Another Saturday in November 1950

Two weeks ago, I wrote a piece for the BBC website all about something the Corporation had shown on television on one particular Saturday afternoon in November 1950. This was on the 75^th anniversary of that broadcast.

 
Today, I have written a piece for the BBC website all about something the Corporation showed on television on another Saturday afternoon in November 1950. This is, obviously, also on the 75^th anniversary of that particular broadcast.
 
No, this isn’t my new very niche specialism. I am not intending to keep writing indefinitely about BBC Saturday afternoon television 75 years ago at fortnightly intervals – although wouldn’t that be fun? The fact that I have ended up writing pieces this month about those two particular Saturdays in BBC Television history all those years ago is a coincidence, although today’s piece is related to something I have been working on for two years now.
 
Because today, I am very pleased to be able to announce my forthcoming new non-fiction book – When Saturday Came. The story of the BBC’s Saturday teatime children’s slot from the point at which they originally began showing regular programmes there – 75 years ago today – up until the demise of the original Children’s Department in 1963 and the handing over of the slot to the Drama Department.
 
It's something I became interested in while I was working on my previous television history book, Pull to Open, about the creation of Doctor Who in 1963. While researching that book, I began to become interested in what had come before – what had been in that slot in the years before Doctor Who was created to fill it.
 
The more I thought about it and looked into it, the more I began to realise this was an interesting story in and of itself. The story of various programmes which had been very popular in their time but have now been largely forgotten. The story of the rise of television from a minority luxury to a mass medium; of the arrival of competition for the BBC in the form of the ITV companies; and of the rise and fall of the original BBC Children’s Department, created in 1950 and closed down at the end of 1963, later being revived as a separate entity in 1967.
 
So in January 2024 I started writing, and spent much of that year working on the book. This year has been mostly spent doing some additional research, editing and refining the manuscript, and trying to find a publisher. The latter, I am very pleased to say, I have managed to do – I have signed a contract with Telos Publishing, well-known among those interested in the subject for their TV history titles, and the book will be released by them sometime next year.
 
It seemed a shame, however, to let the 75^th anniversary of the launch of Saturday teatime programmes with the very first episode of Whirligig go by without marking it in some way. So, taking advantage of the research I had done for the book, I have been able to celebrate the occasion and share some of that research in a couple of ways.
 
Thanks to John Escolme at BBC History – or rather, who is BBC History – I have been able to write a piece about Whirligig for the ‘History of the BBC’ section of the BBC website, which you can read here.
 
But also, I have tried something a little out of my comfort zone. I have dabbled a bit in video editing here and there for small little projects from time-to-time, but now I have had a go at making something a bit chunkier – a 20-minute documentary telling the story of Whirligig. In many ways it’s basically an illustrated radio programme, really; you could listen to it rather than watch it without really missing anything. But I thought putting it on YouTube was the best place for people interested in the subject to actually be able to find it, and if I was putting it there I had to give them something to look at! I think it’s come together okay – it’s not amazing, but not awful, either. I am not very skilled at video editing, and often find it to be very frustrating and time-consuming, but here’s the programme if you fancy a watch:

 

So, happy 75^th birthday Whirligig. Here’s to 2026, and much more about that programme and many others in When Saturday Came. A book of which I am extremely proud, and which I hope you will enjoy if you’re interested in British television history.

A Saturday in November 1950

If you’re anything like me and hang about in the same corners of social media and follow the same sorts of people there – basically, I suppose, if you’re interested in the history of British broadcasting in some way – then there is a certain topic which has been coming up a great deal lately, and creating a lot of discussion. Namely, the current policies and future direction of the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham in Berkshire.

 
Obviously, as a member of BBC staff it would not be appropriate for me to enter into that debate in a public forum. All I can say on the matter is that I have been lucky enough to be able to visit the WAC many times over the past ten years, for various research projects both for and outside of the BBC, and I can vouch for the fact that it really is all of the things its advocates claim it to be. A wonderful resource for all kinds of research into the social and cultural history of the United Kingdom in the 20^th century, staffed by a dedicated, kind, and extremely helpful team. It’s one of my favourite places to go, and whenever I visit I always feel very privileged to be given access to the incredibly valuable material which they hold there.

The BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham, on my May 2019 visit. I normally like to take a picture of the place whenever I go - I think just in case I never have the opportunity to go again!

The reason I mention all of this is because one of the things which has often been discussed in the recent campaign concerning the future of the WAC is how the ability to research there can be a very organic process which can lead to unexpected discoveries. So it was for me when, six-and-a-half years ago, while looking through one of the files which had been provided for me on a research trip, I came across a fact which made me think, “Oh, that’s interesting – I must do something with that one day!”

In the reading room at Caversham, May 2019

The file in question was the BBC Television Outside Broadcasts Department’s football file for the 1950-51 season. It was one of several I was looking through that particular day in May 2019, covering the first seven football seasons from the resumption of BBC Television in 1946. I was there researching the life of Jimmy Jewell, the BBC’s first regular TV football commentator who had also refereed an FA Cup final and briefly been the manager of Norwich City. I was working on a documentary about his life which eventually went out that August Bank Holiday and, if you’re interested, is still available to listen to via BBC Sounds.

 

I noticed among those lists of and documentation about BBC Television’s early football coverage that one of the games on which Jewell commentated was an FA Cup fourth qualifying round match between Tooting & Mitcham United and Great Yarmouth Town, on the 11^th of November 1950. Working for BBC Radio Norfolk, the name Great Yarmouth obviously caught my attention. And I realised that this would have been the very first time a Norfolk football team had ever appeared in a live television game – long before Norwich City, who you would perhaps have expected to have claimed that statistic.
 
