Tag / Random

by Gareth

Blogging for twenty years!

As I was sorting out last night’s update, I realised that this blog has hit a bit of a milestone!

I first started posting on this back in March 2002, exactly TWENTY YEARS AGO!! The first couple of posts – about needing to move out of my rental house, and also going to see a new band called ‘thebandwithnoname'(!) – were actually written on the 13th March, so I’m a week late in commemorating it, but it’s weird to think I’ve been posting on here for so long!

When I first started it, I was doing it using ‘Blogger’ – not sure if that’s still really going anymore… I converted it into a WordPress blog when Google stopped letting Blogger host it on your own site, and I think it’s been through a couple of different looks before settling on how it appears now.

My updates have often been somewhat sporadic, but I’ve always posted at least a few times each year, so it probably is a reasonably good record of my life for the past two decades. I’m sure looking back on some of the stuff I’ve written in the past would make me cringe, especially with the way a lot of things have turned out, but I’m of the mind that it’s what I was thinking at the time, so it stays there!

Something I have noticed more recently is that it seems like I’m off out all time on nights out, which certainly isn’t the case! It’s just that so little else has been happening that when I do go out, I usually post about it, so it makes it seem more of a thing than it actually is! I probably need to start blogging about more mundane stuff as well!!

Anyway, I’d be very surprised if this blog goes on for another 20 years, but I’ll keep posting for as long as I’m able to!

by Gareth

35 years ago!

One of the things I’ve been doing over the last couple of years is scanning loads of old photos and other bits from years gone by! And one of the those things has been old issues of the school magazine I used to produce with Tom, back when we were at secondary school.

One time we ran a competition to take one of the readers to visit BBC Pebble Mill in Birmingham (in all honesty, the main reason was because we wanted to go there ourselves!) One of our team’s dad worked there, so we managed to get her to ask him to take us all, which we did on the May bank holiday in 1986 when there were a lot less people there. Sadly, the studios were demolished in 2005, but back in the 80s they were producing quite a lot of TV – so to someone like me who has always been obsessed with TV and production stuff, it was a dream come true!

The article in the July 1986 issue of Mercian Madness.

What is quite scary though is that we visited the studios exactly 35 years ago today!

I do have some memories of going there, but after all this time it is a bit hazy. I remember thinking how small the ‘Pebble Mill at One’ studio was, and learning that bits of it were pre-recorded to make it seem like they had more space, and allow them to move stuff around during a show, and also we did try and visit the radio area, but because it was a Bank Holiday Monday, there was no-one working there so it was all locked up. Interestingly, ‘Pebble Mill at One’ was cancelled between us visiting and the article being published, hence the RIP reference!

Also, for some bizarre reason, we wanted to brand Jo’s dad’s car with the ‘Mercian Madness’ logo – but using poster paint! Unsurprisingly, this never actually happened! And I’m quite sad that we didn’t take many photos at all – we did have a camera with us because there’s the photo that’s in the magazine, but for some reason, we didn’t really take any others (or none that came out anyway!)

Here’s the article that appeared in the July 1986 issue of the magazine (remember we were all only 13 when we wrote this!):

In the last issue, we ran a competition, and the winner was to go with us to the B.B.C. Read on to find out what happened when we visited…

PEBBLE MILL

AN EXCLUSIVE REPORT BY: BEN COOKE, JO CRAWLEY, TOM GREEN & GARETH HARRISON

MONDAY 5th MAY 1986
Josephine Crawley Reporting:

4.00pm
The motley crew, sorry, the Mercian Madness reporting team arrived. With them was the winner of the competition, Kevin Lee. First year Kevin was very excited about the trip. “It’s the first time I’ve won anything!” he said.

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