Presenter / Producer / Director / Journalist
At school I was once part of a project in which we had to divide into groups and ‘report’ on a chosen event. I can’t remember whether it was an actual historical event or some kind of pivotal ‘happening’ within one a book we were reading in our English Literature class. Whatever it was, our […]
On 2nd August 2010, the Chairman of Wolverhampton Community Radio Training (WCRT, the company which ran WCRfm) Pete Whitehouse presented an edition of “Inside Tracks” and the subject of that edition was me! The programme follows a very similar style to the BBC’s long running “Desert Island Discs”, though the WCR version exclusively features local […]
UpAndHappy! is the name under which I make my TV and Radio programmes these days – as “UpAndHappy! Productions”. But, it actually started life as the name of my radio show way back in the last century. In 1999 I had been with Beacon Radio for 10 years, and I was at that point working […]
On June 12th 2010 I married my sweetheart Nikki at Christchurch in Burntwood. We’d known each other since 1993, when she was a guest on the ‘NightSchool‘ programme on Beacon Radio which I’d helped to produce. We’d kept in touch, and finally started seeing each other in 2001. We got engaged that Autumn, and finally […]
After the excitement of launching Big Centre TV with a first night party at a bar called “The Bureau” on Colmore Row in the centre of Birmingham, we settled down to the day-to-day business of making and broadcasting programmes The station was originally set up to be the local television channel for Birmingham, Solihull and […]
When I was little, in the late 1970s, Saturday afternoons were really special because of Worzel Gummidge, the Southern Television adaptation of Barbara Euphan Todd’s ‘Scarecrow of Scatterbrook’ stories. This TV version starred Jon Pertwee, Una Stubbs and Geoffrey Bayldon and for many is considered the definitive version of the stories, though Mackenzie Crook’s 2019-2020 […]
In November 2006 I received an email from a gentleman called Mike Smith. At first I wasn’t sure who he was, but he explained that he was Sally James‘s husband and as a Tiswas fan I certainly knew who she was! Mike is an almost legendary name in the music and media business, and he […]
Cliché alert! In broadcasting you know that things don’t always go to plan. You’ve watched “It’ll Be Alright On The Night” or “Auntie’s Bloomers” (blimey, that’s going back a bit) and so on… Yeah, so did I, but I never thought I’d be an outtake myself… From the Summer of 2015 I had joined Chanelle […]
Elsewhere on this website there are various “Box Sets” of a number of the Television programmes I made when I was working at Big Centre Television and Made in Birmingham. I didn’t really intend them as a history of the place, but I later realised as I was looking back across them that they do […]
Now here’s a real blast from my past. When I was at Beacon Radio (1989-2000) I got involved in one of the evening magazine programmes for teenagers called “NightSchool”. It was described by the presenter Chuck Street (Andy Hitchman) as ‘the Midlands top-rating teenage radio show’, and was broadcast every weeknight from September 1992 – […]