So I tweeted out the fact that day to the interest of a small handful of people, and made a mental note to see if I could put a little something together around it for the 70^th anniversary of the broadcast in 2020. 2020 being what it was, I unfortunately ended up completely forgetting all about it by the time November rolled around that year, much to my annoyance once I remembered that I had, er, forgotten.
 
“If I’m still working here in five years,” I decided, “I’ll do something about it for the 75^th…”

 

Well, here we are, and here I am. Six-and-a-half years on from sitting in the reading room at Caversham thinking to myself, “Oh, that’s interesting,” I have at last finally been able to do something about it.
 
And I’m rather pleased with what I have been able to do. It’s the tiniest little fact, relevant only really to people in Norfolk and to those interested in niche titbits from broadcasting and football history, but hey – that’s one of the things that’s great about the BBC. That we can serve such audiences. That we do serve such audiences. Yes, we are all of the big things. But sometimes it’s nice to be the little things, too.
 
So I have made a radio piece combining the information and background from the files at Caversham, some more recent research into local newspaper archives, and some new interviews with a couple of people connected with the club, along with a tiny bit of illustrative archive. Including, just to bring things full circle, a clip of Jimmy Jewell on commentary duty, although sadly not from this particular game which was, like so much at the time, broadcast live and never recorded. There and gone in the instant it happened.

But remembered by me, on the BBC, today.

 

I’ve also been able to write a tie-in feature for BBC News Online which, through the necessity of the differing requirements for the two media of course, is a little drier and more plain, but with which I am also quite pleased. Mainly because this one hardly got edited at all in the subbing process, which perhaps shows that I am starting to get the hang of doing these things!
 
All of this thanks to those wonderful files at Caversham, and the ability to research and to explore there.

Flight Cover

 

Well now... Here is something very exciting. Another development this week with Star Flight, my forthcoming Doctor Who 'audio original' for BBC Audiobooks - the release of the cover, illustrated by Lee Johnson!

I was shown the draft a couple of months ago, but it is nice to now have it out there in the world. Particularly so with all the gubbins on it - my name, and of course the logo! As well as the confirmation, which I've also known for a while but haven't mentioned because it hadn't yet been announced, that it will be read by Christopher Naylor. He also did the reading for the BBC Audiobooks version of my non-fiction book Pull to Open, with which I was extremely happy. So needless to say I am very pleased that he is also going to be on narrating duty here.

I, obviously, cannot stop staring at that cover and grinning to myself!

Something else about which I was also very pleased this week was the little piece about Star Flight in 'Gallifrey Guardian', the news section of Doctor Who Magazine. Aside from having been an occasional contributor to DWM for a decade now, I have been a reader of the magazine for the best part of 31 years. So to see in those pages news about a Doctor Who story written by me makes me very proud, as I'm sure you can imagine.

But that wasn't the only nice thing about this month's issue of the magazine. This edition is primarily focused around an interview with Carole Ann Ford, who played Susan, the Doctor's granddaughter, for the first year of Doctor Who's run. 

In both the interview feature itself and some of the supporting pieces about the creation of development of the character of Susan in 1963, Benjamin Cook who wrote the pieces has used Pull to Open as a source and quoted from it quite extensively. I mentioned recently here how I always enjoy the feeling of something I've written being useful to other people in their own work and research, and that's very much the case here. Seeing it referred to like that gives the feeling that I have, indeed, written a 'proper' book!

Two Sides to the Same Story

One of the nice things about working for the BBC is that quite often, if you come across something and think “oh, that’s interesting,” you don’t have to just leave it there and get on with your day. You can actually help bring it to a wider audience who might also perhaps find it interesting, too.

 
Just over a week ago I saw a post on Facebook about a photographer in London who had bought some 1960s rolls of film and found that two of them had already been used back then. One of them contained some damaged pictures of the University of East Anglia campus in Norwich, with its distinctive ‘ziggurat’ halls of residence, and he was attempting to see if he could find out who might have taken the pictures back in 1968.
 
I thought this would make a nice little radio feature, so I arranged to interview the photographer, Attila Prester, as well as William Stileman from the UEA’s alumni department who’d been trying to spread the word and see if they could help to discover who took the pictures. They both gave very nice interviews, with Attila in particular being very moving and almost poetic in how he talked about the power of photography to preserve moments in time and transport us to long-lost places, and how the people captured in those images can somehow speak to us across the decades.
 
One of the upsides of the changes which have taken place in the local part of the BBC over the past couple of years is that if you’re doing a story for radio, it’s now a lot easier to also do it for online as well. So I also wrote a BBC News Online piece tied-in with the radio package, which made sense given it was a story about pictures; to have somewhere where you could actually show the photos was obviously beneficial.
 
It’s interesting, though, how even given that subject matter, it’s very clear to me that the radio package ended up being the far superior version. Now, there are obvious reasons for this – for one, you can get a lot more information into a five-minute radio package than you can a 500-word article. The whole thing has a lot more room to breathe, you can get across more of the feeling and the emotion, allow the people involved to tell the story in their own words, and help convey that sense of emotion with a little music. Writing may be my passion, but radio is my profession – and one I am very good at, too. I’m not saying this one was a perfect package, by any means – I ought to have done the narration, particularly the first link, much more slowly, with narrating too quickly being a regular failing of mine. But it is still a pretty good piece.

On a level of personal professional satisfaction, though, there is also the fact that while I nearly always have the final say over how a radio piece ends up, that’s not the case with an article. If I make something for radio, it will hardly ever be changed before broadcast, and if it were to be – if someone had a serious objection to part of it, or wanted it to be shorter, for example – they would almost certainly ask me to do the edit rather than doing it themselves. This has even been the case on the occasions when I have made things for national broadcast; very rarely has anything ever been particularly chopped and changed about after I’ve submitted it.

