What Was I Thinking: A Memoir by Paul Henry

moment it took me, a piece of paper went through the projector and, of course, flashed up on the screen.
    ‘Projectionist, what was that?’
    ‘I’m not entirely sure, sir, but it seems to have come good.’
    But as the piece of paper went around it jammed the spool, so the film started to roll out onto the floor. I just stood there looking at this incredibly valuable film unravelling all over the room. It was a revelation how long it got in a short space of time. When it’s not wound tight, film is like water — it finds a natural level. Pretty soon I couldn’t budge because the film was around my ankles and if I moved I would have damaged it. So I decided — with, in hindsight, questionable wisdom — to let it go. As long as no one came into the projection booth — and why would they? — they would never know and I could get the film wound up nicely and back in its can when the screening was over.
    My one bit of luck was that they didn’t want to sit through the whole thing.
    ‘I think I’ve seen enough,’ said the bigwig about halfway through. I breathed a sigh of relief and reached over so I could turn the lights back on without moving my feet.
    ‘Thank you very much, projectionist.’
    ‘Thank you, sir.’
    ‘Can you just come in and clear up these glasses and what have you?’
    ‘Yes, I’ll do that.’ Just as soon as you’ve gone .
    But as he was leaving he opened the door to the projection booth, to reveal me paddling in valuable, historic film, some of which now took the opportunity to roll through the door and out of the booth.
    ‘What a fucking embarrassment,’ said the bigwig.
    ‘I didn’t want to disturb your viewing pleasure, but there was a slight problem because someone had left markers in it, sir. But I thought it was better that, you know, your time is valuable, it’s better that you can watch and get on and I’ll just sort this out.’
    ‘Do you want to know what’s valuable?’ he said. ‘This fucking mess here is valuable. Sort it.’ And he closed the door and walked off. I hope by now they’ve finished converting all those films to digital.
    Eventually I got to be involved in other aspects of the organisation. The BBC was very traditional, but also ready to take chances. They made programmes no one would do now, like A Year in the Life of a Tree . They had a tree growing in the middle of the BBC grounds with cameras bolted to it that they kept running for 12 months to see what happened.
    We did an outside broadcast for a year with a family of badgers. We parked a spare outside broadcast truck up in a badger sett and at around 10.15 every night it went live for 15 minutes. You could watch the badgers for a quarter of an hour. When they looked at the ratings, which they hardly ever did because they were the BBC, they realised people were checking on the badgers just before they went to bed. Some nights nothing would happen for minutes and those episodes were among the best rating because people stayed tuned in until they had laid eyes on the badgers. When the OB truck was needed for other duties, people wrote in.
    I became one of several hosts for Any Answers , which was done at Bush House, the BBC headquarters in London. Questions would be read out on air in a show called Any Questions and then other people would write in with answers and we would read the best ones. The shows are still running. I was chosen possibly because I had an obvious affinity for mail, but mainly because I had been doing a bit of hosting on local radio and still hadn’t turned 20.
    ‘You’ve got a younger voice, so we’ll get you to do the younger letters for Any Answers ,’ the producer told me. I got a first-class train ticket once a week to go to London.
    Doing that made me think that the BBC would take any excuse for a radio programme, so I decided to come up with one and took it to one of my bosses.
    ‘I’ve had this idea and I’ve done a rough budget on it,’ I said. ‘We go to the