Eclectica

Mostly cogent, most of the time.

Auntie

State of play: busy beyond words. Here’s why.

Ten years ago I landed a day job working for bbc.co.uk. I was so chuffed. I had got myself in a terrible pickle – I was living in Ipswich and had walked out of my job because my line manager was, to put it mildly, nuts. Not to mention their only big client was British American Tobacco, and I refused to work on that account, leaving me little to do.

I was stuck in a dreadful city, in a nasty house, with no job. The BBC came to my rescue.

I was hired as a website assistant, initially to work on the site for Walking With Dinosaurs. It was just me and a producer and there were millions of people viewing the stuff we put live each day. It was a buzz.

I sometimes helped out on the nascent Doctor Who website, at that point part of the now defunct stable of BBC cult sites, and I then transferred to the Science team and worked on Tomorrow’s World. Good times.

After six months it all came to an abrupt end due to a bizarre HR snafu that I won’t bore you with. But one good thing came out of it.

The BBC was an internal market. This meant one dept of the BBC could hire another to do work for it. So the Science team was hired by BBC Worldwide to provide a support site for a new weekly show called Click Online. I was the team member given the job of setting it up. And when I left the BBC’s employ, I was asked by BBC Worldwide to keep doing the site as a freelancer – after all, I knew the ropes and was cheaper than the Science Team deal.

So every single Thursday night from that day to this, I’ve sat at home putting up a website for that week’s edition of Click Online, latterly rebranded as Click.

The site changed enormously over that time, evolving as the ‘net did. From flat HTML, to ASP-driven includes, to a full CMS. In the early days I had to go to TVC each Thursday to collect a VHS tape that I would take home and encode to provide the site’s video. Then I had the tape couriered to my home each week, and more recently I got the file by email as a digital download.

It was a pleasure to do it. The team who produce the show are dedicated, clever people and the show is better now than it ever has been.

Six years ago I was given another excellent BBC World show to produce a site for – Talking Movies. This became Click’s stable mate. And indirectly both jobs led to five years of work for Top of The Pops, which was the most fun I’ve ever had in a job.

These jobs brought in lots of money and did my CV no end of good. And they were fun. For a couple of years I was even able to quit 9-5 and spend my time as a freelance writer, cutting my teeth on magazine features, film reviews and episode guide books, all subsidised by the BBC work.

Then, when I got married and had kids, the BBC jobs continued alongside my 9-5 jobs, helping us through the single-wage earner years.

But now, ten years after that initial stroke of luck, the sites I maintained have been mothballed, partly for cost reasons and partly due to changes in the BBC.

It’s a huge financial blow at exactly the wrong time, but more importantly, I’ll soon finish working for the BBC, who I’ve worked for in one form or another for ten years. It’s been a huge part of my professional life and the way I defined my work-self – I was a BBC guy, slightly outside the system, but nonetheless a steadfast employee of good standing for our national public service broadcaster. I felt good about that.

Nothing can recapture the thrill of going to work in the iconic doughnut of Television Centre, sharing lifts with all sorts of big names, walking through the news centre while they were broadcasting News 24, eating my lunch in the Blue Peter garden, standing in the wings ready to walk on set during a live Tomorrow’s World broadcast if a dummy site I’d set up for Peter Snow failed to work, hanging out in the Star Bar after TOTP recordings, interviewing Adam Duritz and, just weeks before his death, the very gentlemanly Robert Palmer. Not to mention the excitement of seeing what Click and Tom Brook had come up with that week.

I’ll miss it.

And now I have to fill the financial gap. This is hard because, while there are no end of people willing to pay me to write – which is lovely and flattering – it pays much less money for much more work than the BBC did. So I’m working way more than ever before, and earning way less.

And that’s the credit crunch all over, innit.

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