Paul Hayes
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...
Paul Hayes
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...
Paul Hayes
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...
Paul Hayes
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...
Paul Hayes
This month marks the 30th 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,...
Paul Hayes
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...
Paul Hayes
A promotional poster for my Flight into Danger documentary, created for me by Andrew-Mark ThompsonI 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...
Paul Hayes
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...
Paul Hayes
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...
Paul Hayes
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...
Paul Hayes
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 75th anniversary of that broadcast. Today, I have written a piece for the BBC website all about something the...
Paul Hayes
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...
Paul Hayes
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,...
Paul Hayes
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...
Paul Hayes
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...
Paul Hayes
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 60th anniversary and all the various bits and...
Paul Hayes
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...
Paul Hayes
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...