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.

Teeline and typwriters

It's 30 years since a nervous bunch of school-leavers and graduates gathered in a Portakabin in Plymouth to be taught how to be journalists. Here I am, on the left, with Julie Skentelbery.

This Saturday most of us return to the city - my ancestral home - for a reunion. We will start our sojourn in the Holiday Inn where John Pilger was memorably short changed.

Back in '79, I was a fresh faced school-leaver who saw an ad for a trainee reporter in local paper The South Devon Times. I'd always wanted to be a journalist but as my deputy head mistress memorably put it, "Gail is too shy to get her foot in the door".

I somehow managed to get my foot in the door by mentioning at the interview how I read everything, including sauce bottle labels. That struck a chord and I was hired.

The course was run by Mirror Group Newspapers as a training ground for their string of regional weeklies (paid for at that time) and their nationals the Mirror, People and Sunday Mirror.

The first six weeks were spent in the Portakabin gaping at the graduates when they came up with words like "juxtaposition". We had to pass exams in numerous disciplines including Teeline shorthand, which was taught by the redoubtable Ella Furze. I still remember the outlines for "accident blackspot" and "to the best of my ability".

We were being paid a pittance at this time but nonetheless deductions were taken for the Olympia Monica typewriters we had to buy. No computers in those days.

We were occasionally marched off to courts and morgues to get a taste of life as reporters. We made hideous errors in those first reports. It is fortunate for habitual criminal Ernest Foxy Fowler that these were never published.

Having a press pass meant we could sneak into all sorts of events and situations, and Margery and I drove to St Austell where she was interviewing The Stranglers. We were very excited and all dressed up, but they kept us waiting for ages and were then bored and sarcastic. How rude!

After the six weeks were up we were sent out to the outposts of Devon and Cornwall to staff regional papers. I worked on the South Devon Times. Sometimes it was a struggle to come up with the big stories and then we'd have to lead with "Lettuce soon a Luxury" or "Asda to open on Monday".