A great day in broadcasting history

Viewers of BBC Breakfast News today will be aware that today marks the 30th anniversary of the birth of breakfast TV in the UK.

That's not the only milestone. This day, 30 years ago, two new local radio stations were born, BBC Radios Devon and Cornwall.  I was hired by Radio Devon as a fresh faced reporter called Gail Tyler, and I was proud to be there on launch day.

When the station launched it came from Broadcasting House in Plymouth. The studio complex in Exeter was still being built, and two Portakabins were being used on the building site.

We all came together a few months before the launch and spent six wonderful weeks in London training. I was the youngest, and the only one with absolutely no radio experience. So there were quite a few memorable faux pas along the way. One of our training projects was to "find" someone interesting and interview them.  My great friend Julie Skentelbery, who was also in London with Radio Cornwall, facilitated a meeting for me with one of her former colleagues on the Sunday Independent:  Alastair Campbell.

He had played the bagpipes as a busker in the underground.

We recorded the interview at Marble Arch underground. Alastair didn't have his bagpipes. I was not in full control of my equipment (a Uher tape recorder) so used the Auto setting, and the sound quality was terrible.  Worse still, I had about 20 minutes of Alastair rambling on and I didn't know how to edit. Fortunately Julie seized the razor blade and saved the day.

The fledgling radio station played host to the Director General, Alasdair Milne, who sadly died last week.  Mr Milne is seated on the right, looking as if he might go for a spin on the turntable. I am "at the controls" in the Plymouth studio. My colleagues in the picture were Mary Saunders; the late and great Reg Henderson Brookes (second right), and the wonderful David Bassett, whose booming voice would announce "Bon bons for all, this day!"  He always came into the office with a great flourish, and if we didn't pay enough attention he would go out and come back in again.

Alasdair Milne was mentioned on the very popular Treasure Hunt quiz show presented by Douglas Mounce.  The question was: "who wrote Winnie the Pooh?" and quick as a flash the listener replied "Alasdair Milne."

Other memories:

• My first live news bulletin, which went out on a Sunday and was four minutes long.  Mike Gibbons, our Programme Organiser, was on the beach in Weston-super-Mare and managed to pick up the transmission. He called me to say it was very good, but I'd forgotten to say who I was.
• As a more experienced newsreader, I became adept at editing copy as I read it. During a bulletin Allan Urry rushed in with "news just in," and as he and David Willis were great jokers, I didn't trust the copy and ended up saying "The dead man....is not thought to be seriously hurt."  I came out of the studio with great poise, hoping I had got away with it, but then picked up the phone to a listener who said "tell your newsreader she made my day"  (I had denied being the newsreader).
•  Evelyn the cleaner had her favourites and fortunately I was one of them; one of my colleagues had to suffer the indignity of Evelyn Hoovering outside the news cubicle as she read the 10 minute bulletin.

Fletcherising and fossils

The Internet has been an absolute gift to me as an inveterate searcher of trivia and facts. I'm able to satisfy any cravings for knowledge at the click of a mouse, and with my trusty smartphone, can even do it in the middle of the night as has been known.

Last night, for some reason, I remembered an elderly man I once interviewed when I was working as a gauche young reporter at BBC Radio Devon. His name was Edwin Beer and he was over 100. His great age, and the secrets of longevity, was the reason for the interview.

He was the first to use the disabled lift at our newish Exeter headquarters and was a fantastic raconteur. He told me that the secret to his longevity - and he was the second oldest man in Britain when he died at age 107 in 1986 - was Fletcherising.

This is the practice of chewing your food 32 times before swallowing, made popular in the early 1930s by Horace Fletcher.

Well, having remembered Edwin Beer, I began feverishly searching the web to see what I could learn about him. To start with I wasan't doing very well. There was a famous urologist called Edwin Beer and a famous sculptor called Edwin Beer Fishley. But recalling that he had told me he was involved with the invention of the fake silk, rayon, I broadened my search and found a reference to him at the Devon county council website, where it named a book he wrote in 1968, The Beginning of Rayon: Corrigenda and Supplement.

Knowing now that his full name was Edwin John Beer, formerly of Paignton, I discovered an article from an issue of Geology Today in 1989 which described the Edwin Beer Collection.

