Fire, Fire!

I seem over the past couple of months to have become in the day job a kind of unofficial correspondent on the anniversaries of ‘notable fires in Norwich which had a profound social or cultural effect on the city, but in which nobody was hurt or killed.’

 

Or at least, that is to say that I have made radio pieces and provided online articles regarding two of them. Which, in that very niche field, is still more than average!
 
The most recent was on Friday, which was the 40^th anniversary of the fire which so seriously damaged the old City Stand at Carrow Road that it had to be demolished and rebuilt. This was an event of which I was aware, but which I hadn’t realised the anniversary had been approaching until I received an email a few weeks ago from Bob Ledwidge, the BBC reporter who was actually on the scene that early morning forty years ago reporting on the fire for television.
 
I’ve known Bob a bit for some years, and as one of the founding members of staff at BBC Radio Norfolk he was very complimentary about the programmes I put together for the station’s own 40^th anniversary back in 2020. Knowing my fondness for archive material and my ability to weave a good tale out of it, Bob suggested that I might be interested in doing something on the anniversary of the fire.
 
This seemed like a good idea, and I was able to pitch the idea to the breakfast show to make them a piece. But in addition to that, I also made a longer version, a 10-minute mini-programme really, for our Secret Norfolk local history series which is available online via BBC Sounds. I’m rather pleased with it, and you can have a listen to it here:
 

 

I also provided some copy for my colleagues at BBC News Online to be able to put up an article on the anniversary of the fire, although in this case my byline is more of a courtesy than anything else – it’s more that they used my copy to make their own piece rather than it being something I could be said to have written. Which is obviously fine, I should add – they know rather more about writing News Online pieces than I do!
 
All of this comes only a couple of months after I did the same thing for the anniversary of another notable Norwich fire – the burning down of the old city centre library in August 1994, which eventually resulted in its replacement by the building where the BBC is based in the city and thus in which I now work, The Forum.
 
This was a fire which had a huge impact on the city – a real sense of social and cultural loss, and an event still very strongly remembered by anybody who was living in the city, and probably much of the surrounding county, at the time.
 
I provided the same set of material for this as I did for the Carrow Road fire anniversary on Friday, but my sense of satisfaction with it all was probably the opposite way around. The News Online piece ended up being pretty close to what I had actually written, so it feels much more like something I can justifiably say is ‘by’ me. But although I was pleased with the radio piece when I’d made it, I realised  very soon afterwards that I’d actually done a pretty bad job of it.

Almost nothing of BBC Radio Norfolk’s own coverage of the library fire that day exists – in fact, I was only able to find a single, very brief excerpt in an episode of the BBC Television book programme The Bookworm from later that year. So I mostly had to use a mixture of national radio and regional television material to help tell the story.

 
But stupidly, it was only once the piece was finished and had gone out that I thought to check that day’s output from BBC Radio 5 Live, which is easily accessible on the BBC’s internal archive system. And there was a huge amount on there – live reports, recorded reports, voice pieces, all from BBC Radio Norfolk personnel and much of which had almost certainly originated from the station’s own output that day. I was particularly angry with myself because I’d also been frustrated at the lack of material from the library fire when making my BBC Radio Norfolk 40^th anniversary series four years ago, and if I’d thought to check 5 Live then it would have been a much stronger opening to the third and final episode of that than what I was eventually able to cobble together.

 

I was so angry with myself about all this that my colleague Matthew Gudgin – who’d actually been reporting on the library fire that day in 1994 – took pity on me and used some of the material from 5 Live in the news and on the afternoon show on the anniversary day. So it didn’t go entirely to waste!
 
But the frustration came from the fact that there will almost certainly never be a chance to do the job again properly. No reason to make the far superior piece which the 5 Live material would enable. And I missed out on not making that much better piece simply by not having thought of something obvious which should have occurred to me four years beforehand, and would still have made a difference even had it occurred to me one day sooner than it did.