 
Writing for BBC News Online though is a very different beast. Partly this is because I don’t do it very often, and even though it can be an interesting and even a fun challenge to try and write something which fits in with the required style – I always regard myself as doing an impression of someone writing a BBC News Online article, rather than someone to whom it comes naturally! – obviously there will be nips and tucks and changes which whoever’s subbing it will do, to make it fit that style more properly. But also, there’s the plain fact that two different writers, or a writer and a sub or an editor, will nearly always have two different perspectives on how something ought best to be written.
 
But it doesn’t just come down to the different ways in which the different media are overseen and published or broadcast. Sometimes – and it can vary between one or the other depending on the nature of the story, the interviewees, and the material available – a story is just better told in one medium than it is in another. I think that the passion with which Attila speaks makes this a case where sound very much triumphs over text. But then again, we put the radio piece up on BBC Sounds and linked to it in the article, so hopefully anyone who read it and was sufficiently interested will have also had a listen to the radio version.

 
Have a listen yourself, and see what you think. Or should that be hear what you think…?

Flight Updates

If you thought I wasn't going to take each and every opportunity I could to chronicle all of the stages of my first professional piece of fiction's journey to publication in as much detail as possible here, then I'm afraid you were very sadly mistaken. Anyway, I'm comfortable in the knowledge that very few people actively read this blog, and that it mostly functions as a sort of chronicle for myself to look back on at various things I've done over the years, so I know I'm only writing to please myself anyway. Which is, as is often pointed out, often the best reason to write something anyway.

Star Flight got what I'm certain is its first podcast mention just over a week ago, on an episode of Radio Free Skaro. This is a Canadian Doctor Who podcast to which I have been a listener, off-and-on, since around 2013 or so, and for which I have kindly been interviewed a couple of times, when The Long Game and Pull to Open came out.

On this occasion they were interviewing BBC Audiobooks editor Michael Stevens, during which he talked about the range and what they have coming up next year, with Star Flight getting a nice little mention. It was also brought up earlier in the episode, too, before the interview, when they do their news round-up at the start and talked briefly about it having been announced as an upcoming title. Not much, as there obviously isn't yet much to say, but some very kind comments about The Long Game and Pull to Open, which is of course much appreciated. You can have a listen to the episode here:

Aside from that, the website CultBox also put up a short news article briefly summarising the news of Star Flight and John Peel's The Mind Trap having been the first two BBC Audiobooks Doctor Who 'audio originals' announced for 2026:

But the main action, such as it is, has been over on Amazon, where after going up for pre-order Star Flight briefly reached the dizzy heights of number 6317 in the charts. Which, I admit, doesn't sound all that impressive, but when you consider how many thousands, probably millions of books and audiobooks are available via Amazon, I think it's pretty good going!

It also made number two their 'Hot New Releases' chart for Doctor Who books and audiobooks:

And got up to number four in their general Doctor Who books chart:

All of which I am, as you can imagine, pretty proud of and pleased with! I'm not sure there will be a lot more to say now until the cover artwork is released; I'm not sure when exactly that will be, but I have seen the draft and I am very pleased with it! I couldn't stop looking at it when it was first sent to me. It made the whole thing feel that much more 'real', of course.

Oh, something else I can share with you, as it doesn't give anything away, is a bit of the email I was sent with the contract to sign when I was commissioned to write the story. This was particularly pleasing as, because it's an audiobook, they obviously refer to it as a 'script': so I was being formally commissioned, by the BBC, to write a Doctor Who script, with the paperwork looking and feeling a bit like that for all those actual, proper, TV Doctor Who writers whose work I have watched, enjoyed, read about and written about down the years...

Taking Flight

I recall once seeing an interview with the comedian Peter Kay, in which he was asked about a poll having voted him the country’s funniest man. Kay dismissed the idea, pointing out that it’s an impossible thing to judge, and that the funniest man in the country could easily be someone like a milkman nobody’s ever heard of, perfectly happy telling jokes to his friends.

 
It's possible that the same could be true of writers. The greatest and finest writer of the most beautifully moving prose in the history of the English language could easily be someone who died in the 1930s having only ever written for her own pleasure, never showed her work to anybody, and whose name will never be known or remembered.
 
If you’re good at something, if you enjoy doing it, if it’s how you want to spend your time, do you really need the outside validation of others?
 
Perhaps for some people the answer is no, you don’t.
 
But I think to many of those for whom writing it an ambition, there is often a need for it. A craving, even. A desire, often a very strong one, for what you do to mean something to someone else. To have some external reassurance of the fact that you can do this, and you have not been entirely wasting your time.
 
All of this has, of course, been gone over many times, by far finer minds than mine. Perhaps most famously, by Orwell in his essay ‘Why I Write’, which I first read in my late teens and which certainly struck a chord with me for his confession that “Sheer egoism,” was one of the main driving factors behind it. “Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death… It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one.”
 
I’ve never really thought about it in terms of wanting to be remembered after death – what happens while I’m still here to enjoy it is far more important to me! – but that egotism he writes about is of course a factor.
 
The thing with writing is you can keep fooling yourself for your entire life that you might one day ‘make it’. Fairly early on, most people realise that they are never going to be an astronaut, or a footballer, or a pop star. But you can keep pretending into old age that you might, just might, one day write a great work of fiction which people will want to read.
 
I don’t remember precisely when I first knew that I wanted to be a writer. But it has almost always been there, from a very young age. When I was in the early years of primary school I found that I could write stories, I enjoyed writing stories, and to some degree at that stage I probably did it better than most of my peers did. It was something for which I had a talent, and which I was aware other people eventually made careers out of, so perhaps that was something I could do. Sometimes this sat alongside other ambitions – wanting to be a writer and a fireman, for example, or a writer and a Formula One team manager. But wanting to be a writer was always in there.
 
