Farewell BBC, and thanks for the TV Centre memories

I couldn’t have had a better send off from the BBC last week, when I left the corporation I had joined in 1981. I’ve just about recovered from a party featuring people I’ve worked with from the 1980s to the present day, a quite brilliant video starring, among others, Brentford’s manager Thomas Frank and Bake Off’s Prue Leith, and some very generous leaving presents.

My leaving present

Among them was a souvenir of a very special place in my life. It was a 1960 architectural drawing of the floor plan for BBC Television Centre at White City. From 1983 to 2013, with a few years away in Cardiff, this extraordinarily exciting and glamorous but increasingly rundown building was my home.

It was a place where you would run into actors playing Cybermen from Doctor Who in the canteen, where you could pop into an observation gallery and see a play being rehearsed or Blue Peter going out live. Its biggest studio TC1 was home to General Election programmes, Children in Need and Strictly.

“Back to the Fun Factory,” the crews would say when we wrapped up a shoot and returned to process our story at the Spur, the wing occupied by TV News and later the radio newsroom too, though its journalists still yearned for their old home Broadcasting House.

Eventually, we all moved to New Broadcasting House, a modern, more efficient if cramped home for all of BBC News. I’m not one of those who think abandoning TV Centre was a mistake. It was riddled with asbestos and cost its new owners a fortune to restore, and NBH as it became known proved a far better place to meet contacts from the tech world.

But I was sentimental enough about it to make this video of my last visit to the infamous “Killing Station” tea bar via the newsroom.

And I had more reason than most to be sad about our departure from TV Centre because it was woven into my family history. I came there first aged 5 and continued to visit throughout my childhood. My mother was a director’s assistant in the TV Drama department and quite often had to work Sundays typing scripts so, as a single parent, she had little alternative but to bring me with her.

I didn’t mind - I was left to roam the circular corridors of the doughnut on my own, peering into observation galleries to see if anything was going on, and if I was good there was the promise of chips in the canteen at lunchtime .

My mother Sylvia Rich also had great affection for a building she had watched going up in the late 1950s, as she walked to work in her office at the Lime Grove studios in Shepherd’s Bush. In a letter to her sister enclosing a cutting from the BBC staff newspaper Ariel about the new buildings she described that walk:

“It's pleasant to walk across to the present one with the park on the left and the “Quatermass”* building site on the right, with gorgeous flowers and little streams in the park; and steaming black tar and bare-topped workmen steaming by it on the right, and to watch the building going up to what it will be in 1960 - we hope- it is progressing quite fast, and fascinating to watch it grow.”

*Quatermass and the Pit was a very successful 1950s sci-fi drama and I suppose she thought the site looked like a set from the play.

Amazingly, TV Centre was finished on time and opened in 1960. In a rather beautiful coffee table book about the building my mother appears sitting at a table in the canteen - or rather restaurant as she insisted on calling it - chatting to friends from the drama department. She is in the bottom left of the photo, with her arm on her chin.

The restaurant block, BBC TV Centre,1960

When she died in 1996, my mother left behind thousands of letters and documents, many giving fascinating glimpses of a career in the BBC which started in the Radio Talks department in Bristol in 1941 and ended with a retirement tea party - rather more sober than mine - in the Bridge Lounge at TV Centre in 1974.

Having packed those letters away 25 years ago, I’ve been going through them again lately, wondering whether there might be a book in them. That could be just one of the projects keeping me busy in my post-BBC life. “More as we have it”, as they say in the world of TV news.

Meanwhile, if you happen to be in Southwold on Friday November 5th at 11.15 am I shall be talking about my current book Always On at the Ways With Words literary festival.

Always On is available as a hardback, ebook or audiobook here.

And if you want to support your local independent book shop you can order it at Hive.