When Paul Turner went for his interview at the BBC’s Community Programmes Unit in London in 1975, he thought he was in with a chance. Although he had been turned down for promotion at the BBC in Cardiff, the Community Programmes Unit had established a reputation for adventurous programme-making in its short existence and thus had won some degree of independence within the BBC’s hierarchical structure. Perhaps, thought Paul, this was at last a chance to move on from cutting film inserts into Wales Today back in Cardiff.
The twenty-nine-year-old assistant film editor impressed Mike Fentiman, the man in charge of the Community Programmes Unit at the time. But Fentiman was in for a surprise. ‘I wanted him in the Unit but was told, “No, you can’t have him”,’ Fentiman told me. ‘“But I want him,” I replied. “You can’t, he’s got a Christmas tree on his file. He has got so far and we now realise that he is a threat inside the BBC...”’
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