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Last year I wrote about the 100th anniversary of the BBC, and why I was so proud to be associated with it. Today marks the centenary of another British cultural institution, one which for most of its history until being sold off in 2011 was a part of the BBC, and indeed was its official "organ". For it is 100 years ago today since the first issue of the Radio Times listings magazine was published - and to my surprise, but no little pleasure, I have found myself also becoming associated with the magazine for its centenary special issue.

We were always a Radio Times household when I was growing up. I am just about old enough to remember the pre-deregulation days when we would get both the Radio Times and the TV Times to have both sets of listings. But, like many households in the UK, once they were both publishing each other's we got both for precisely one more week before deciding on which side our bread was buttered and continuing with the Radio Times alone.

I can remember it feeling like one of the signs of being an independent grown-up when, after having moved away to go to university, I had to start buying my own copy if I wanted one. I think the magazine is a great cultural time capsule, too. For TV and radio history, obviously, but also for the more wider popular culture of the time, too. Just the other day I was browsing some covers of issues from 1989, and I think you'd find it hard to have a better barometer of just who and what were in the public consciousness in any given era of Britain in the second half of the 20th century than the covers from across those decades.

I've been very proud to have had a couple of my documentaries selected as "Today's Choices" in the radio pages down the years, and even to have once managed to get them to play along with printing a clue within the magazine for Treasure Quest. But I was even more proud earlier this month to rather unexpectedly find myself asked to write a small piece for them - and not for any old issue, either, but for the centenary special.

It's a short feature about Eric Maschwitz, one of the early editors of the Radio Times and a fascinating character - a lyricist who wrote the words to A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square; a screenwriter who co-wrote the screenplay for Goodbye, Mr Chips; a radio executive who created In Town Tonight; and even a spy involved with counter-intelligence operations in neutral New York in the early days of the Second World War.

He also, in one of his latter roles as a BBC television executive, had a part in the chain of events which led to the creation of Doctor Who. Which is why I wrote about him in Pull to Open, and why I in turn ended up being asked to write this short piece.

So, happy birthday Radio Times. And thank you for letting me become a small part of that history!

What Next...?

 

With friends, colleagues and ex-colleagues at the end of the Treasure Quest 'wake' after the final show, at the Coach and Horses pub near the BBC in Norwich

It’s been an emotional week for me, and for several of my colleagues – some of them now, sadly, former colleagues, but still close friends – as last Sunday we said goodbye to Treasure Quest, the BBC Radio Norfolk programme which I have produced for the past 15 years, ever since its regular run started in May 2008.

 
Or rather, which I did produce. It still feels strange to refer to it in the past tense.
 
It ran for 732 quests across 808 episodes – taking in 11 two-parters, five shows where the weather stopped us going out, and 60 ‘Virtual Quests’ during the pandemic – and I was involved in all but about nine of them across that time. I’ve written before on this blog about how much the show has meant to me, and that’s been a big part of the wrench of it ending, of course. I’m very proud of so much that we were able to do after I wrote that piece, too: keeping it going through covid with the Virtual Quests which really seemed to mean so much to people; turning it into an on-air mystery game for a Boxing Day special; having the new team of Sophie and Julie together for a final three years.
 
But what’s also made the final end emotional, and moving, has been seeing how much it means to other people. I knew it was a popular show which had built up a community of listeners around it who really valued it and felt a part of it, but seeing the hundreds of comments come in about what it means to people and how much they’ll miss it has been quite humbling. It’s very sad to think of that ‘community of the air’ now having been dispersed, forever.
 
I wrote last year, for the BBC’s centenary, about what a privilege it has been for me to be a part of the BBC. And a large part of that feeling has come from the opportunity to be a part of the team making a show which really did mean something to people, and became a part of their lives – a very rare and special honour. I think all of us lucky enough to have been in the ‘TQ Family’ felt that way, all through the years. And we were very proud of everything that we did together.
 

 
So it’s been a strange and sad week, and left me feeling a little adrift – especially sitting here typing this at home on a Sunday morning, when for over a third of my life so far I’d have usually been at work producing TQ.
 
