Student television was where it all began for Paul Hayes. Now a writer and newsreader, he presented 2024's election coverage in East Anglia, but he never forgot his first love: UEA's Nexus TV. So much so that in 2021, he convinced BBC commissioners to let him loose on a radio special, 'Nexus: Norfolk's forgotten TV Station'. Forgotten no more – and STAN salutes his dedication to keeping the legacy alive.
Paul's Nexus documentary is available online here. It features notable alumni Arthur Smith and Gudinder Chada, along with an incredible 1973 find from the student station's archives -Morecambe and Wise revealing they were 'bored stiff' with Monty Python.
We sat down with Paul to discover the inside story of his time in student television, hosting the NaSTA conference in 2004, and his career beyond Nexus...
Beginnings
I started at the UEA in September 2002, as an eighteen-year-old fresh from sixth form. I studied English Literature – I wanted to do the Creative Writing minor too, for which the UEA is of course very well known, but I wasn’t good enough to get on it. I was able to do a couple of the creative writing units through my degree, though.
I found out about the student television station fairly quickly. I see from my diary at the time that I already knew about them before the ‘SocMart’ at the end of September, where all the various clubs and societies would try and sign up the freshers.
I was very enthusiastic, but it was very clear very quickly that the whole thing had rather gone to seed. They had a studio and a production gallery up in the corner of the student union building, but it was apparent that it had not been properly maintained for some time, nobody knew how to work it, and it was no longer capable of outputting anything to any of the TVs in the communal areas as it once had.
A New Audience
The station had cupboards and shelves full of old tapes on unplayable formats. I was already then as a teenager fascinated by television history – I have been since I was a child – so in many ways I found these relics of a glorious past far more interesting than the current efforts. Even then, I wanted to try and explore the station’s history and tell its story somehow.
The problem was we were caught between two eras, really, in the early-to-mid 2000s. Many students now brought their own TVs to campus with them, so there was no longer the captive audience in communal areas which there was to a degree up to the 90s. But we were pre-YouTube, so there wasn’t a straight-forward way of putting anything online – it was technically possible, but you really needed someone with the know-how to do it, and there wasn’t any kind of popular streaming platform at all yet.
So because we no longer had the capacity to broadcast to the TVs in the student union building, we ended up having to dub everything off to tape and have it played on the big screen in the bar at certain regular points. Which didn’t really work – I mean, who’s going to pay attention to that?
We did get regular shows up and running, though. There was a music show, of course, as there always is, and I ended up producing a weekly news programme simply because nobody else wanted to do it. We used ‘News of the World’ by The Jam as the theme tune, a couple of years before Mock the Week ended up doing the same thing.
I enjoyed myself hugely putting a spoof documentary together called Norfolk Skies. It was based around the idea that students had mysteriously been disappearing from the campus, and ‘revealed’ that they had been abducted by aliens. I got various people to play friends and relatives of the missing students, and a mature student I knew to play a university representative… It was good fun, and even though it wasn’t real it was my first attempt at making a documentary, something I went on to do a lot of in radio.
NaSTA Hosting 2004
My main involvement was arranging for a scriptwriter called Paul Cornell to come and give a talk, which he very kindly did. He was one of the writers on the relaunch of Doctor Who, which was just going into production that summer as we hosted the conference.
I also remember they used to do this thing called the ‘Golden Bodge’, where each station had to pick various elements, a setting, a theme, etc, out at random, and they had to make I think it was a two-minute or a five-minute video to those specifications – but it had to be all done in one take, with no editing. Then they all got shown at the awards. One station – I think it might have been GUST – made a very impressive Casualty-style epic. They even had a white van they’d got from somewhere sweeping in at the start as an ambulance, and a patient being rushed out of the back of it, etc. Someone else’s involved a performance of Kelis’s ‘Milkshake’ song in the style of Margaret Thatcher.
I also recall there were some representatives of a US company hanging around, who claimed they were looking to set up a national network using student TV station content. They had somehow been persuaded to pay for all the trophies that year! I don’t think their proposed TV channel ever happened, though!
Graduating
I ended up hanging around in Norwich after I graduated, not really sure what to do next, and worked as a temporary admin assistant at the local council. When we’d organised NaSTA, one of the award judges we’d arranged had been a man called Tim Bishop, who was the head of BBC East. After I’d graduated and was trying to work out what on earth I did next, I wrote to him and asked how one gets into the BBC, and he gave me the name of someone to get in touch with and said the classic way in was to come in one day a week as a volunteer answering phones, etc. Which is what I ended up doing. Eventually I started getting paid shifts here and there, more and more of them, and in early 2008 they said there was a job someone else was stopping doing. They weren’t really sure what was going to happen to it, it might not carry on, but did I want to come and work there full time for three months? I said yes, of course, and 16 years on I’m still there!
