{"id":115,"date":"2011-10-31T17:59:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-31T17:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theblankscreen.co.uk\/selfdistract\/2011\/10\/31\/exit-bbc-stage-left\/"},"modified":"2011-10-31T17:59:00","modified_gmt":"2011-10-31T17:59:00","slug":"exit-bbc-stage-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2011\/10\/31\/exit-bbc-stage-left\/","title":{"rendered":"Exit BBC, stage left"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s 18:00 on October 31, 2011 and a<\/span>s of this moment, I no longer work at all for the BBC. Slightly strangely, I haven\u2019t left the Corporation \u2013 the BBC has left me.<\/span>

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<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Strictly speaking I am a freelance writer but it\u2019s complicated. Perhaps ten years ago, the BBC was my biggest, most regular client and I’d have continued like that but for how they told me one day that there was no more freelance budget. But if I wanted to go on staff, they said, that would be good. I\u2019m wondering now if this was my first real experience of the logic of BBC budgeting but all I thought at the time was that the fee worked out to be the same, so what did I care?<\/span><\/div>\n
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Later I\u2019d care a lot or at least I\u2019d care roughly annually because it doesn\u2019t half make your tax complicated. I\u2019d be on salary for a couple of days a week, then freelance – and oftentimes the freelance work would be for another end of the same company. <\/span><\/div>\n
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But on the other hand, by this time I\u2019d already had the Freelance Coronary: the moment when everything, every client, every job, just collapses. I wasn\u2019t working for the BBC on that day and the worst I\u2019ve had with the Corporation since is the odd Freelance Chest Pain. You don\u2019t forget it, though, so I took that staff post. I\u2019m glad I did, too, because later the recession coincided with one of the BBC\u2019s cost-cutting drives. That wasn\u2019t a remarkable coincidence: the BBC is always cutting something.<\/span><\/div>\n
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For instance, I know it was cutting something when I first joined but I\u2019ve no idea what because I can\u2019t remember when that was. I do remember an earlier approach, I remember being a schoolboy and going to BBC Pebble Mill to just ask for work. It was embarrassing. I was embarrassing. I should stop doing that.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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Sometimes it works, though.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
I remember vividly how exciting it was when I got work experience at BBC Radio WM. Don\u2019t ask me, I don\u2019t know when it was. I\u2019m surprised at all this: I suspect my subconscious is preventing me remembering so that I can\u2019t tell you and therefore you can\u2019t figure out how many thousands of years ago it was. Might\u2019ve been 1990s. I think it was.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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I did do a spot of work on Micro Live, a BBC TV show in the 1980s – and met the great, delightful Terry Marsh. If she\u2019s ever googling herself and finds this amidst all the stories about boxers, do please picture me waving.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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Somewhere around this time I think I started pitching to BBC Radio 4. Aghast to think I still am, still unsuccessfully. Though these days it\u2019s drama and then it was documentary: I don\u2019t think I was really suited to docs. Used to find these great ideas and have little interest in actually making the programmes.<\/span><\/div>\n
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BBC Radio WM was much more successful for me. It was definitely my first exposure to BBC politics. It’s where I learnt to not to say that in a blog. So moving on… I remember the breakfast show producer Kathryn being tremendous and someone I instantly liked, instantly liked a lot. She was succeeded by someone else I didn\u2019t rate and who definitely didn\u2019t rate me but I am completely blank about her name. I\u2019m okay with that.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
At that time, I used to get up around 4am to go to work on the WM breakfast show; then the show ended at 9am but I had a deal whereby I\u2019d leave at 8:30am. That was so I could get over to a technical writing job outside the BBC, an office job that ran 9am-5pm. Then the evenings would either be working at BHBN Hospital Radio or at Focus Newspapers.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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Sudden memory: leaving that office job one day when it was belting down with rain. I ran out of there with a friend who mentioned it the next day, mentioned how overwhelming that rain had been. It took me half a minute to understand what she meant: to her the rain was last night, to me it was two shifts ago.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Oh! Another sudden memory from the same place. That technical writing thing was a very long-term job; you\u2019d have an urgent meeting there that would be about whether you could finish a particular job within the next eight months. At BBC local radio, we might have deadlines no longer than the time it takes to open a fader and take a mic live.<\/span><\/div>\n
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I\u2019m not saying one is better than the other, but I am saying that the perspective I got from having both changed how I saw each.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know now what I thought I\u2019d get from the BBC but this is one of the things I did and that shaped me. I\u2019m still very good at handling deadlines, I\u2019m still a little scared of running out of time. If I\u2019m due to phone you at 3pm, I\u2019ll phone at 3pm. If it\u2019s now 2:59pm, I know I can write an email in that minute and I will.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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When I\u2019m hanging on the phone listening to muzak and the tune comes to an end, I still sit up a bit, expecting the person I\u2019m calling to wait until the right point in the fade and come in with a back anno about the piece and then into what I want.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
Maybe the BBC gets into you, maybe you\u2019re already a bit BBC and that\u2019s why you\u2019re drawn there. Definitely radio gets into your soul.<\/span><\/div>\n
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If you don\u2019t like the BBC and especially if you\u2019ve not felt the tug toward it that so many of us do, let me give you an example of how it can matter to people. Once when I was actually working for BBC WM, when I\u2019d moved on from unpaid work experience, I wrote a letter to someone on BBC stationery. Just another letter, just another day. I suddenly recall noticing the tiniest of black dots on the page: I tried to brush it off before seeing that it was printed on. Right there beneath the BBC logo there was a little dot and it was there because you were supposed to begin all typed letters at that point on the page.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Grief. Typing. Typewriters.<\/span><\/div>\n
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I don\u2019t remember what the letter was now, but it happened to be to someone I knew a little and later I found that she\u2019d kept it. Treasured it. Obviously not because it came from me, I\u2019m pretty certain not because of the content, but because it was BBC. Even though I was the same as her, even as I would\u2019ve felt the same, it was a little Damascus moment because I saw something could be both important and trivial. That things I felt were daunting from one perspective were almost certainly not from another.<\/span><\/div>\n
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I\u2019ll bet you anything that this fed in to my decision to go freelance. That was a gigantic move for me, a huge mountain that I put off for a years. And yet the instant it was done, I was only surprised it had taken me so long. I said earlier that it was 1996 when I jumped out of salaried employment; I now don\u2019t actually remember that date, I remember 2006. By chance, someone asked me about it in 2006 and I realised it was my tenth anniversary. That\u2019s what sticks with me, the actual event seeming so simple and obvious and unmemorable next to the happenstance of spotting the anniversary.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
Whatever seems impossibly huge is, well, not. That doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s achievable. Definitely doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s easy. Might not mean it\u2019s worth it. Does not mean it isn\u2019t exquisite and delicious and vital.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
But it does mean you should bloody well get on with it.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
While there\u2019s time.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
Hang on, this hasn\u2019t half gone off the point. The straight, simple fact is that as of 6pm tonight, I ceased to be employed by BBC Magazines, a division of BBC Worldwide. This is because BBC Magazines is no longer part of Worldwide, is no longer anything. Radio Times magazine and website are now part of Immediate Media, or at least they will be as of tomorrow and so will I.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Today the RT website team went to Television Centre for one last lunch at the BBC Club.<\/p>\n

