Grantgoddard Stories

Alongside the revolution in television broadcasting, a similar battle of the airwaves is being waged on the radio. Will this forever wipe away the narrow choices offered...

It was the summer of rock'n'roll. Bill Haley. Buddy Holly. Chuck Berry. Fats Domino. The Big Bopper. Now, every time I hear one of their songs, I am reminded of a summer...

In 1930, while the new London headquarters of the BBC, Broadcasting House, were being built, a venture called the International Broadcasting Company [IBC] launched from...

Nazi soldiers were everywhere. Battalions of Nazis marching down wide boulevards. Nazis standing on convoys of tanks, waving flags. Row upon row of Nazis saluting speech...

It is a sad fact that, alongside other by-products of the affluent society in which we live such as the National Health Service and Unemployment Benefit, education has c...

Technological advances made during the last two to three decades have changed our world almost beyond recognition. Everyone now has the ability to be almost permanently...

I love history. I hated 'History'. My Empire-made History GCE text book chronicled world history from the era Neanderthal Man emerged from Milton Keynes up to Britain's...

"Bob Marley has died!" I exclaimed. Having switched on the car radio before starting the engine, one of Marley's songs was playing on John Peel's 'BBC Radio On...

"Why are you choosing a university so far away?" aunt Sheila demanded of me. "You should commute from home to Guildford so you can help your mum." I...

People don't just disappear, do they? I don't mean a clothes-on-beach John Stonehouse sort of disappearance. Nor a dead-nanny-on-floor Lord Lucan type of crime. Those we...

India? I might have loved the 1980 song of that name by 'The Psychedelic Furs' but had never entertained going there. Then an email arrived from John Catlett, who had hi...

"I am a paediatric doctor," said the young woman cleaning the toilet bowl in the bathroom of my apartment. "I work at the hospital during the day but I ca...

"Clackety-clack clackety-clack, from Kalamazoo to Timbuctoo, from Timbuctoo and back!" As a young reader, I learned these words by heart from a favourite child...

A colleague would arrive at my workplace some Mondays with evident cuts and bruises. A tragic case of domestic violence? No. He was a loyal fan of Millwall Football Club...

1976. With trepidation, I knocked on the door of the Durham student newspaper to volunteer, opened it and encountered a cacophony of shrill, loud voices in an office no...

Kapow! There was an explosion. Before I even grasped what had just happened, I could see I was covered with shards of glass. What was that noise? The train window I was...

"How is it that jobs just seem to fall into the laps of posh people?" my daughter asked the other day. A rhetorical question? A truism? Both? Those of us who w...

The Bomb Squad arrived in vans, ran into the Holborn office block and up its staircase to the eighth floor. We watched events unfold from the car park below, the assembl...

"Gimme your money!" he shouted, pointing a pistol at me. He had jumped out from behind some bushes. It was a dark winter evening. I was alone. Nobody was about...

"I am sorry, sir, but you are not allowed in the tea room," the head chai-wallah said to me politely but firmly. "It is OUR job to bring you cups of tea w...