I’m middle-aged now, and I have been very fortunate indeed to have had a life in which I have been able, while not exactly making a full-time living from it, to tell stories as part of my professional career. By writing non-fiction books, feature articles, and making radio documentaries. Forming narratives, telling stories, making people interested in knowing what happened. Keeping them following along to the end of the tale.
 
But it’s not quite the same as writing fiction.
 
I am better – much better, really – at writing non-fiction and putting together radio features than I am at writing fiction. When I am constructing those narratives, I do it well – I do it bloody well, actually, so there – and I do it confidently, like crafting some intricate piece of needlework. But despite all these years – decades – of trying, I have never been able to find the same sense of fluency with fiction. Not as an adult. It’s like trying to do the stitching one-handed.
 
I have never stopped trying, though. Because I am under that delusion I mentioned earlier, that I might one day crack it. That I might somehow suddenly stumble across the idea, the way of doing it, which will give me the golden ticket to the chocolate factory of having a novel published. Now I’m in my 40s the rational part of me has started to think that if it were going to happen, I’d have done it by now. That I have reached the extent of my limitations as a writer.
 
But even with that rational part tugging away at one corner of my mind, I can’t just stop. Wanting to be a writer, wanting to be a novelist, is a key part of who I am. Even if I tried, I don’t think I could make it go away. The ideas would always be there, simmering away, and I’d always be thinking maybe this one, maybe this time…
 
It’s true, though, that I have tried a lot of ideas. Serious ones, silly ones. ‘Literary’ ones, trashy ones. Contemporary, historical, science-fiction, horror, first person, third person… I have never found the right formula to make it click. The story which will make people want to know what happens next, and be well-written enough to bring them along on the journey.
 
But…
 
But…
 
But…
 
I have mentioned on this blog more than once over the past few months that I was sitting on a secret. A commission. A real-life, actual commission to write a piece of fiction. Not a novel, something shorter, but still…
 
It was finally announced by the publisher and went up for pre-order online earlier this month so, as the saying goes, I’m “so glad I can finally talk about this.”
 
I realise it sounds incredibly mercenary to think that making money out of something gives it value. But it’s not really about the money, as such, as nice as it would be to be able to make a full-time living out of writing. (I definitely don’t think I will ever reach that stage). But it is that sense of validation, as I mentioned earlier. That someone, with no reason to think favourably of me for any reason, took a look at a submission of mine and decided it was up to a professional standard.
 
So yes, finally, after all of these decades of trying, I am going to be the author of a professional work of fiction. And what is it, you may ask…?
 
Well… I suppose it was inevitable. It’s this. Of course it’s this. What else, really, was it ever going to be…? 

 

Coming in 2026, from BBC Audiobooks – Doctor Who: Star Flight!

From Norwich, it's the Gig of the Week!

As I usually mention on this blog whenever it happens, every so often I get the chance to write a feature for the website at work, usually from a radio piece which I have put together. More often than not this will be to do with a story I have had my eye on for some time and have known about for a while. But there's a piece I've written which has gone up today which is about an event I had never heard of until earlier this year.

There has, of course, been a lot around this summer about the 40th anniversary of Live Aid. I knew that back in 1985 many people across the country had been inspired by it to put on fundraising concerts of their own for the cause, mostly small affairs in village halls and the like. But what I had never heard of until I happened to see a post about it on a Facebook group of was Norwich's version - a mammoth 12-hour gig in Earlham Park, with thousands of people in attendance and featuring acts such as Hawkwind, Amazulu and The Supremes.

I was intrigued both by the fact that it had happened at all, and the fact that it seems to have slipped out of the folk memory - especially given the fact that the far smaller 'North Walsham Live Aid' from later in 1985 often seems to get a mention around the time of the Live Aid anniversaries. (Or it does when you work for the local radio station, anyway!)

I thought this was worthy of further investigation, so decided to see if I could track down some of those involved to interview them for a piece for the 40th anniversary - which is today. The result was a package which ran on my friend Thordis's programme today, and is also available via BBC Sounds - although the online version is slightly different as we can only use production library music on online pieces, not the commercial tracks I used on the radio version.

I've also written a tie-in piece for BBC News Online, which went up this morning. This, however, was only possible thanks to the wonderful photos provided by one of my interviewees, Mark Hodgson. It was his post on Facebook which had first made me aware of the existence of the concert, and fortunately I know Mark slightly - he was one of the people I spoke to for my documentary about the old UEA TV station, Nexus, back in 2021.

So I was able to drop him an email asking both if he'd be willing to be interviewed for his memories of being in the crowd that day, and for permission to use some of his photos in a News Online piece. Very kindly he said yes to both, which is particularly fortunate as without his photos there wouldn't be an article. I'm quite pleased with what I've written, I think it's a nice little piece which tells a decent story, but without Mark's photos to it wouldn't have been publishable. I was very fortunate that he not only took some excellent pictures that day, but all these years later had digitised them in such high quality and given his permission for the BBC to use them. Thanks, Mark!

Ex-cite-ment

Regular readers of this blog – are there any such people? Do comment down below if so, I’d love to know – will be very well aware, in an eye-rolling, ‘here he goes again’ type way, that despite my great ambition being to write fiction, the only area of professional writing in which I have had any success at all so far is with non-fiction. Indeed, until recently the only writing I’d ever been paid for at all was exclusively non-fiction. That has now changed, although I can’t yet talk about what the professional piece of fiction is, as it hasn’t been publicly announced.

 
But there is, however, one thing about writing non-fiction which it does have that fiction can’t really be said to. And that is the fact that what you have written can sometimes turn out to be useful for other people.