Leicester University had become the lucky recipient of a large collection of geological specimens. The collection was formed over a long period by Edwin Beer (1879 - 1986) and was donated by his widow Phoebe. "Beer had led an active and eventful life. He was by profession a chemist and was a pioneer in perfecting the process for making artificial fibres."

Searching Leicester University turned up no additional clues. My search on Edwin Beer's remarkable life seems to have ended for the time, with no photographs gleaned. Stay tooned for the next instalment.

10 MINUTES LATER
I've just bought the book for £6.50 on ebay!

Opera on The Green

You could have knocked me down with a feather when I found a whole page in the Sunday Times Culture magazine about opera singer William Shimell.

When I was at BBC Radio Devon, I had to interview him. I got him to sing for me and his voice was so powerful I had to stand outside the room to stop the needle on my Uher going into the red.

He was very good looking and charming, and lived fairly locally in Kingsand. Kingsand is just "across the water" from Plymouth in Cornwall and to my mind, one of the last undiscovered gems. A lot of the houses in the windy streets are second homes, which is sad but inevitable, but it's a pretty little place and untarnished with the usual "emmet" spoils of Cornish tourism.

My mum Giz and I usually go to Kingsand and its sister village Cawsand once a year. We always wander up to The Green, where passers-by can occasionally thrill to Bill giving an impromptu recital. We're not opera buffs by any means. We went to see Carmen in the Theatre Royal and Giz fell asleep and had her programme snatched from her lap. Never again!

After my interview, I looked out for mentions of Bill in every opera review, but never found any. The Sunday Times article explains why. He is very famous internationally and has been one of the defining dons of his age, performing Don Giovanni and Don Alfonso many times. But for some reason he was not asked to do the roles in his home country.

Now he is appearing in a film, aged 57, for the first time ever. "Certified Copy" with Oscar winner Juliette Binoche and William Shimell is out on Friday. It sounds intriguing, and nothing to do with opera. Shimell doesn't get to sing one note.  Here's a review from the Cannes film festival from The Guardian. I will look out for this with interest.

Stroppy Fern shoots herself in foot

I am not a fan of TV presenter Fern Britton for reasons I will explain below. She was all over the papers yesterday having walked out of her "This Morning" job because she discovered she gets paid a lot less than Philip Schofield.

I imagine she thought that if she threw a strop the powers-that-be would offer her more money and beg her to come back. I fear she is sadly deluded and may have shot herself in the foot. She will indeed be "spending more time with the family" and hopefully not raiding the biscuit tin now that her gastric band has enabled her to lose all that blubber.

There are very few TV presenters over the age of 40 - Fern was an exception. Fiona Bruce, a very presentable 42, got shuffled off to Antiques Roadshow and how often do we see Carol Smillie, Carol Vorderman, Anthea Turner, Angela Rippon, Selina Scott etc etc these days? Sometimes they crop up in those ghastly daytime shows that no-one watches but prime time? Not when the TV moguls consider a woman's prime is her 20s or 30s. I would suggest they look at some current trends - the success of Mamma Mia for example - and at the powerful women in cinema and music who are reversing some of the stereotypes: Julia Roberts (42), Halle Berry, Madonna (50), Tina Turner (late 60s).....

Anyway, back to Fern and the reason why I find her fake and false with her faux sympathy and smiles.

A few years ago she was a presenter on BBC Spotlight in Plymouth and I was a gauche reporter on BBC Radio Devon.

The TV people were somewhat sniffy about sharing "Broadcasting House" in Plymouth with the radio goons but we called them the dead legs because they had the easiest job ever: tearing off the stories we had filed through ringing the police, going through council minutes and so on.

Anyway, on Children in Need Night a swimming pool had been provided in the garden and the idea was to film some silly stunts and show them live on TV.

I borrowed a Plymouth Argyle strip and gathered pledges to be thrown into the pool. I went into the studio to tell lovely Alan Dedicoat and Fern all about it - they were doing a Children in Need radio special.

The interview went OK and I left the studio. I then heard Fern tell the nation (well, one or two people in Barnstaple) that "she had never seen such big thighs."

My dip in the pool that very cold night was blighted by the thought of my gargantuum thighs and Fern's cruel comment.

Well over the years she got very fat and I was pretty smug on the thighs subject - but now of course she is off loading the weight. But she's out of work now and the spectre of Cash in the Attic or a return to Ready Steady Cook looms. Not so good, eh Fern?