But there have been some brighter spots, relating to the continuing positive reaction I’ve had to Pull to Open. Two reviews of the book appeared this week, both of them extremely pleasing. Paul Mount for Starburst says in his review that “Books about the history of British TV in general and Doctor Who in particular don’t get much more essential than this one.” For SFX magazine, meanwhile, Nick Setchfield gives it four-and-a-half stars out of five and says it “succeeds in turning the facts of a TV legend’s birth into a freshly engaging narrative.” Mount also calls it a “formidable work of long-form investigative journalism”, while Setchfield praises my “cultural historian’s eye for context.”
 

So that has all been nicely ego-boosting!

 
As have the continuing images on Twitter of people sharing their pictures of having received the book, and commenting on either their excitement at looking forward to reading it or their positive thoughts after they have done so. I was particularly flattered to see the very kind tweet from Richard Marson, whose own writing on British television history is widely admired. He’s very much an expert in this area, so to see him refer to the book’s “great job of contextualising the birth of Doctor Who and navigating the available sources to form a clear picture of the key events and characters” was very nice.
 

What happens next, I don’t know – on most scores, really. My future at the BBC is still currently to be decided. In writing terms there are a couple of little irons in the fire for pieces coming up related to Pull to Open, about which more before too long hopefully. People have been asking about and suggesting ideas for future non-fiction books, but there isn’t yet any concept which really strikes me as one I’d like to get my teeth into. I do have one idea for a non-Doctor Who non-fiction book, again related to British television history, but I’m not sure whether it would really have enough of a potential audience for anyone to want to publish it.

 
Finally, on a literary note, on Thursday evening I was at the joint book launch in Norwich for the married authors Rachel Hore and DJ Taylor, whose new novels The Hidden Years and Flame Music were both released that day. I was quite pleased with the resulting radio piece, particularly my idea of pitting them against each other in a sort of Mr & Mrs game asking them questions about each other’s new books. This seemed to go down quite well – have a listen to see how they did!
 

Open Out

It's here!

After a little bit of a delay, my new book Pull to Open has finally been released! Copies have been arriving with people over the past week, and very excitingly on Friday I received a box with my copies inside. Not that I'm so massively egotistical as to want lots of copies of my own book hanging around the place - although I do want some, of course! - but there were various people to whom I'd promised copies.

I am very proud of it - and the pleasing thing is, it seems to be going down very well so far with those who have read or are in the process of reading it. Earlier this month I recorded the first interview I'd done with someone about the book with someone who'd actually read it, which obviously was a nervous moment. But Steven Schapansky of the Radio Free Skaro podcast was extremely complimentary, and was kind enough to record a very long chat with me for their most recent edition which was released last Sunday. If you'd like to have a listen to that, you can do so here:

There's also been a very kind review from the Sci-Fi Bulletin website - 9 out of 10, I'll take that! And it was also flattering to see Doctor Who Magazine generate a nice amount of space to the book in their 'Gallifrey Guardian' news pages. This was the medium through which I first read about so much Doctor Who news and heard about so many new books and products when I was a child and a teenager, so it was very pleasing to see it featured there. I've also done interviews about the book for the CultBox website, and for the Who's Views YouTube channel.

As the book has been arriving with people in recent days, one of the things that's been nice has been seeing photos posted on social media as it's excitedly shared that they have it. Many of them also sharing the free Sydney Newman sticker, in the style of the 1972 Sugar Smacks stickers, which they get with it! Thanks to Paul Burley for creating that one. People being excited to receive a book that I have written is one hell of an ego boost, as I might imagine. I just hope these people are all as pleased by it once they've read it!

There've also been some very generous comments online, including very flatteringly from the esteemed Doctor Who historian, and general television historian, Andrew Pixley. One aspect I'm particularly pleased about is that people seem to be enjoying one of the main elements of the book, providing extra background and context about British television and the BBC of the time, to try and give more of an idea of the world into which Doctor Who emerged and why certain things happened. I knew that people like me would probably enjoy it - so it's nice to know that there are other people with tastes along those lines out there to justify that faith!

But anyway, yes - an extremely successful launch so far, I'd say. I really am very happy and very proud.