Now of course many – probably most – people will read a work of non-fiction simply because they are interested in the subject itself, to take pleasure in finding out more about it or reading a well-constructed narrative outlining its story, or a particular element or phase of that story. But there are also people who, obviously, read a work of non-fiction in the course of their own research into a given subject, for something they are working on themselves.

 
This is one aspect of writing non-fiction which I really like the idea of. The notion that someone might read The Long Game or Pull to Open and use something they’ve found there in their own work. That something I have researched and written about, maybe something I put in one of those books which doesn’t appear anywhere else, will make them go ‘Ah!’ and give them something interesting and maybe even important to include in whatever they may be writing themselves.
 
The reason this comes to mind now is because I have just finished reading Exterminate! Regenerate!, a new mainstream Doctor Who non-fiction book by John Higgs, published by a big publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. A book likely to have a far wider reach and much larger readership than my Doctor Who books, but which it turns out The Long Game and Pull to Open were both read by Higgs during the research for.
 
There are bits and pieces, facts and quotes, from the books cited by Higgs throughout the relevant sections of the book, something I find very pleasing. The fact that I was able to research, collate and write about information which has then gone on to be useful for another writer. But more than that, I even get a couple of mentions in the text, too – being rather flatteringly referred to by Higgs as a “dedicated and talented” historian of Doctor Who. Alongside Richard Bignell, no less – a far more knowledgeable and esteemed researcher of the programme’s history than I!

I’m even in the index, which is a first, and will probably turn out to be a unique experience. It may sound like a weird thing to say, but I’m quite chuffed about that – being an index entry in a book like this!
 
But anyway, yes, it’s nice to feel useful. Or at least, I think so. I remember, about 20 years ago now, I read a biography of a particular historical figure, and I used the book to make some improvements to that person’s Wikipedia page, with the book properly cited. This prompted an angry comment from the author on the article’s talk page, furious as he saw it that his book had been ripped off and plagiarised. I didn’t understand it – you can’t copyright facts, after all, and they were sourced to the book – and thought anyone interested enough to read the page would then be more likely to read the cited book. But he was deeply unhappy. So, feeling very bad about the whole thing and not wanting to upset him, I reverted the edits and removed my improvements to the article.
 
Obviously outright plagiarism, and sources not being acknowledged, is an absolute no-no, and if I found someone had done that with material I’d written I’d of course be very upset, and angry. But using your writing as a useful reference source… Well, I just find that flattering, and immensely pleasing. After all, that’s sort of what the whole point of writing a non-fiction book is. To get more information on a subject about which you’re passionate out there into the world. It would be very selfish indeed if you wanted that to stay purely within the confines of your books, rather than taking on a life of its own and being part of the general pool of knowledge about whatever particular subject it is.
 
So, thanks to John – and I’m very glad I was useful!

St Catherine and All Saints

Very unusually for me – indeed, I think almost certainly uniquely for me, past, present, or future – this particular piece of writing began with a church service.

 
Not one which I was attending, I hasten to add. But last autumn, soon after the Look East 60^th anniversary and all the various bits and bobs which went on around that, my colleague Andrew was attending a regular Sunday service at his local church. Also among the congregation was a member of the Norwich Society who, having seen some of the mentions of the Look East anniversary, wondered whether Andrew might possibly be interested in writing something about the history of the BBC in the city for their twice-yearly journal, Aspects of Norwich.
 
Andrew said he didn’t really think it was something for him, but that he knew a man who might be interested…
 
So it was that he put me in touch with them, and I was very pleased to be able to contribute an article.

I thought it would fit best to base the piece around the story of the BBC’s first proper headquarters in Norwich, at St Catherine’s Close on All Saints Green, which became their first East Anglian radio HQ in 1956 and then had a regional television element added to it three years later. Overall the BBC were there for 47 years, through until 2003, and I thought a piece about the early days and the establishment and early growth of the BBC presence in the city might be interesting.

 
I was particularly pleased to do it because it meant I was able to provide a home for various bits and pieces of information which I thought were interesting which I’d come across while researching some of my previous programmes about local BBC history, either at Caversham or in our own files which we hold in Norwich. Things there wasn’t really the time or space for in those programmes, or which were a bit niche for something being broadcast for a general audience, but which would work nicely in a dedicated history piece for a specialist readership.

It also meant a chance to share some pictures which, similarly, wouldn’t really have a home elsewhere. The kind of thing which if this were Broadcasting House in London, or the BBC in the likes of Glasgow or Manchester or even Birmingham, would probably find their place in a dedicated book about the history of the Corporation there, but which in Norwich there isn’t really the market for. The history of part of an important institution which, inevitably being a small and unfashionable part of said institution, still falls through the cracks.

 
I think it’s quite a nice piece in-all, and the Society seemed very happy with it, although I haven’t actually had any feedback from any of the readers of Aspects of Norwich. But then again, no complaints, either! If you fancy a read, Aspects of Norwich is available in various local bookshops, as well as directly from the Society’s website.

Wembley Words

In my previous blog entry, about the series I produced for BBC Sounds called The Man Who Made Wembley, I mentioned the pleasing news that on its first weekend of availability, the series had been given a nice little notice in The Observer. Just a brief mention at the end of a round-up of other sporting-related programmes, but nice to have - even if, as I mentioned before, they did get the title slightly wrong!

However, it turns out that The Observer wasn't the only national publication of which The Man Who Made Wembley caught the attention. Because the following weekend, it got another little write-up in the Sunday press. This time in one of the supplements in the Sunday Times, their Culture magazine, in a piece written by their regular radio and podcast reviewed Clair Woodward - who also, back in 2022, gave my Nexus documentary a nice review, too.