So Nexus definitely helped through that Tim Bishop link. In other ways… Well, obviously radio is very different to TV, but Nexus was the place where I started to learn about editing. Taking all those disparate bits and pieces you’ve recorded or sourced from wherever, and forming them into a coherent narrative. That’s definitely been very useful.
It also taught me the very valuable lesson that I should never attempt to go into management or be in charge of anything! I was elected ‘President’ of Nexus in my third year – for some reason the person in charge of all the student union societies at the UEA was always called a ‘President’ then. I was awful! A good lesson for me to learn, but the other members of Nexus at the time could probably have done without it.
One thing I would say to students graduating today is that enthusiasm and engagement is always looked upon very favourably. You’d be amazed at the number of work experience people I’ve seen down the years who didn’t seem very interested and engaged at all. If you can demonstrate your passion for the industry, in whatever way you’re able to express that, then it definitely helps people to want to help you.
BBC Nexus Documentary
I pitched the idea to my boss in April of 2021, and it went out in August, so four months – but I wasn’t working on it solidly through all that time, I fitted it around my other work. I properly got into the swing of it in the summer, recording interviews and putting it all together,
It was an enjoyable programme to research and to make, and I was very pleased with how it turned out. I felt I did a good job of taking what is, let’s face it, a very niche subject and making it interesting and entertaining for a wider audience.
But it was also a highlight because of the impact that it made. I was fairly confident that the ‘Monty Python vs Morecambe and Wise’ line would be a very good hook for it. But I never expected it to make the splash that it did. The programme made it to network radio in the form of 4 Extra, and was a ‘Today’s Choice’ in the Radio Times and the Sunday Times. I did a piece for the Today programme. We did a News Online piece which got over a million hits, and it ended up in pretty much all of the national newspapers… Definitely one of the programmes of which I am most proud.
Dusting Off The Archives
A lot of the most important archive material I already had. I mentioned earlier how I was fascinated by the history of the place when I was there, and I can remember when I joined someone telling me about their ‘famous Morecambe and Wise interview’. But they only knew that from the label of an old Sony reel-to-reel format we could no longer play. They seemed to have no desire to see if we could actually get it converted and do something with it.
I liked poking around in the old tapes, and one day I found a VHS tape which had a date on it of December 1983. This we could of course play, and it turned out to be a compilation someone had made of various material from the old 1970s and early 80s reel-to-reel tapes, which I found fascinating. So I dubbed myself off a copy and kept it! Then when I came to make the documentary in 2021, I was able to use a machine at work to copy it into a digital format. And it had a bit of that Morecambe and Wise interview at the start, with them talking about Monty Python, which I knew was what I really needed to ‘sell’ the show, as it were.
Apart from that, I had some tapes of material from my own era. I got in touch with someone who’d put some bits on YouTube, and several of my interviewees also supplied me with material. Most of the interviewees came via the alumni society – they kindly put a bit in their newsletter for me, and various people got in touch. For the ‘celebs’, Arthur Smith and Gudinder Chada, I got in touch via their representatives.
It was frustrating not to have copies of things which you knew had happened, but which didn’t seem to survive – Nexus’s coverage of the Sex Pistols’ non-gig at the UEA in 1976, for example. But at that point you just have to remind yourself that we’re lucky to have all the material that we do have. When the old Nexus studio at the UEA was eventually closed down, all the surviving tapes do seem to have been donated to the East Anglian Film Archive, which is good. They confirmed they had them, but when I was making the programme they hadn’t been able to start digitising them yet, so I wasn’t able to access any of them, sadly.
When I’d been at Nexus myself I’d been fascinated by tales that they had actually used to broadcast over-the-air, with a short-range transmitter. It was nice to be able to find out a bit more about that, and to confirm that these unlicensed over-the-air broadcasts did actually happen! That’s one of the things I’m proud about the programme having done, I suppose. Preserving some of those old student tales as a historical record.
Looking To The Future
In the 70s, 80s, 90s, it was a rare and unusual thing for a group of students to turn up at an event with their own camera kit. Now, pretty much everyone has an HD camera in their pocket, everyone can make and stream their own videos, so why do you need a student television station when every club and society has their own YouTube channel? Obviously that democratisation of media, making the making of it available to everyone, is a very good thing. But I’m sure it makes it difficult for any kind of student media to really cut through. And this is, of course, simply a reflection of those same difficult truths in the wider media landscape.
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