Not a Novelist (Yet)

Aside from the regular day-to-day aspects of my job, my work this September has mostly been concerned with broadcasting anniversaries - which will probably come as absolutely no surprise to anybody who has ever had even the most casual glance at some of my

August is over, and what have I spent it doing?

To round off July, I thought I'd catch up with a couple of bits of writing I unexpectedly ended up doing for BBC News Online this month.

This is a slightly curious one.

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’ve got a piece in the latest issue of Doctor Who magazine, which came out last week – a write-up of an interview which I actually conducted six years ago.

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the one and only bona fide new episode of Doctor Who to have been broadcast during the 1990s – the 1996 TV movie, starring Paul McGann, made in Canada for the US Fox Network as a collaboration between Universal Tel…

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 whi…

A promotional poster for my Flight into Danger documentary, created for me by Andrew-Mark Thompson I can’t say for certain when I first heard of Flight into Danger.

It's here!

It's March, which is an exciting month for me - not generally, I mean, but specifically this one.

After I had done my piece on Our Friends in the North for the History of the BBC website last month, John who runs that section of the BBC site asked me about any other ideas I might have for further pieces for this year.

I don’t remember how much of Our Friends in the North I saw first time around.

As I believe I may have mentioned here before, I am not a huge fan of New Year's Eve.

It's turned out to be rather a good year for various writing bits and pieces of mine, and this month has seen that rounded off with my final professional piece of 2025.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a piece for the BBC website all about something the Corporation had shown on television on one particular Saturday afternoon in November 1950.

If you’re anything like me and hang about in the same corners of social media and follow the same sorts of people there – basically, I suppose, if you’re interested in the history of British broadcasting in some way – then there is a certain topic which h…

Well now...

One of the nice things about working for the BBC is that quite often, if you come across something and think “oh, that’s interesting,” you don’t have to just leave it there and get on with your day.

If you thought I wasn't going to take each and every opportunity I could to chronicle all of the stages of my first professional piece of fiction's journey to publication in as much detail as possible here, then I'm afraid you were very sadly mistaken.

I recall once seeing an interview with the comedian Peter Kay, in which he was asked about a poll having voted him the country’s funniest man.

As I usually mention on this blog whenever it happens, every so often I get the chance to write a feature for the website at work, usually from a radio piece which I have put together.

Regular readers of this blog – are there any such people?

Very unusually for me – indeed, I think almost certainly uniquely for me, past, present, or future – this particular piece of writing began with a church service.

In my previous blog entry, about the series I produced for BBC Sounds called The Man Who Made Wembley, I mentioned the pleasing news that on its first weekend of availability, the series had been given a nice little notice in The Observer.

This has been a week for getting the chance to do things I thought I might never again be given the opportunity to do.