DWM 578 is now on-sale at WH Smith's and all good newsagents, or via the Panini website. I hope you like the piece if you do have a read!

Harbour Writes

The latest edition of Doctor Who Magazine, issue 574, is now out and I'm pleased to say that I'm fortunate enough to have a piece in it. Called Harbouring Ambitions, it uses some of the material I gathered for The Long Game to tell the story of how the Nick Berry vehicle Harbour Lights almost ended up getting Doctor Who back onto the air five years earlier than it actually happened. 

I'm very grateful once again to Marcus and Peter at DWM for running the piece, and also for them very kindly again giving me one of the little contributor profile spots on page three, as they did when they published my Donald Wilson piece last summer.

The article also appears to have the desired effect of perhaps interesting a few more people in picking up copies of The Long Game, as a couple of extremely nice tweets about it appeared over the weekend. It would be blatant showing off to include them here, of course... But I am by no means beyond that, so here they are!

Paper Talk

It turned out that last week ended up being quite a prolific one for my appearances in assorted publications - not only the mentions of the Nexus documentary in the Radio Times and The Sunday Times, but I also had a newspaper feature I'd written published and was the subject of another.

Last week, last Wednesday in fact, saw the 65th anniversary of the first ever East Anglian regional TV opt-out on BBC Television, on January the 26th 1957. Not perhaps the most notable of anniversaries, but always being one for a bit of broadcasting history - especially for broadcasting history connected to the bit of the BBC where I work, and which nobody else is likely to notice or even mark - I decided to make a radio package about it to go out on our afternoon show. This was particularly driven by the fact that some audio from the broadcast actually still exists, albeit in quite poor quality.

The piece duly went out on Wednesday, but while I'd been making it I came up with the idea of seeing if the Eastern Daily Press might be interested in a feature about it, too. I submitted this to them earlier this month but wasn't sure whether or not it was going to be any use to them. As it turned out, however, they actually ended up running it on Tuesday - and it also appeared in Norwich's Evening News, and in the EDP's Suffolk sister paper, the East Anglian Daily Times, the first occasion upon which any of my work has appeared there. You can read the piece online on the EDP website by clicking here.

So, with the Nexus documentary having gone out on 4 Extra on Tuesday, I managed to be a writer and a broadcaster on the same day without having lifted a finger during the course of the day at doing either!

Then on Wednesday I had a message from Paul, an old friend of mine back home in Sussex, telling me that a piece about me and The Long Game had appeared on the website of one of my old local papers, the Worthing Herald. I'd actually written to them a few months ago thinking I might perhaps be able to get a bit of local publicity down there, but nothing had appeared so I'd assumed it hadn't been of any use or interest.

Then suddenly last week they evidently decided it was, and the piece appeared - I believe also in the print edition, although I haven't actually been able to see a copy of that. If anyone has one, or a scan, do please let me know!

Extra! Extra!

It was a very proud moment for me today, as after working in radio for 15 years I achieved a bit of an unexpected first - presenting a programme on one of the BBC's national radio stations.

I'd mentioned in my previous blog entry on New Year's Eve that there might be something more coming up from the Nexus documentary I made last year. What I couldn't say at the time, because it hadn't yet been announced, was that BBC Radio 4 Extra had decided to broadcast the programme. I'd pitched it to them not long after the original broadcast, suggesting I could make a 25-minute cutdown focusing on the more famous of the interviewees.

To my surprise, however, after having a listen they decided they'd like to take the entire thing - and it went out at 11am this morning. 4 Extra programmes get several outings in their week of broadcast, so it's also going out again at 9pm this evening, and twice again on Saturday.

This is only the second time I have managed to get one of my documentaries onto national radio, and the first time it's been one that I've presented as well as having produced. The previous one was my Ayrton Senna documentary, which BBC Radio 5 Live ran three times in 2014 and 2015. However, in that case, while I produced the programme I didn't present it - narration duties on that occasion were taken on by the great Rob Bonnet.

5 Live did also take another documentary of mine later on in 2017, and it was billed in the Radio Times and everything, but never in the event went out - due to a last-minute schedule change to cover England in the Rugby League World Cup semi-finals.

So I was, as you can imagine, incredibly pleased about the Nexus programme being taken on by 4 Extra - but even more pleased with the response it's already received. The Radio Times made it one of their 'Today's Choice' selections, and The Sunday Times also flagged it up:

It still amazes me to see just how far this programme has been able to go. When I came up with the idea of doing it, I did worry it was a bit niche even for a local radio station; that it might not interest anybody who hadn't been a student at the UEA, or even then who hadn't been involved in some way with the TV station. But it seems that I was very wrong about that - and very pleased to have been so, of course!

There's just something so wonderfully BBC-ish about having been on between one of Bert Coules' Sherlock Holmes adaptations, and an episode of The Goon Show...