Flight into Danger Revisited

I’ve written previously on this blog about my pride in having been able to write for the Radio Times, a magazine the history and heritage of which is very much threaded through the story of British broadcasting, and particularly so for that of the BBC which owned it for the first 89 years of its existence.
 
I’ve been pleased as well to have written a couple of other bits for them since then, and to have had the Wembley series so nicely reviewed in its pages last year. Now, I’ve been able to combine the two things: writing for the magazine myself, and documentaries I’ve made being written about in its pages. Because in the latest issue out today I have a piece about my Flight into Danger documentary on BBC Sounds.
 

This is nice for two reasons. Firstly, of course, it’s nice just to write for the Radio Times again; to once more be a tiny part of a publication with such a long and esteemed history. But it also feels as if it somehow connects what I’ve done to Flight into Danger’s UK showing all those years ago back in 1956. Only in a very small way, and I’m not at all trying to suggest that having made a radio documentary about something puts me on the same level as the people who made the actual programme.
 
But it was the Radio Times, with its preview piece in the week of the BBC broadcast of the play, which will have first introduced many if not most of Flight into Danger’s eventual British viewers to its existence. And so seventy years on, it feels slightly as if I’ve taken up that thread at the other end and have now been able to re-introduce the existence of the play to the magazine’s current readers.
 
The 1956 preview piece was written by Elwyn Jones, a distinguished and important figure in the history of BBC television drama, then just in the early stages of his career with the department. He had been working for the Radio Times himself, but was now working in television directly. On the BBC’s Programme-as-Broadcast documents for Flight into Danger he is listed as its ‘producer’. He wasn’t in any way involved with the original production, of course, but he seems to have been the one on the BBC side who made the arrangements for the recording to be shown here.

I’m not being so self-aggrandising as to suggest that my also having written a piece about Flight into Danger for the Radio Times somehow makes me in any way like Elwyn Jones. But it is pleasing to feel as if there is that one little element in common with someone who helped bring the play to British screens, thus setting in motion some of the most important events in Flight into Danger’s extraordinary afterlife and its impact on British broadcasting.

 
So anyway – thanks to all at the Radio Times for letting me write the piece. I hope you like it if you’re able to pick up a copy. The new issue is, as usual, on sale from now until Monday from all good newsagents, or digitally via Pocketmags.