In her splendid autobiography "The Kindness of Strangers", Kate Adie writes with some
asperity that she is continually being challenged
with the claim that she must have
spent her childhood standing in front of a mirror,
holding a hairdryer and saying "this is Kate
Adie reporting for the nine o'clock news". She
hotly denies this. Well, that is exactly what I
did! Not with a hairdryer, you understand –
in our days, hairdryers were called towels –
but I did have a tennis racquet, held to my
shoulder and it did look quite like a 35mm film
camera!

Later, at school, when asked by a
careers adviser about my future, I remember
saying that I would like to go into broadcasting.
A look of horror crossed the man's face. It
was a very conservative school, subdued
cloisters and all that, and it was if I had suggested
that I wanted to emulate Jack the Ripper
or become an anarchist.

Some years on, whilst serving in the Royal Air
Force, I read a notice stating that volunteers
were needed for a special assignment in Germany.
Abroad! Germany had a certain frisson
about it: after all, it was only ten years
since the end of the war and my knowledge of
Germany came from the cinema newsreel pictures
of devastated cities and bewildered citizens.
Now, I had been told, of course, never,
never to volunteer for anything. But, caution
to the winds, I did volunteer and became one
of a small team whose day consisted of carefully
dropping needles on to 78rpm gramophone
records for forces radio. Hard work,
true, but infinitely better than stamping around
a parade ground or painting black coal white –
which did happen. I had accidentally got into
broadcasting.

Eventually, I got kicked out of the Air Force
(or demobilised as they preferred to describe
it) and I had to look around for work. By absolute
chance, my demob day was the very
day that Anglia TV was to begin broadcasting
from its Norwich studios and I applied for the
post of Librarian. I don't think there was
much competition: my job interview lasted
about ten minutes and the personnel officer
("human resources" had not been invented
then) took me to the window of his office,
pointed out the estate agents opposite and
said they had some very nice flats to let and I
had better reserve one straight away. "Had I
got the job?" I asked.

"Of course, dear chap. What a question! Try
to be here as near to nine o'clock tomorrow as
you can make it." What a strange interview!
Was it even an interview? What rôle in this
new company was I to play? "Don't worry,
dear boy, you'll soon get the hang of it." And I
was shown to the door.

It transpired that I was to be the Film Librarian.
There was no video tape in those days,
that would arrive a couple of years later. My
task was to catalogue all the film used in programmes
for possible reference and re-use.
No computers, of course, just large yellow
cards that had to bent into a typewriter.
Fine, I could do that easily. "By the way, if
you could possibly fit it in, could you also look
after the still photographs and graphics?"
Yes, I didn't see why not. "Oh, then there are
the reference books." Really? "And could
you just keep an eye on the gramophone
records?" Ah, back to the records (still mostly
78's but the new fangled LP's had arrived
and the biggest problem was to retrieve them
after transmission otherwise they had a habit
of just disappearing off the premises....Within a
few years, we had a team of half a dozen staff
mounting a shift system seven days a week
from 6 a.m. to midnight. In addition to all this,
we also had to service the programmes with
background material, information and archive
footage. And I asked myself, how did I get
here?

Stuck away in deepest Norfolk, we were not
bothered much by the strict trade union practices
that so beset the London stations. In
fact, I doubt if the Union knew we were there.
We were north of Watford, you know. This led
to a very relaxed atmosphere wherein staff
helped each other and there was little in the way of restrictive practice. I was occasionally
allowed to make on air announcements –
usually in the early hours of Sunday morning
when mistakes would go unnoticed. After all,
most of our viewers were in agriculture and
went to bed very early in order to be awake
and alert before dawn – which was more than
my team was! I got a taste for the microphone
and was determined to put it to good
use.....

Next gripping instalment: "Very nice son,
what else can you do...?"