Presenter / Producer / Director / Journalist
Ever since Tiswas ended in 1982 I had hoped to somehow see it again but as time went on I came around to the idea that I probably wouldn’t. TV programmes have their time and then they pass into history, that’s just the way it works. And apart from a brief reunion skit during the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]