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 spend 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:
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