With due acknowledgement, and of course thanks, to those two newspapers, however, best of all came the other week when the podcast page of the Radio Times highlighted the series. Not only that, but reviewer David Hepworth actually made it his 'Pick of the Week'. I think "breezy series" is a compliment - it must be, given the context, and I'll take it as one anyway!

Oh yes, and the BBC Sport Online piece I wrote to tie-in with the series also made it into the round-up of their "most engaging football content" for the season just gone. Which is pretty good going, given that neither the piece nor the series really features football all that much at all! I'm not sure whether they judged that in terms of readability or raw figures, but I'm pleased with how the piece did on both counts - it got over 300,000 views and the stats seemed to show that people who clicked on it were reading through most or all of it.

The Man Who Made Wembley

This has been a week for getting the chance to do things I thought I might never again be given the opportunity to do.
 
One of them was rather sudden – in the week I was asked if I would cover as a presenter, for yesterday afternoon’s Saturday sport show, due to an injury to the scheduled presenter and nobody else being available to cover this particular weekend. My regular presenting work came to an end with the reorganisation of BBC Local Radio in the autumn of 2023, and I hadn’t presented a show at all since the general election last year.
 
I had never expected to do so ever again, given the limited opportunities now available, so it was nice to be able to go back to it as a one-off. I ended up rather enjoying myself, I think I did a reasonably decent job, and I wouldn’t say no if the opportunity ever again arose.
 
In truth, though, I know I am not a natural presenter, and never have been. I have always been more of a ‘producer who could get away with presenting’, and producing was always the role I felt as if I had some ability at which made me an asset to the organisation. However, it seemed unlikely I’d be producing again, either, after the 2023 changes; but last weekend we released online on BBC Sounds a new series which I have written and produced.
 
Not, as you might have gathered from that, a live programme, but something you’ll know if you’ve read much of this blog in the past that I have long enjoyed doing and think I do have some talent for making – a documentary. I had also wondered, with a little more melancholy than over any presenting opportunities, whether I’d ever get the chance to do one of these again, so I was very pleased indeed to be able to do this one.
 
Rather than being a one-off programme as my previous documentaries have mostly been, this is a podcast-style series in five shorter parts. Called The Man Who Made Wembley, it tells the story of Arthur Elvin, who after leaving school in Norwich at the age of 14 for a job as a clerk in a jam factory went on to save Wembley Stadium from possible demolition in the late 1920s and ran it for the next 30 years, turning it into England’s national stadium.

I can’t recall exactly when I first heard of Elvin, but I am reasonably sure it was while I was making my documentary about football referee-turned-television commentator Jimmy Jewell in 2019. Two men with quite similar stories, in some respects; both born in the late 1890s, both flew during the First World War, both had an association with Wembley Stadium – Elvin as owner, Jewell as cup final referee – and both died relatively early, in their 50s in the 1950s, with neither having had any children and both being obscure figures today.

 
I think the latter is one of the reasons I have enjoyed doing these more biographical-type programmes about Jewell and now Elvin. They’re interesting figures, but haven’t really been looked at fully before. There have been no biographies written, and no other documentaries made about their lives. They exist at the tantalising edges of history and popular culture; involved with events of a great interest to a large number of people, but pretty much forgotten now in and of themselves. It’s nice to be able to shine a little light on such lives.
 
So I thought Elvin would be a good subject for a possible documentary, but didn’t get around to it until, with no other producing projects on the horizon, it seemed like a good one to try and pitch last year. I wasn’t producing any live shows any more, so I desperately still wanted to try and produce something. And I thought this had a good hook – an interesting life story in and of itself, but also one that had a wider interest through the Wembley story.
 
Fortunately, the editor locally agreed, as did my colleagues Emma Craig and Paul Joslin and those further up the chain at BBC Sounds, and in January we got the go-ahead to make it. Most of the research and recording was done in February, I spent a chunk of March editing it together, we finalised it in April and it went up last Saturday morning.

Researching in some of the Wembley files at the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham, back in February

There have been all sorts of nice things about making the programme. Just the sheer enjoyment of being able to do something like this again, for a start! Of diving into the research, pulling all the various threads together and forming them into a narrative. Getting to speak to some very interesting people who kindly agreed to be interviewed. Having another reason for a trip to the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham, one of my favourite places to visit for either my internal or external projects, to look through the BBC’s Wembley files of Elvin’s era.

 
But particularly nice was being able to work on the programme with my friend Thordis, with whom I have ‘grown up’ together in the BBC. We were messaging each other one evening last year when I had not long come up with the idea of pitching the series, and when I mentioned it to her she replied with the unexpected comment: “You do know I’m related to him…?”
 
I did not, or at least if it had ever come up I had not remembered it, so I knew at once that she should present the series. It turned out that Thordis’s family weren’t, actually, entirely clear on the exact nature of their link to Arthur, but even that added something to it – we were able to give the programme a little touch of a Who Do You Think You Are? element.

Recording the narration for the series with Thordis at the - now former! - studios of BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, in April. They moved out in early May to move to new premises, making The Man Who Made Wembley one of the last programmes, if not THE last programme, to come out featuring material recorded there

I’m very proud of the finished result, and if you’re interested I hope you might enjoy listening to it on BBC Sounds. There have been some very nice comments about it through the week, including a little review in today’s edition of The Observer. I mean, they get the title wrong, but it’s close enough that anyone interested should still be able to find it!

 
As you might expect, I and others involved have been trying to bang the drum for it as much as possible. I’ve made radio pieces and even done a few live turns, locally and on Radio London; thanks to Emma there’s been a trail going out across BBC Local Radio stations nationally; I wrote an online feature for BBC Sport which seems to have done very well and even got promoted on the front pages of BBC News and the whole BBC website; and BBC London even kindly gave it a little plug at the end of their 1830 programme on Wednesday night.

