Grantgoddard Stories

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...

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 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...

I like to be helpful. If I have a skill, I will offer it to help solve a problem at work. I thought that was what working for an organisation was all about. The bringing...

What's in a name? Well, first impressions are lasting impressions (as The Impressions' song goes). When our names are usually the first thing that strangers know about u...

A posh voice opens doors. Not literally, unless you are royalty, but figuratively. Opportunities seem to fall out of the sky for those who speak in a recognised way that...

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...

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...

It has always been difficult for me to understand how white South Africans who built successful careers under the country's apartheid regime can live with the guilt and...

He was dead. He was definitely dead, his face turned blue from the extreme cold. His body was lying face-up on the street, at the top of a staircase that led from the su...

"Did you enjoy your day off yesterday?" a member of my team asked me one morning. "Yesterday?" I enquired, slightly confused. "Yes," he con...

"It's for you," shouted the man behind the counter, holding the telephone handset at arm's length toward me after having answered the call. "For me?"...

"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...

I recognised the tune. Not only did I recognise it, I knew all the words and would have happily rapped along with it. But not here. Definitely not here during rush hour...

"There's a bomb!" someone shouted. "There's a bomb!" I had just collected 'NME' from the newsagent that reserved it for me each week and had been la...

My childhood playground was a warzone. While my classmates were likely splashing around in inflatable pools in the safety of their back gardens, I would be on my bike fo...

"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...

I pull back the bedroom curtains and, from my window, see a huge elephant ambling along the promenade above the Mekong River. I know it must be 6:30 a.m. Every day at th...

When someone leaves their job, what are the chances that the 'best man' to replace them will be: the groom at whose wedding their predecessor was Best Man, AND * a con...

"It's just like the multinational pharmaceutical businesses deliberately designing toothpaste tubes so that you cannot squeeze out the last bit of toothpaste,"...