Ten Years in Two Weeks

August is over, and what have I spent it doing? Well, a few bits and pieces, but a large chunk of it was spent putting together a book which very few people will ever read, and of which only one copy is ever going to be available.
 
Allow me to explain…
 
September will see the 70^th anniversary of the BBC setting up a full-blown broadcasting headquarters in Norwich – which is the outpost of the BBC where I work and have done for the best part of 20 years. There had been transmitter staff based in and around the city for some years before 1956, in the days when the BBC owned and operated the transmitters themselves, and in the run-up to opening the headquarters the recruited staff had been based in a temporary office in the city.
 
But it was on September the 10^th 1956 that the new BBC East Anglian HQ officially opened at St Catherine’s Close on All Saints Green in Norwich. Radio moved across the road to Norfolk Tower in 1980, but St Catherine’s Close would be the main BBC base in the city until 2003 – when the operation moved to The Forum on Millennium Plain, where we remain to this day.

Knowing that this anniversary was coming up, I wanted to do a little something to mark it. These days at work we have a small waiting area on the first floor for guests, next to the radio and TV studio section, which is also sometimes used as a kind of ‘common room’ area for staff to sit during breaks. I thought it might be nice to put some sort of photobook together celebrating our history in Norwich, which staff and guests could flick through when sitting down there either having a break or waiting to go onto a live programme or do a recording.

 
It’s very unlikely that anyone would ever publish any kind of commercial book on the history of the BBC in Norwich. The market would be far too small, and the interest from the wider broadcasting history community too limited. There has been the odd book down the years on some of the bigger regional bases such as Manchester, but generally speaking BBC regional history is not a rich seam for publishers to mine, for obvious and understandable reasons.
 
But I knew that I could put something together – I had the knowledge and the access to the material, even if not the design and layout skills. Originally my idea was to do something taking in the whole seventy years, but it quickly became apparent that this would be impractical. It would be far too much to cover, and actually – paradoxically perhaps – the earlier years are far better-represented, at least in terms of what we have in Norwich and what I’ve seen at Caversham, than for example the 1970s.

 
Plus there’s also the fact that if you start doing more recent years, you might risk accidentally upsetting people if they or their work aren’t included. So I thought the first ten years would be a good cut-off – especially as it pretty much forms a distinct era in the history of the BBC’s East Anglian operation. Eric Hammond, the Engineer-in-Charge in Norwich who really helped build the whole thing, retired at the end of 1965, and David Bryson, who was editorially in charge as the ‘East Anglia Representative’, left in 1967. So 1956-1966 forms a nice initial era.

 

A lot of the material I had already gone through before for some of my radio projects telling aspects of BBC East’s history, so I had a pretty good grasp of what was available and what the story was. It was just a matter then of putting the whole thing together.
 
It took about two weeks all-told, laying out all of the images and writing the captions. There isn’t a huge amount of text, but overall it runs to about eight thousand words in total throughout the book. Because I have no design skills I put the whole thing together very simply in Word, although the cover was done in Acrobat using a template from the Lulu print-on-demand website through which I created the finished copy.
 
I have been frustrated by the limitations of my own abilities with design and not spotting issues which I ought to have spotted when going through –  I thought – the thing very carefully before having it printed. But overall, once it arrived and it existed as an actual, physical book, I was pretty pleased with it.

 

Nobody would ever make a coffee table book on the history of the BBC in Norwich for real. But I feel proud to be able to celebrate the achievements of those who built the foundations of this outpost by having put together something which at least gives an idea of what such a book might be like.
 
So, if you ever happen to be in as a guest for a BBC radio or television programme in Norwich, do please give it a look!