I should also add that before the book came out I was kindly interviewed by The Doctor Who Show podcast - another very enjoyable interview which if you wish to hear you can find below. The start of another 'Podcast Book Tour', perhaps? If any other podcast producers out there would like a chat, I'm more than happy to oblige!

Another Passion

 

Anybody who's cast even the most casual of glances across the content of this blog would be left in no doubt that I am a Doctor Who fan. It's the enthusiasm of mine which gets written about the most here, which is no surprise because this is a blog about my writing and it so happens that Doctor Who is the subject about which I have found myself most often professionally engaged to write.

(On the subject of which, by the way, thanks to The Doctor Who Show podcast for once again interviewing me, as they did for The Long Game, about my new book. You can hear the interview here if you'd like to know more about the book).

But there other things in life in which I am interested, of course. Not least among them is Formula One Grand Prix motor racing, of which I have been a dedicated armchair follower since I was 11 years old and happened across the 1995 Brazilian Grand Prix on television one Sunday afternoon. 

It's not that Formula One has never crossed my path professionally at all. Back in 2014 I was fortunate enough to make a documentary about Ayrton Senna's early career in Norfolk which gained some success, and last year I produced a documentary telling the story of George Russell's first year with the Mercedes team. 

More recently, however, I have been helping to look after our weekly Racing Torque motorsport show at work, and at the end of last month this resulted in an incredible opportunity to visit the Oxfordshire headquarters of the Williams Formula One team - one of the great names of the sport, and the team of which I became a fan when first starting to follow F1 in 1995.

This of course resulted in a report for Racing Torque, various other bits and pieces across the station - and, for the first and probably only time, a bylined piece by me on the BBC Sport website. Yes, for this week only, I have been able to have a little bit of a play at being an F1 journalist!

Which is of course immensely pleasing, and another reminder of how very lucky I have been to have this job, and the amazing things I have been able to do through it.

Something else I have done this week which was equally, if not more, pleasing was a piece for BBC Radio Sussex, about my old primary school's 150th anniversary celebrations which I went to last Sunday. After 16 years in the BBC, it was nice to be able to finally do a piece for my "home" station - and in my home village, too, celebrating that school. And if I had been able to go back in time and tell the 11-year-old me who left that school in the summer of 1995 that in 28 years' time he would be writing professionally-published books about Doctor Who and getting to visit the Williams headquarters, on BBC duty for his actual job... Well, I can't help but think he would have felt things hadn't turned out too badly.

Mind you, he would probably have a go at me for not having had a novel published yet... But there's still time!

Pull to Open

Yesterday evening was very exciting for me. After a long time waiting for everything to be sorted and settled and ready and it to be appropriate for it to be made public, my publishers (and it feels exciting itself just to be able to say that!) Ten Acre officially announced my new book! It’s called Pull to Open, it tells the story of the creation of Doctor Who in 1963, and it will be released on the 24^th of July.

I wrote the book through 2022, and Stuart at Ten Acre was gratifyingly very keen to take it when I sent it to him at the end of the year. It’s taken a while having to wait for certain bits and pieces to fall into place and doing some edits and other admin, but finally we’re almost there and the time was right to announce.
 
But why, some people may ask, go back to 1963 again? Why go back to tell a story which has been told before? When even in the introduction to The Long Game I mentioned how although the creation of Doctor Who was a story which had long fascinated me, it was one which had already been well-told by others.
 
So why have my go at telling it now?
 
Well, I gradually came to realise that although that was true, it had never been told in quite the way I fancied telling it.
 

Doctor Who: The Sixties, a Christmas present I received in 1993 which helped start me off on this journey.

After The Long Game had come out in the autumn of 2021, it became clear that I could, in fact, write something other people would want to read, and I had done a pretty good job of it. Lots of people bought it. Lots of people said very nice things about it. At the very end of the year, in one of the interviews I did to promote the book, with AJ Black for his website, he asked me if I had any other books lined up.

 
“I can’t imagine ever writing another non-fiction book, either Doctor Who or otherwise,” I told him. “But you never know! If I am struck by a good idea for one I might give it a go. Certainly in Doctor Who terms, I think pretty much anything else I might want to write about has already been very well researched and written about by other people. Whereas with The Long Game I knew I had something new and a bit different which hadn’t formed the basis of a book before. If I ever think of something else like that, I might have another try!”
 