It was closed. <\/p>\n

Tomorrow I\u2019m still working for Radio Times. On Wednesday, I\u2019m still working for them. This Thursday I\u2019ll back to freelancing with big photography collation project for my book; Friday\u00a0 I have a pitch to make and a script to progress. Saturday and Sunday, more drama work. Then Monday back to Radio Times.<\/span><\/div>\n

<\/span><\/div>\n
There\u2019s a line – isn\u2019t there? – \u00a0that goes something like \u201ca difference that makes no difference is no difference\u201d.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
I can readily see the similarities between today and tomorrow, between the work I did and I will do, definitely see that I\u2019ll still be working precisely as closely with precise the same excellent Radio Times people. For at least a while, when I go to London I will go to the same desk in the same BBC building.\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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But it will be different.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
It\u2019s certainly 15 years since I started doing anything with the BBC, might even be twenty. I cannot tell you the number of times the Corporation has made me livid. Won\u2019t tell you the number of times I\u2019ve made a prat of myself within a BBC building.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
(Hint: it’s approximately the same number of times I\u2019ve done it outside.)<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
But I\u2019m happy I worked at the BBC, I think I did some good if ephemeral things there, I know the BBC is part of who I am. It\u2019s not all of me, but it\u2019s a part and it\u2019s a part that I\u2019m glad I have.<\/span>

<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s 18:00 on October 31, 2011 and as of this moment, I no longer work at all for the BBC. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4chyI-1R","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}