Wood Lane
London
W12 8QT
Today's generation of children have text messaging, emails, and writing on Facebook walls if they want to contact a favoured television personality or pop star, or enter a competition. When I was a kid, the only method was the much missed form of communication that was the written letter. To enter a competition we had to write our answers on a postcard and send it to the above address. To know if we had won the competition, we had to wait until Mike Read, (and later Phillip Schofield - Noel was before my time) randomly pulled an entry from a pile of postcards and read out the name of some other lucky bastard.
As a child living in different parts of the country, the centre of all that is show business seemed to happen in That London. I imagined that everyone famous lived there, and the very heart of all of this excitement seemed to be BBC Television Centre.
One of my earliest career ambitions was to present the flagship Saturday morning show on BBC1. People my age will remember that the ITV rival always seemed cooler, a bit more rock and roll, but we all remember the BBC1 programme. Swap Shop, Saturday Superstore, and Going Live are a lot more memorable than Number 73 or Motormouth for example. Even though Going Live was the big one that ran between September and spring, I would have settled for the summer gig on one of the now lesser remembered shows such as On The Waterfront, The 8.15 From Manchester, or UP2U, because I really wanted the job.
Alas, I never got the opportunity to even go through the hallowed gates of BBC TV Centre. Phillip Schofield apparently wrote to the BBC every week asking for work, which is exactly what I should have been doing as a child. I did write to certain heads of department, but never received a reply. The BBC haven't learnt how to reply to correspondence at all it would seem, given how they have ignored me all these years until the present day. I am starting to wonder if there's either someone who works at the BBC who either hated me at school, or an ex-girlfriend who doesn't want me working in the same building.
Anyway, tonight BBC4 had a night devoted to saying a sentimental goodbye to Television Centre. This seemed on the surface to be a crass move, after all there isn't a single person who thinks this is a good idea. Even the selected panel of TV presenters, comedians, and actors had the opinion that the BBC were on to a loser with this decision.
Looking at the amount of great television that has been produced in that great building, (not counting the terrible output from BBC3), and the memories of the likes of Noel Edmunds, Phillip Schofield, Terry Wogan and others, watching BBC4 tonight you got a genuine impression that a part of history was disappearing forever.
I was a little confused at why Madness were made to perform a gig outside in the pissing rain as a way of saying goodbye. There was a perfect opportunity to do one more edition of Top Of The Pops with a roster of ex-presenters, (the ones who aren't helping the police with their enquiries), as a musical finale to this great building.
Of course there is a darker side to the memory of TV Centre, as one of the most popular TV shows of my generation was a Saturday teatime show called Jim'll Fix It. It is alright to say that we used to watch it as children, and I dare say that everyone who watched it will have written in at least once. As we grew older, we of course came to regard Jimmy Savile as something of an oddity, perhaps without coming to that conclusion. Of course from the outside looking in as we were, we were free to speculate on Savile's bizarre lifestyle, whether we actually believed him to be a paedophile or not. I first alluded to his suspicious behaviour in a blog I wrote (about not being accepted for Jim'll Fix It strangely enough), before he died. The very sad epitaph to the BBC TV Centre story is the fact that we now know what went on after television programmes presented by Jimmy Savile.
Of all the letters that I sent to London W12 8QT, I am glad that my request to become a member of The A-Team for the day was turned down, seeing as the price to pay was a bumming in the dressing room.
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