BBC Wales’ move back into the heart of Cardiff after almost sixty years will see the creation of massive new housing development. The sprawling site on both sides of Llantrusant Road, with its expansive car park, is now a huge pile of rubble.
I was working in London when the grand new BBC headquarters was opened on St David’s Day 1966; by Princess Margaret. After returning to Cardiff in 1971 I came to know it well, working there for years as a one-man company, Skinner Public Relations.
I worked with Iwan Thomas the chief public relations officer and veteran television and radio presenter. Most of my work was with the Welsh Symphony Orchestra.
We designed and produced colourful, expensive concert programmes for their concerts in Wales and overseas tours and the Cardiff Singer of the World competition.
My most enjoyable experience was touring in Europe, North America and Japan.
When my broadcasting career started almost seventy years ago it was from the an impressive house in Park Place opposite the National Musuem.
I was a ‘stringer’, a freelance, complementing the staff reporters, just three of them for the whole of Wales. Apart from interviews I did regular short pieces, usually three minutes, at a .guinea - one pound one shilling - for the weekly Sunday morning news programmes News Extra, often following a plea by the news editor that morning if I had ‘a short piece’.
When television came in the news studio was a former church in Broadway, about a mile from the radio studios. That all changed with opening of the Llandaff headquarters and a new era in broadcasting.
Today, appropriately I think, BBC Wales is is where it should be, in the heart of the capital city.
l hope to go there one day.
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