Into the Vortex

There is currently a new Doctor Who Magazine special out, fresh onto the shelves, and I'm pleased to say that I was asked to contribute to it. It's a particularly nice one to be a part of, as it's a bit of a mammoth effort - the first complete episode guide to the show which DWM has done for a very long time. The idea is that with almost the entire show now available on the BBC iPlayer for anyone to watch pretty much any of, this will help highlight connections and themes between stories.

Given its nature, it's an all-hands-on-deck sort of effort, and I was pleased to be asked to be one of those hands. I ended up writing the entries for the Ninth Doctor's first three episodes, and the Tenth Doctor's first four, something I enjoyed very much as they're all episodes I know very well and like a great deal. This includes episodes such as Rose, the opening episode of the show's revival in 2005 which means a very great deal to me, as I suspect it does to many other Doctor Who fans, and that year's Christmas special The Christmas Invasion, which is one of my very favourite episodes.

But with a few of them it was quite some time since I'd last gone back and re-watched them, so it was fun to do that. There were one or two things I spotted which I don't think I'd noticed before, so it was nice to be able to include some of those observations. I also enjoyed looking back through some of the contemporary reviews of and pieces about the episodes for the 'What They Said' sections of the pieces - nice to get a snippet of Bonnie Greer's Newsnight Review verdict in there! Which I'm sure many will remember from the time.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it if you do have a read, as there's lots of great work by many of the great and the good of Doctor Who writing. And me! Into the Vortex is available now from all the usual places, including the magazine's website.

Pick Up a Penguin

It's only one month now until the release of the audiobook version of my book Pull to Open, which tells the story of the creation of Doctor Who in 1963. And here's a little bit of pre-publicity for it, in the form of BBC Audiobooks' Doctor Who catalogue for this autumn. Published on the Penguin website, as Penguin Random House are the company who release BBC Audiobooks titles.

It's nice to be in there alongside all those other forthcoming audiobooks, and as an official piece of BBC Doctor Who merchandise, too. It's also nice to be able to bring a version of Pull to Open to those who, for whatever reason, are unable to buy or to read the full-length printed book version from Ten Acre. Which is, of course, still available for anyone who is interested.

In other news, it looks as if there might be a very exciting possibility of something else Doctor Who-related happening, writing-wise, in the future, although it's still early days so I can't say anything more about that just yet. I have also finished a draft of a possible new non-fiction book, too. It's something on which I have been working for much of the year, not directly Doctor Who-related this time, although it still needs further work for which I am awaiting another couple of archive research trips next month before I hopefully have a more complete draft ready by the end of the year.

Oh yes, and I have started writing a new piece of fiction. Something inspired by a comment I read in some research I was doing last month, which suddenly resolved itself into a plot in my head and which actually seems to be going rather well so far. Whether it will end well is another matter, but I am at least not totally despairing of its quality even as I write it, which is perhaps half the battle. I might even actually be enjoying writing it, which for fiction is often a rare pleasure, I find...

Looking East

If you've taken probably even the most casual look at this blog, then one thing will perhaps have become very clear - I have a very great interest in the history of the BBC. It's a subject I find deeply fascinating, and something I very much enjoy researching, writing about and, when I get the opportunity, making radio features about.

So when my colleagues at Look East, the regional TV news programme which operates out of the same BBC office in Norwich where I work, had its 60th anniversary coming up, I couldn't resist sticking my oar in. Fortunately for me, some of the bosses on that side of things were happy for me to do so, to the extent that I was even able a couple of weeks ago to take a trip down to one of my very favourite places, the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham in Berkshire, to see what I could see in some of the relevant files which they hold there.

This resulted in an online piece which was published yesterday, on the actual day of Look East's anniversary. Something I learned during all this being that the commonly accepted date, even as recorded in some of the files held at the BBC in Norwich, is wrong. Look East was indeed planned to start on September 28th 1964, but a technical fault meant that this didn't in fact happen. That episode never made it to the air, viewers in the East of England got Midlands Today instead, and Look East finally got going the following day.

