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CHAPTER 1

FAREWELL DINNER

After 11 on the evening of Wednesday 16th June 1965, two youngish men escorted a woman of 65 from a party that was becoming noisy and was fast losing its way in the large dining and hospitality room on the sixth floor of the BBC Television Centre in Shepherds Bush. They saw her carefully into the lift, down to the Reception area with the startling colour of the John Piper mosaic, out through the swing doors, down the steps to the senior car park that was then in front of the building. They saw her into her car, a worn Morris Minor Traveller. Both wondered if she was safe to be driving, but both knew that she would not take any notice of anything they said. So they watched as she left and drove smartly through the middle of the exit, turned right, and shot off down Wood Lane, protected by the good fortune that always seemed to be hers when she drove home at the end of a long day. She was going back to an empty flat and more than 20 years of life. David Attenborough and I watched her go, but we did not go back to the party.
    1965 was the end of the beginning. Almost twenty years of BBC Television since the war. The year had started with the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill on a grey January day. The pictures of a small boat carrying his coffin, almost drifting westward down the empty River Thames, went round the world; the commentary brilliantly sustained for four hours by Richard Dimbleby: he spoke for the old Britain, for the generations that had fought the war that ended 20 years before. He himself was to die before the end of the year.
    The farewell party is a traditional ritual in the BBC. There had been several occasions for her already, but this was the final BBC honour at the retirement of Grace Wyndham Goldie. At events of this kind it is always said, often at tedious length, that it marked the end of an era. But for once the banal phrase was right. But this was a special event for television because Grace had been present on the studio floor in Alexandra Palace in 1937 for the first public broadcast of this new phenomenon. She was one of the first to recognise and write extensively of the importance and potential of the new medium. Now, almost 30 years later, she was leaving it all, having helped to create the standards and the grammar for the BBC and made for herself an iconic status. There had never been such an Assistant Head of any department in the BBC, before or since.
    Next day, Alasdair Milne, a future Director-General, wrote

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