Presenter / Producer / Director / Journalist
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 […]
Who doesn’t love Crossroads? Don’t answer that! Seriously, I used to love Crossroads when I was growing up. I was born and raised during the Mid-1970s in “ATV Land” (West Midlands) and Crossroads was our very own Soap Opera. Granada had Coronation Street in Manchester. Yorkshire had Emmerdale Farm in Leeds. ATV had Crossroads in […]
During August I was informed by the new manager of Made in Birmingham that I was no longer required to work on the Birmingham News Weekend Magazine. Things change all the time, so you simply take it in your stride. I had effectively been producing the programme single-handedly for the best part of 2 years […]
And so in July 2017 Made In Birmingham moved… to Birmingham. It made sense. The only reason that Big Centre and then Made in Birmingham hadn’t been in Birmingham up until that point was down to cost. The original station which had won the West Midlands local television license had based itself in Birmingham and […]
During the Summer of 2016, Big Centre had been doing nicely. It had passed through the difficult times and emerged in really quite a good state. This made it attractive to other would-be owners. So it was that in October 2016, Big Centre was officially merged with Made Television, and was to be rebranded as […]
In April 2016 Big Centre TV re-branded to simply Big Centre. A subtle difference, but it was what everybody called it anyway, and the rebrand said goodbye to the colour swirl which had divided opinion in the early days of the station, and welcomed the stylized ‘BC’ icon. The company also now officially became Big […]
The Midland was the name of Big Centre’s original daily news programme. The main anchor was Bob Hall with a core team of Lois Swinnerton, Roshni Patel and Monika Plaha also presenting on a regular basis. In November 2015 Big Centre went through a rough patch. A number of people were made redundant and various […]
During the Summer of 2015, I was presenting Crossroads Check-in at the weekend on Big Centre. I was also helping Chanelle Shea-Calvin with Postbag which was a nice little half hour programme which highlighted stuff on the station, and allowed people to get in touch with their thoughts. Between us, we had the idea that we […]
Now this is where it gets a little anorakky, so pull up your hood, do up the zip and brace yourself… On the telly, the bits between the programmes where you hear the announcer speaking and saying things like “This is BBC1, now it’s time to see who’s the most depressed, in tonight’s seventeenth edition […]
Postbag was the first programme that I actually presented on Big Centre, on a single occasion in April 2015. The programme initially had a number of presenters and did exactly what it said on the tin – it was a way for viewers to get in touch with the station, find out more, air their […]