It's a bit of an odd anniversary in some respects, as it's an anniversary of the programme title, rather than of the actual programme itself. The BBC began broadcasting East Anglian news bulletins from Norwich in October 1959, but these were brief, straight-forward affairs basically only there so they could claim they'd started before Anglia Television. Indeed, the script to DG-designate Hugh Carleton Greene's introduction to the first ever one makes a point of saying it's the first live broadcast from any TV studio in East Anglia. Which it was - by about three weeks!

On September 17th 1962 this then became a full-blown regional magazine programme of the kind we have today, in common with most of the other regions around the country who all mostly started then, moving up from being a bulletin to being a magazine. This was initially East Anglia at Six, then in 1963 became East at Six-Ten, before finally in September 1964 another change of timeslot meant they gave up being beholden to the time for the title, and plumped for Look East instead.

Anyway, I've had a good time researching and writing about all of this, and nobody from Look East seems to have become too annoyed with me doing it despite the fact that my closest connection to the programme is once having had my hand photographed to be used in a graphic! 

I also managed to do not one, not two, but three completely different radio pieces related to the anniversary. You can hear one of them in expanded form as part of our Secret Norfolk series online here:

It occurs to me that this is actually the second time this year I've written a piece for BBC News Online about local BBC history, but I had completely forgotten to mention the previous one on here. It was back in February, when my colleague Jill Bennett retired after 44 years at BBC Radio Norfolk, and I was asked to write something to mark the occasion. You can have a read of that one here.

Part of the reason I enjoy doing these is, as well as simply the love of BBC history, it's fun to look into and celebrate and help to record those parts of the Corporation's story which, frankly, aren't as well recorded. Very few people stop to tell the stories of local and regional parts of the BBC, and when they do they tend to be very anecdotal. Which can be useful up to a point; but there is so much memory, so much information out there which has been lost forever, when people in those buildings up and down the country have down the decades chucked out those old documents or even those old recordings in office moves. It's nobody's fault; it's enough of a job doing the work in hand without stopping to consider posterity. But I like to at least try and make the effort, whenever I have the chance, in the little corner of the BBC here in Norwich where I have been lucky enough to find a place.

Aural History

Usually down the years with this blog, I have tended to write about exciting developments in my writing career as soon as possible. Partly to show off about them, of course! But also because I enjoy having this blog as a record. I do have a private diary as well, in which I write about what goes on in my life purely for my own personal posterity and interest to look back on. But somehow, having it all here as well, all laid out in neatly ordered little chunks as it develops over time, is also nice to have.

Which is all a very roundabout way of getting to the point and saying that something exciting has happened - or at least, is happening - and I haven't got around to writing about it here yet. I'm not exactly sure why. Possibly because it was a while after I knew it was happening before it was officially announced and I was able to talk about it. A little bit because I have been busy working on a new writing project over the summer. But I think mostly because I simply hadn't got around to summoning the effort to sit down and get back to the blog.

So, here I am!

Late last year, I happened to come into contact with Michael Stevens, the editor of BBC Audiobooks and their official range of Doctor Who releases. It transpired that he had bought, read and enjoyed Pull to Open, and we got to talking about some possible Doctor Who ideas I could perhaps be involved in for the audiobook range. Eventually, Michael decided that it might be nice to put out an audiobook release of Pull to Open.

Everything was agreed, I prepared a suitable abridgement, and earlier this year it was recorded - rather pleasingly, at BBC Audiobooks' studio at Television Centre, the building where back in April 1963 Sydney Newman and Donald Wilson had sat down and created the basic format of Doctor Who together in the first place. I was going to go along to the recording, which would have been very exciting, but sadly the practicalities of it all didn't work out in the end. Probably just as well for them - the last thing they needed was me hanging around getting in the way!

