London Belongs To Me

I was reading this book recently - London Belongs To Me by Norman Collins. It's a great book. A sprawling widescreen picture of London on the eve of the Second World War. It's Dickensian is scope and ambition, without - quite - the memorable characters the Victorian master managed. Or - quite - the corkscrew plot twists. Nevertheless, it's a fine novel. Full of sardonic wit, and written with pace and verve. A rich portrait of a conservative, working class England facing hardship and uncertainty with dignity, humour and a few glasses of light-and-bitter.

I'm half-way through the book before I realise that Collins wrote this 1000 page epic while heading up the post-war BBC TV service. And I'm shocked. of course I am because it is unimaginable now, to think that a bona fide novelist would be let loose on running television. It's unimaginable that any creative person would actually get their hands on the means of TV production.

Ok, the television service in the 1940s was tiny compared to now, but the BBc was the only game in town and under Collins' leadership the number of licenses climbed to over a million from a base of under 100,000. So He oversaw a ten-fold expansion of what was even then becoming a key industry, and he did it while writing big, ambitious novels and also - it turns out - writing 100 episodes of Dick Barton Special agent which he also created. He left the Beeb in the mid-1950s to become part of the team that set up ITV. An important player.

This is all the more interesting when you think that Collins went from being a humble assistant on BBc talks at the outbreak of the war to running the revamped television service in 1947. Six years to go from the mailroom to the boardroom basically. And, as I may have mentioned, all the time writing popular novels.

It is this tangling of the creative and the administrative which is so alien to anyone who has come near television recently. These days there are many, many comfortable layers of fat between the writers and the producers. And many, many more layers of fat between the producers and the guys who write the cheques and sit at desks in offices that have things like 'vision' and 'strategy' on the doors.

And tomorrow I'll write about my first daze in the job... And introduce some of the characters