Birks

Maggie Brown in The Guardian suggests incoming DG Lord (Tony) Hall of Birkenhead should recruit Nick Pollard. This blog got there first.

Maggie misses one significant point. Not only is Nick also from Birkenhead - they are both Old Birkonians. Nick (1961-1968) left with "one and a half ropey A-levels" and went straight to the Birkenhead News as a trainee; Tony (1964-1969) took a more gilded route to journalism, via Keble College, Oxford, to the BBC News Trainee scheme.

Nick moved from print to broadcasting via the Mercury Press, an agency with strong connections with Radio Merseyside. And thence to the microphone - he remembers listeners of BBC Radio Merseyside thinking he was dying on air, after running back to the newsroom for a forgotten script, and dashing back to make the pips. "We had dozens of calls from people telling the producer that I seemed to be having a heart attack on air. It was absolutely impossible to read it out and I always advise people never to run anywhere before you read the news."

While Tony was starting as a news trainee, Nick was already in the BBC Radio Newsroom as a sub, working on summaries. Nick then went back to Liverpool to join the launch team for Radio City (which included Gillian Reynolds and John Perkins).

Mobile Nick then returned to London for a spell with BBC TV News - including, spookily, work on a new programme, Newsnight.  He left again in 1980, this time for ITN, just before Tony Hall arrived as part of the Newsnight production team.