Whether all this means I’ll ever get the chance to do another one or not, I don’t know. Only time will tell on that. I’d like to, although I also don’t have a clear and obvious idea for another one yet. Elvin was a subject which always seemed likely to attract at least some interest. Whether I can find something else like that which hasn’t been well covered before… well, as I say, only time will tell.

The Story at Platform Three...

For reasons which aren’t worth going into, ever since the great change around in BBC Local Radio in the autumn of 2023, when I had to move into a different role, I am now officially employed by the BBC as a ‘Journalist’.

 
This is not a title with which I feel particularly comfortable – I am not in any sense a journalist by ambition, inclination or training. It’s not a label I would ever use for myself. If someone were to ask me what I do for a living, I would never say “I’m a journalist”. And certainly not a reporter.
 
Which I realise might seem odd when you consider that for the past 17 years, my full-time paid employment has been working in a BBC newsroom. But for much of that time, my primary occupation has not been mainly, or at the very least not solely, concerned with news. Mostly, I have been a producer – although admittedly for many years producing programmes which had a news section in them. A facilitator of other people’s journalism, perhaps.
 
That’s a different skill, though. I did enjoy working on those 5pm drive time news hours, getting the stories of the day to air, particularly if something was breaking, things were changing, and it was up to me to ensure we had material about it on the air, accurately and professionally. But that’s not the same as actual newsgathering – it’s a production skill, a craft skill if you’ll allow me to go that far. And I was good at it, too. I’m not a reporter, but I am good at helping reporters get their material onto the radio.
 
But I have never had the desire to be out there pounding the pavements myself, with a card reading ‘Press’ tucked into the hatband of a trilby, asking the questions that need to be asked and speaking truth to power and all that. I lack the gumption and the drive for that sort of thing; I am a much more timid character. I’m far happier speaking to people who actually want to be talking to me.
 
Admittedly, over time I did get much more used to the idea of doing news interviews, especially during the years when I would regularly stand in as drive-time presenter. I could handle it, when I had to. Even then, though, I was usually doing the interviews from the comfort of the studio. I am very much an ‘inside broadcaster’; I never really enjoyed working on outside broadcasts, even on fun occasions for lighter shows. Producing in the studio, I felt much more in control of everything. I knew what I had to do and more importantly how I could solve any problems. Not so easy to be confident about when you’re outside on location.
 
However, in the decade or more I spent regularly producing weekday drivetime shows, in one form or another, I did occasionally end up actually going out into the world on a reporting job. Usually these would be the ones within walking distance of the studios – I don’t drive – and more often than not they would be for softer, more feature-y items which are much more my natural environment.

Covering a teaching union protest in February 2023

Even more occasionally though, these assignments could be relatively ‘hard’ news stories – taxi drivers blocking city centre roads in protest, for example, or teachers demonstrating en masse outside City Hall. Although those sorts of protests, where there isn’t really any threat of violence or confrontation, are actually relatively easy to cover as there are lots of people all gathered in one place, many of whom will be very keen to talk about their cause or grievance.
 
I wouldn’t necessarily go so far as to say I ‘enjoyed’ covering those sorts of stories, but there was always the sense of satisfaction afterwards in getting it done, getting it done relatively well, not letting the news editor down, and doing a professional job of it. The more enjoyable part for me was getting all the raw material put together once I was back inside; the ‘craft’ element which is generally what I’m better at than being out on the street doing an impression of a reporter. My main aim on those sorts of occasions – and with any out-and-about recording really, even for the documentaries and features I’ve made – is always to do the least bad job possible of that bit, so I have something I can put together well in the edit.

 
All of this comes to mind because on this Saturday just gone, I actually went out and about doing a bit of reporting again for the first time in a little while. I suppose I did cover a book launch back in January, but this was a bit above that. It actually entailed going to another city, for a start.
 
Inevitably, of course, it involved Doctor Who. I mean, come on – this wasn’t going to be actual news, as I hope I’ve already made clear! But I’d seen that Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery were having the official opening of their new Doctor Who exhibition on Saturday, with Peter Purves doing the honours. I thought it would make for a nice package for our shared Norfolk-Suffolk-Cambridgeshire daytime show for the day after, which handily is presented by my friend Thordis, who was very happy to take a piece. I knew I could do a good job of it; the museum were happy for me to come along; I established that nobody from Radio Cambridgeshire itself was going; so on Saturday morning off I went on the train to Peterborough.

The reason I mention any of this at all is because for the first, and probably last, time in my career I sort of accidentally found myself being a ‘multi-platform’ reporter; that is, covering the same story for radio, online, and indeed – uniquely for me – for television. Something which most reporters do all the time these days, but as I’m not a reporter was a new experience for me.

 
I had thought that there might be a decent online article in it, so had suggested that I could perhaps put one together for them, but in the end was asked to do two – one on the exhibition itself, and another focused on the interview with Peter Purves which I was hoping to get. This I was also fairly confident about – I am not a regular News Online writer but I have often contributed features for them before, usually tied-in with one of my documentaries or radio packages. I’d never really done an ‘on the day’ story for them, but I was pretty confident I could do a decent job. I know the style, and although I am not a natural writer of such pieces, I can do a good enough impression of one to make life relatively easy for those actually putting it online.

But I also found myself being asked to help out the weekend TV team by filing some pictures for the Saturday Look East bulletin, so they could cover the exhibition opening with what they call an ‘OOV’ – an item the presenter reads ‘out of vision’ over a few shots of whatever the story happens to be about. Now, if I am not really journalist, I am certainly not a video journalist, which is a very specific skill. I was doubtful of being able to file anything broadcastable, especially as my phone can’t shoot video in anything close to broadcast quality. It’s also an Android, so only shoots in 30 frames per second anyway, which isn’t really any use to anybody.