And that kept nagging at me, once the interview came out. It felt like a waste, somehow. All that good will I had built up with The Long Game, there had to be some way I could channel it into something else. Frankly, I knew that if I put my efforts in 2022 into trying to write fiction there was very little chance of it being published. If I put them into writing a non-fiction work, specifically a television history of particularly Doctor Who one, I knew that it would be at least seriously considered and probably had a very good chance of being published.

 
But what could it be…?
 

I’ve written before on this blog about how the creation of Doctor Who in 1963 has cast a kind of spell over me. I think many of us have particular little slivers of history, little eras, which form a kind of bubble of interest. Where a particular combination of the people and the circumstances and the background and the culture and the society all get a hook into our consciousness somehow.
 
BBC Television in 1963 is very much that for me. It’s why, nearly 20 years ago now, I had a go at writing the story of the creation of Doctor Who as a novel. That was no good, of course, and it would be no good trying that again. So what else could I do with that interest?
 
I did have one ‘way in’, as it were. In 2021, I’d written a piece for Doctor Who Magazine about the co-creator of the programme, Donald Wilson. This was something I’d first researched way back in 2015, and it was originally a much longer article, but eventually by the time it reached print there was only space for a shorter piece. But I still had all of that writing and research. I knew I had a ready-made chapter on Wilson’s life.
 
But a chapter of what…?
 
Once again, it came back to that nagging feeling. Another book. A Doctor Who book. And finally, the realisation that I could tackle the very start of the show in a way which I didn’t think had been done before.
 
Firstly, with this book, the creation would be the story. Those books I’d loved so much in my childhood and my teens, like Doctor Who: The Sixties or The Handbook: The First Doctor, had begun the story and then carried on to tell the tale of a whole era. This book would only go up to the end of 1963 – the point at which Doctor Who was about to go nuclear, so to speak, as the Daleks rolled onto Britain’s screens for the first time. Poised with a happy ending, just as The Long Game was with its finale of the return of the show being announced in September 2003. A perfect, ready-made narrative structure.
 

But secondly, I knew from the kind comments I’d had that one of the things people had really enjoyed about The Long Game was the way in which it provided the wider background and context of what was going on in the BBC at the time. Who these people were who had taken these decisions, and how they’d come to be in those jobs at that time. Not just what had happened and when, but why it had happened. How the BBC and the wider British television industry was working at that point in history.
  

I knew that if I could bring all of that, and combine it with the strong narrative thread of the events slowly coalescing for Doctor Who to rise into existence, I could write a really strong book. With 2023 being the show’s 60^th anniversary year, it seemed perfect. So, hopefully, that’s what I’ve done. On the 16^th of January 2022, I sat down at my laptop and typed the opening words: “When did Doctor Who begin?” There’s been a lot of writing, research and effort since then, but now, 130,000 words later, I have a book.

Among all the many, many lovely comments I’ve had since Pull to Open was announced by Ten Acre yesterday evening, one of the ones by which I was most touched was from a user called DeeDeeTee on the GallifreyBase Doctor Who forum. They wrote that: “The Long Game was an incredible read. Paul's skill is managing to tell the history of the BBC through the history of the show. I'm really looking forward to seeing how he weaves this magic in telling the story about the very beginning...”

It’s a wonderful feeling to find that someone you don’t know at all has read something you have written and understood exactly what you were trying to do with it. Trying to explore and explain part of the deep, rich and complex history of the BBC through the narrative of how that history influenced the development of Doctor Who.

Whether or not I have succeeded… Well, time will tell. We’ll see what people make of it next month.

Running the Show

Doctor Who Magazine released a new special edition earlier this month, focusing on the producers / showrunners from across the history of the programme from 1963 to the present day. I'm pleased to say that earlier this year I was asked to contribute a couple of pieces to this, and they've now appeared in the finished version as my first professional writing efforts of 2023.

