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| BBC Cymru Wales' new HQ, Central Square, Cardiff |
I have just watched a programme on BBC Wales' new headquarters in Cardiff central square. Very impressive. All 'state of the art' technology, space and airiness, right in the heart of the city.
What a difference from more than 60 years ago when I started my very modest, short-lived career in broadcasting.
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| Princess Margaret opens Broadcasting House, Llandaff, 1967 |
It was a few years before broadcasting in Wales moved on from being almost a cottage industry with the opening of Broadcasting Hose in the fields at Llandaff on the site of the demolished Baynton House mansion.
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| The BBC site in Llandaff |
The original home was a rather elegant house in Park Place - I don't know if it had a title - a few hundred yards from city hall.
No parking, as far as I can remember, although there was probably plenty of space in the road in those days. It might as well have been called Radio House as that was its main purpose.
The earliest BBC Wales television studio I remember was in a converted church in Broadway about two miles away.
The Park Place building was always bustling, its small, cramped, studios producing the daily news bulletins and even variety shows.
I remember one radio - a variety show - from there featuring a man eating razor blades! You could hear him chomping.
Chain smoking Mai Jones, composer of the alternative Welsh anthem 'We'll keep a welcome in the hillside', was a key figure. International rugby players flitted in and out of the 'sports department'.
My visits were for the evening news bulletin or News Extra, broadcast on Sunday mornings.
In those days BBC Wales had a tiny reporting staff, three I think, for the whole of Wales.
I was one of the freelances they relied on for news reports and short general interest pieces.
My area covered the Rhymney Valley where I was the South Wales Argus district reporter.
My first radio interview was with the manager of the recently opened aircraft engine maintenance works in Caerphilly.
I was given a bulky recording machine, told how to switch it on and off and was on my way.
The first of my few outings as a television reporter included a prelude to the Aberfan disaster, the 'moving mountain of Blaina', when I stood, knee deep in black sludge interviewing a frightened housewife.
I remember my first radio studio report - about an afforestation project on a Bedwas coal tip.
I was quite proud of the intro - 'Did you know there's a desert in Monmouthshire?'.
I would sit alone in a studio, listening to the newsreader, waiting nervously for my cue. I concentrated on breathing steadily and getting the intro right. After the first sentence I was away.
There was no training, just one half-day listening to tapes of interviews that had gone embarrassingly wrong.
Laughable but worrying.
I was fortunate in having someone who gave me confidence, Tom Richards, BBC Wales news editor, a former news editor of the Western Mail.
On any Sunday morning I might get a call from him, 'Have you got a couple of minutes today, Bob?'. I would hurry down to Park Place.
The fee was a guinea a minute, two thirds if repeated on the BBC World Service.
When I gave up reporting he was kind enough to say he hoped the BBC would not be losing me.
Television reporting was more demanding. Not just me and my recorder but accompanied by a producer and cameraman. Interesting and I might have improved with practice.
When the news bulletin ended we would gather at a pub next to the studios in Broadway for an inquest, a debriefing.
I had a lot to learn.
Then it was all over. I was a local government public relations officer.
My first experience of robot broadcasting - an interview 'down the line' from a blank studio in London from Cardiff - was in 1971 when I was appointed the city council's public relations officer and was asked how I would 'sell Cardiff'.
It was not the end of my links with the news.
Over the yeas I was interviewed many times, in studios and in the streets I began to enjoy it.
I never thought that many years later I would be on Good Morning Britain talking about coronavirus.
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