A blog about me and my writing
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. The first actually resulted, indirectly, from the Mr Pastry piece I did for Secret Norfolk and News Online in June. A man called Philip Yull heard the Pastry episode of Secret Norfolk , found it interesting and emailed the station to ask if we might be interested…
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…
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…
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. I’m glad I’ve finally been able to bring more of it to print than has been the case before, and I wanted to write a bit here about the interview and, particularly, its subject. I’m not sure when I would have first heard of Alan Yentob . I was…
This month marks the 30 th 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 Television, the BBC, and BBC Worldwide, as-was. That anniversary is being marked in many and various ways across the Doctor Who world. One of these…
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…
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 . I am reasonably sure, though, that it must have been in the book The Doctors: 30 Years of Time Travel by Adrian Rigelsford, which I would have purchased with saved-up paper round money sometime in the mid-1990s, probably from The…
It's here! Star Flight was released on Thursday, and although of course most people will probably buy it to stream or download, it also exists as an actual, physical version on CD. Which I was able to get a copy of on release day - rather pleasingly, World Book Day. And even though it's not a book-length story, audiobooks still count, so it was nice to be able to welcome a new member of the…
It's March, which is an exciting month for me - not generally, I mean, but specifically this one. March 2026. Because this is the month - indeed, this week will be the week - which sees the release of my first professional work of fiction, my Doctor Who audiobook Star Flight for BBC Audiobooks / Penguin Random House. It will be out there in the world from this coming Thursday, the 5th. But…
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. He sent me the list of BBC anniversaries for various services and programmes coming up throughout 2026, and I did have a few ideas – but then realised there was one anniversary…
I don’t remember how much of Our Friends in the North I saw first time around. I am sure that it wasn’t all of it – I am pretty certain I didn’t see the whole thing until it was repeated the following year. But I do know that I saw at least some of it on that first run in early 1996; and I know that something about it really drew me in. It seems ridiculous to think back on. I was only 11 years old…
As I believe I may have mentioned here before, I am not a huge fan of New Year's Eve. I am not opposed to the idea of celebrating it, of course, and have had some pleasant ones spent with friends in the past, mostly in my late teens and early twenties. But it's a time when, obviously not uniquely, I become a bit introspective about the progress of my life, or lack of it. How another year has…
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. If you've ever taken even the most casual look at this blog over any period of time, it will probably not surprise you to learn that this is another article for Doctor Who Magazine . A few weeks ago, I was asked if I had any ideas…
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 . This was on the 75 th anniversary of that broadcast. Today, I have written a piece for the BBC website all about something the Corporation showed on television on another Saturday afternoon in November 1950. This is, obviously, also…
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 has been coming up a great deal lately, and creating a lot of discussion . Namely, the current policies and future direction of the BBC Written…
Well now... Here is something very exciting. Another development this week with Star Flight , my forthcoming Doctor Who 'audio original' for BBC Audiobooks - the release of the cover, illustrated by Lee Johnson ! I was shown the draft a couple of months ago, but it is nice to now have it out there in the world. Particularly so with all the gubbins on it - my name, and of course the logo! As well…
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. You can actually help bring it to a wider audience who might also perhaps find it interesting, too. Just over a week ago I saw a post on Facebook about a photographer in London who had bought some…
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. Anyway, I'm comfortable in the knowledge that very few people actively read this blog, and that it mostly functions as a sort of chronicle for…
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. Kay dismissed the idea, pointing out that it’s an impossible thing to judge, and that the funniest man in the country could easily be someone like a milkman nobody’s ever heard of, perfectly happy telling jokes to his friends. It's possible that the same…
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. More often than not this will be to do with a story I have had my eye on for some time and have known about for a while. But there's a piece I've written which has gone up today which is about an event I had never…
Regular readers of this blog – are there any such people? Do comment down below if so, I’d love to know – will be very well aware, in an eye-rolling, ‘here he goes again’ type way, that despite my great ambition being to write fiction, the only area of professional writing in which I have had any success at all so far is with non-fiction. Indeed, until recently the only writing I’d ever been paid…
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. Not one which I was attending, I hasten to add. But last autumn, soon after the Look East 60 th anniversary and all the various bits and bobs which went on around that, my colleague Andrew was attending a regular Sunday service at his…
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 . Just a brief mention at the end of a round-up of other sporting-related programmes, but nice to have - even if, as I mentioned before, they did get the title…
This has been a week for getting the chance to do things I thought I might never again be given the opportunity to do. One of them was rather sudden – in the week I was asked if I would cover as a presenter, for yesterday afternoon’s Saturday sport show , due to an injury to the scheduled presenter and nobody else being available to cover this particular weekend. My regular presenting work came to…
For reasons which aren’t worth going into, ever since the great change around in BBC Local Radio in the autumn of 2023 , when I had to move into a different role, I am now officially employed by the BBC as a ‘Journalist’. This is not a title with which I feel particularly comfortable – I am not in any sense a journalist by ambition, inclination or training. It’s not a label I would ever use for…