I was asked to write the pieces focusing on Doctor Who's one-off 1990s return in the form of the 1996 TV Movie and its producer Philip Segal. I was glad to be able to do this as the TV Movie is a production for which I have an enormous amount of affection. Even though it ended up of course with the disappointment of not leading to any new series, as a 12-year-old I found it incredibly exciting - to actually have new Doctor Who! The show had been off-air as a going concern since I was five years old, a lifetime at that age, and even though the Doctor Who videos I bought with my paper round money were mostly all new to me, I knew that I wasn't quite the same. This was different. This was properly new. Doctor Who was back!

As I say, it sadly wasn't to last, and we had to wait nearly ten years for the proper return. But the fact that it did eventually come back makes it all the more possible to look affectionately on the TV Movie, so I was pleased to be able to write about Segal and also to interview the movie's writer, Matthew Jacobs, who very kindly spared me some time to chat via Zoom from LA.

That's not the only exciting thing about this latest DWM special for me, though. In one of the pieces after mine, Eddie Robson writes about Russell T Davies... and refers to The Long Game, as if it's a proper book by a proper writer! I found this enormously flattering and, of course, quite the ego boost!

I'm also rather pleased to have contributed to DWM again for the first time under the new version of the old 'diamond' logo, which it recently adopted. This pleased me purely for nostalgic reasons - the magazine was using the older version of that logo when I first became a reader of it in the mid 1990s.

The Doctor Who Magazine 'Showrunner' special is out now from Panini, available at WH Smith's or online.

Old Year's Night

A front page mention for my Boxing Day piece in the EDP

It's that time of year again - time to look back over what I have achieved over the past twelve months, and to wonder what the next year might have in store.

I fear I must report that, as with last year, not only am I no closer to achieving my dream of having a novel professionally published, I basically made no effort at all to achieve anything in that direction throughout 2022. I barely wrote any fiction at all - just a few fragments here and there for projects which will almost certainly never see the light of day.

However, I do have some excuse. Back in January, I set myself some targets for the year. Having decided after the success of The Long Game that, for the time being at least, it was far more worthwhile to put my efforts into non-fiction than fiction, I decided to have a go at writing another factual book. This I now have a draft of, it seems to have gone reasonably well, and fingers crossed it looks as if it may appear sometime in 2023 - more on that as and when.

So one target was to write a draft of a new non-fiction book, and I have achieved that. The other was related to my day job - I wanted to make two more radio documentaries. I had in mind from very early on what I wanted them to be, too. One about Banksy's "Spraycation" in the summer of 2021, to go out around the first anniversary of it happening and using bits of our live programming from the time to tell the story of what happened. The other was a local documentary for the BBC's centenary celebrations, and I managed to achieve both of these. In fact, I ended up not only making these two, but four documentaries altogether this year - also doing one the week the Queen died with some local remembrances and archive, and one for this Christmas looking back at local Formula One driver George Russell's first year with the Mercedes team. We even got to speak to George for this, which as a big armchair Formula One fan I enjoyed putting together.

I think, then, that I can look back on the year with some satisfaction. I was also able to carry on writing some other bits and bobs. I was flattered to be asked to make some more contributions to Doctor Who Magazine, and the Eastern Daily Press printed some more features of mine tied-in with some of our radio programmes. I even managed to squeeze another one of the latter in before the end of the year, with a Boxing Day piece about our Treasure Quest special.

This time last year I wrote that there was some exciting news coming up radio-wise, which was that in January my 2021 Nexus documentary got a national airing on 4 Extra, which was immensely pleasing - especially it getting good write-ups in The Times and the Radio Times.

So all of that was good, and once again I look back on a year when I have been very fortunate and can be satisfied that I was able to use whatever writing skills I have in a professional capacity. And yet...

I still have to face up to the fact that I am basically middle-aged now, and still after all these years of ambition I have never been able to earn any money at all from writing any fiction. You'd think I'd be able to get a little something in somewhere, but no. 

I just have to try harder, I suppose. I'm not sure what avenue I could pursue to try and achieve that during 2023, but getting back to fiction more generally will have to be on the list. After all, you can't become a novelist if you're not at least trying to write novels...

Happy New Year, everybody!