 
However, for a few seconds’ worth they could just about get away with it. I did my best to try and take some shots which moved, so were better than still photos, but didn’t pan around wildly or wobble all over the place. Just to show what a 21^st century kind of guy I am I filed the shots back to Norwich while I was still in Peterborough, so they had plenty of time to have a look and see if they could salvage anything useable. And, rather to my surprise I must admit, they were actually able to use a few shots, marking my debut – and doubtless, swansong – as a television newsgatherer:

  

  

In fact, I ended up being so pleased with my efforts that the next day I put my own little video together from the various bits I’d shot, and stuck it up on YouTube:

       

 
Anyway, then it was back to Norwich on the train to be congratulated for my new-found television skills, and a few hours writing the two online features, putting together the radio package, and sorting some news bulletin clips for my colleagues at Cambridgeshire (where the event took place) and Suffolk (where Peter Purves lives). I also eventually ended up cutting the Peter Purves interview as a straight ‘head-to-head’, as we call it, for another show, and a version of the radio package for BBC Sounds.

 
Any actual BBC journalists reading this will be rather bewildered that I am bothering recording all this at all, given that they do this sort of thing day-in, day-out, each and every day. TV, radio, online – it’s just what you do as a BBC reporter these days. You cover it all. I am not expecting to be applauded just because I happened to be in a position to have a dabble at it myself.
 
But it was a useful reminder of the work that goes into these things. And this was a self-chosen story, on a very soft subject about which I know a very great deal and feel very comfortable discussing, taking place at a fun event on a nice day with plenty of friendly and receptive people willing to talk to me and no really restrictive time limit for filing. I can only imagine how difficult it must be when you’re sent to cover a story in the middle of nowhere in the pouring rain, with very little knowledge about what’s taken place other than some people’s lives have just been ruined, nobody wants to speak to you and you’re up against a very tight deadline, with a producer or an editor anxious to know where the material is.
 
It’s certainly not something I would want to do for a living. But I do still enjoy doing it on the odd occasion when I have the time and the opportunity to pick and choose something I would like to cover. Not something which happens very often – even on Saturday, although I was working, I was working on my own time, if that makes sense, as I wasn’t actually on-rota or being paid for doing it.

 
But it was fun to do, I’m glad I did it and managed to cover it for everybody, and it was nice to dip a toe into that ‘multi-platform’ reporting world.

Cloud Nine

 

Doctor Who has returned for its latest series this weekend. So it seems an appropriate moment to look back 20 years to when it really came back in the biggest way of all, with its first new series for 16 years and the start of what perhaps still stands as one of the greatest comebacks in the history of British television. If not the greatest.

That spring of 2005 was one of the most exciting times of my life. I know some might find it odd to find such vicarious fulfilment through the return and success of a television programme with which I had no direct connection, other than my passion for it. Most people who are in any way interested in reading this blog probably do understand it, but if not, you have to think about it a bit like being a fan of a football team. You have no involvement in the team or the game, no say over what happens, but when they win a major trophy it's bliss. It feels like everything. Everything you ever wanted.

That was what the return of Doctor Who felt like for me in the spring of 2005, and for many others, too.

I have very fond memories of that whole 18-month period from the announcement of the show's recommissioning in September 2003 to the point at which it finally arrived on screen in March 2005. It did feel like an eternity at the time, when I was so excited to see it, but there was so much to enjoy - the excitement of the announcement itself, the beginning of shooting, and before that point of course the casting news.

It's the casting of Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor which I have written about in the new Doctor Who Magazine special released earlier this month, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Eccleston's Doctor. I was asked if I would like to contribute to the special, I pitched a few ideas and I was very happy that this one was taken up, as I felt I was in a unique position to be able to contribute something on the subject.

Although Eccleston's name had been put forward by one or two fans in all the general discussion since the recommission announcement, there had been no widespread speculation about him becoming the next Doctor until the middle of March 2004. Then, just a few days before it happened, suddenly a leak suggested that he was the favourite and was about to be cast. I was astonished - he just wasn't someone I thought would be interested in the part, although I did suggest him as a possible candidate to play the Master in one online discussion thread.

But I was also incredibly excited, as having been a huge admirer of Our Friends in the North, in which he played Nicky - the character that, even at the age of 12 back in 1996, I found the most interesting of the four leads - I had followed his career with interest ever since. He'd of course starred in Russell T Davies's The Second Coming, which I had also liked a great deal, and while I remained unsure of how convincing the leak was, I was very excited about the idea that an actor I liked so much could be cast as the Doctor.

I remember very well sitting at the computer for most of the night on Friday the 19th into Saturday the 20th of March as first it seemed an announcement was imminent, and then it came - Eccleston was the Doctor. I don't think I went to bed until about 4am, following and joining in with all of the excited chatter on the Outpost Gallifrey forum.

And this was why I felt I was in a unique position to capture some of the excitement of that night. Outpost Gallifrey was unquestionably the main place for Doctor Who discussion online at the time, and when it closed down five years later I saved a few of the major discussion threads from 2003-04 period for posterity. One of which was the thread from that very night, as the news broke that Eccleston had been cast.

As far as I am aware, I am the only person to still have a full copy of that thread, so the only person in a position to write some of it up the the record. This was the idea which Doctor Who Magazine liked for the special, and it's the piece which has ended up being published. A little time capsule of how it felt to be a Doctor Who fan at that moment in the show's history.

In fact, the whole special issue is like that. It's a great reminder of so much of the fun and the thrill of the programme's return, not just the excitement of the very fact that it was back after so long, but that it returned so successfully, too. I am very pleased to have been asked to contribute to it, and I hope the piece brings back happy memories for those who were there in the build-up, and is an interesting historical document for younger fans who weren't.