A Piece of Pastry

This is a slightly curious one. An article which wasn’t my idea and which it would almost certainly never have occurred to me to write, but which has ended up becoming one of the most-read pieces of work I have ever done.

 
A few weeks ago my colleague Emma, who among many other things produces the Secret Norfolk series of feature pieces and mini-documentaries for BBC Sounds, asked me if I might make her an item for that series about the actor and comedian Richard Hearne – a household name in Britain for many years in the mid-20^th century for his Mr Pastry character.
 
Emma had been speaking to Paul Dickson, who runs walking tours of Norwich city centre exploring its history and heritage, about some possible subjects he might be able to help with for Secret Norfolk episodes and he had suggested Hearne as an interesting candidate. Emma knows of my great interest in and work related to television history, and thought I’d be the perfect person to do such a piece.
 
I was aware of Hearne, and probably had been ever since I’d heard former Doctor Who producer Barry Letts tells his well-worn anecdote about sounding him out for the part of the Fourth Doctor in the 1993 Radio 2 documentary Doctor Who – 30 Years. I’d also researched some of his work, a little bit, as his early 1960s Saturday teatime sitcoms feature in my forthcoming book When Saturday Came about the history of the BBC Television’s children’s shows in that slot from 1950 to 1963.

 

But he’s not someone I would have necessarily gone out of my way to make a radio piece about or write an online feature on. However, I was more than happy to do so when Emma asked me if I’d fancy it. I was able to put together what turned out to be a nice little Secret Norfolk episode, talking to Paul Dickson out-and-about on the streets Norwich and using a bit of archive of Hearne speaking about his life and career on BBC Radio 4 in 1968.
 
I hadn’t initially thought there was any mileage in a tie-in News Online feature, for the simple reason that it wasn’t in any way, shape or form ‘news’. This wasn’t an event or a happening, it was simply interesting. However, the news editor had expressed an interest in an article and, while there was no ‘hook’ for it, after making the Sounds piece I decided I could probably do something as a light weekend feature.
 
This I duly did, and after going up last weekend it’s proved that there are actually a large number of people who remember and / or are interested in Mr Pastry, as it’s done great guns on the stats. Interestingly, over the course of the past week it’s pretty much doubled what it got on the first day, which is unusual and surprising and probably comes from it being shared on Facebook nostalgia groups and the like.
 
On the one hand, it’s slightly dispiriting to find that something I put together comparatively quickly can get a much larger readership than something I originated and very carefully researched and crafted over a long period of time. But on the other, it’s just nice to do something which interests people and which they want to read!
 
So, here’s to good old Mr Pastry.

Penny, the Pylon, and Me

At my secondary school, which I attended all the way through from year seven to sixth form, at the beginning of every school year you’d be issued with a school diary. I expect many if not most other schools of the time had something similar – an A5-sized, spiral-bound thing probably about half an inch thick, mainly made up of weekly planner pages for recording homework, etc, but also with your timetable, staff list, school rules, a map of the school site and where each classroom was, and all that kind of thing.
 
Almost everyone would heavily-customise these – i.e. scribble all over them – but many of us would also stick various things onto the clear plastic ‘covers’ which protected the front and back pages. I would usually add various pictures cut out of newspapers and magazines – Formula One cars, Daleks, and other bits and pieces reflecting my interests.
 
In my final year at school, the last year of sixth form, one of the pictures I had stuck to the front of my diary was a print-out of a photo I’d taken myself.
 
“It’s a pylon,” Penny, my closest friend at the time, would point out, deeply unimpressed. “Why do you have a pylon on the front of your diary, Paolo?” My “pylon” was, as I recall, the subject of much withering contempt from her throughout that school year.
 
It was not, of course, a pylon. Oh no. It was something much more exciting. A transmitter mast.

 

I was not so much interested in the technology or the architecture of the mast itself, but what it represented. This was a photo of the transmitter mast at Alexandra Palace, the birthplace of the BBC Television Service.
 
I had been invited there by Simon Vaughan of the Alexandra Palace Television Society for an event they were putting on in the old Studio A on September 10 2001. As I recall it, I had emailed Simon via the APTS website a while beforehand when I had been researching an article on RUR, the first piece of television science-fiction, which had been broadcast from the Palace in February 1938.

 
Simon had kindly helped me out with my query and we had corresponded via email and he asked me if I’d like to come along to the event – very kind of him, considering I was probably quite an irritating 17-year-old at the time. Well, I was definitely 17 anyway. I am pretty sure the term had actually already started, and I skipped a day of sixth form to go – but it doesn’t seem to have done me any harm in the long run. I mean, look – the BBC website says I am a “media historian” and everything! And I suppose I do have a media studies A-Level, so that justifies the description. Right...?

 

It was a fascinating day. I remember the sense of being somewhere special, where television in Britain had properly begun, in those very studios. We went into B, and also up into one of the old galleres… I don’t think I properly appreciated at the time just what a privilege it all was. Also to meet Arthur Dungate, well known in TV history circles for chronicling his days at AP on his website, and hearing many of his stories.
 
There is a sense of magic which clings to the Palace, if you’re interested in television history. I think it’s partly because much the architecture is relatively unchanged from the time the BBC service was based there. So as you walk up the hill and stand on the terrace and see London spread out into the distance, it’s possible to imagine what it might have been like to be one of those heading up to work there in those early days, when the entire BBC Television staff was based there and it had a collegiate, pioneering feel.
 
But the service itself also had a sense of enticing enigma to it. As I wrote earlier this year in a review of John Wyver’s book Magic Rays of Light on Goodreads, this was a full-blown television station – well, sort of – the world’s very first such regular service, and yet only the tiniest fragments of it survive to give us only the vaguest, tantalising impression of what it might have been like.
 
That sense is also there with the service’s revival after the Second World War; the way after being dormant for so long, the personnel regathered and they picked up and started again.
 
My fascination with those early days led me on another trip to the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham last month, to research another piece for the History of the BBC website. That was because today marks the 80^th anniversary of the resumption of BBC Television after the war, and I have written an article about that return.

 

I was also able to get hold from the BBC sound archives of something I hadn’t actually realised existed until I was researching this piece – about ten minutes’ worth of audio recordings of bits of the re-opening programme. The full programme itself is long gone; in some ways you could say it never existed, disappearing into the ether live as it was broadcast. But having these audio fragments gives a closer sense of what it might have been like than you can get simply from reading the scripts and other documentation.
 
So I was able to use some brief clips from those surviving audio fragments to make a short radio package on the anniversary for the BBC’s CNS department, which provides the local radio network with feature material and guests and items related to national stories.

Paul Hayes · Return of BBC Television in 1946 - BBC Local Radio 80th anniversary report

 
Quite a few of the stations have run it on Friday and over the weekend, and nosily tuning around on BBC Sounds to see what they made of it it’s been pleasing to hear a few of the presenters sounding genuinely impressed with it – that it gave them “goosebumps" or that it was a “privilege” to have played it.
 
It’s a nice reassurance that I do have an ability to write and edit items which can have an effect on people. As I think I have mentioned here before, my main aim with this sort of thing is always just to create something which makes people think “that’s interesting,” and it seems I might have achieved that here – even for some of those who would not normally be grabbed by the subject.