But it's all been successfully recorded, and is due to be released this November. The reading is by Christopher Naylor, well-known to Doctor Who fans as the actor who these days plays Harry Sullivan in Big Finish Productions' Doctor Who audio dramas, in place of the late Ian Marter. There won't be a physical release of Pull to Open - it's rather long, and would take up a fair few CDs! - but there is still a 'cover' for promotional and online shopping purposes, which I'm pleased to say has been adapted by the original team behind the Ten Acre version, Stuart Manning and Andrew Orton. But now with the official Doctor Who logo and the BBC blocks on it!

Yes, to paraphrase the wonderful Completely Useless Encyclopedia, I am now officially Worthy Of The Diamond Logo! And because of the unique way in which BBC Audiobooks works, a Penguin author, too... The audiobook went on pre-sale a few weeks ago and since then it's been bobbing about in the audiobook bestseller charts on Amazon in the "Film History & Criticism" section. Which it isn't either of, of course - but I'm not complaining!

On the Shelf

There's something which happened to me a couple of weeks ago which I've been meaning to mention here, but not got round to. I've finally been inspired to sit down and write about it today as it's a story I tell on an episode of a podcast on which I make a guest appearance, which was released this morning. The podcast is Gasbags from SOUNDYARD, run by my good friends and former colleagues Anna and Sophie. Gasbags is their own podcast about running the business, and their lives, and anything else which takes their fancy, and with Anna unavailable this week due to undergoing an operation, they very kindly and flatteringly asked me if I would sit-in alongside Sophie. As a sort of 'Guestbag', I suppose! You can have a listen to it here:

Anyway, on the episode I talk about the surprise I had earlier this month when I was rather aimlessly browsing the shelves of Waterstones in Norwich. I often think, whenever I am in a big bookshop like that, with all of those thousands of books and that unique 'new book' smell all around, what a fine thing it would be to have one of my own books on those shelves. I am pretty certain I may even have thought it when I walked into the shop that day.

Don't misunderstand me. I am very proud of the books that I have had published, and pleased with how they have been sold. There is no question that more people have found and enjoyed them through them being sold online than if they had only been available to stumble across by chance on the shelves of a bookshop.

And yet...

There is something a little special about the idea of having a book of your own on sale in a shop like that. I know I shouldn't think this, and others may rubbish it or even be offended by it. But I can't escape the idea, just speaking purely personally for myself, that in some tiny way it would make me feel a little bit more of a 'proper' writer.

And that day, browsing the shelves of the TV and film section in Waterstones, suddenly and completely unexpectedly there it was. There *I* was. Nestled between William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade and David Hendy's book about the BBC, a copy of The Long Game. It took me a fraction of a second to process it, as I recognised the spine. A feeling of disbelief, and then pride. I didn't exactly shed a tear, thank goodness, but it did feel a bit of an emotional moment.

All those year, decades, of going into big, high street bookshops like that and fantasising about one day having something of my own on the shelves. And now, there it was.

It hit me all the more because of it being such a surprise. I had no idea Waterstones stocked it, and I hadn't gone there looking for it. I'd had absolutely no idea it was there.

Admittedly when I had another look last weekend, it was still there. I didn't know whether to be pleased, or disappointed that nobody had bought it! I suppose maybe I ought to have done to encourage them to stock more, but that would be a bit self-defeating! 

No, I did not offer to sign it!

Podcast Piece

 

It's been a quiet start to the year here on the blog, with almost a quarter of it now gone already and nothing said.

That's mostly because it has been a quiet time writing-wise - although that's in terms of it appearing, rather than me doing. In fact, some rather exciting things have been happening as regards my latest writing efforts, although nothing which I can say anything about for the moment. But, all being well, there should be a lot more to say over the course of the year!

However, the reason for breaking silence now is that I have this month had a small addition to the ranks of my professional credits. This was another piece for the Radio Times, this time one of the small capsule reviews they run on their podcast pages.

I was able to contribute a short item about Chris Skinner's Countryside Podcast, and as with my two pieces last year it was a great honour, a pleasure and a privilege to be able to write something for the Radio Times. 

Not much, of course, but they all count! And nice to be featured in an issue with such a striking front cover, too.