Maggie Brown – författare

June 1940: four children Carol, Alan, Peter and Jenny are evacuated from south London with their grandmother to stay in a converted tram that has been transported to a small rural village in Rutland. Their mother is left behind to run the family shop, enduring hardship and difficulties, whilst their father is in the RAF.Life has changed for all of them. They must adapt to a totally different way of living as well as growing up without their parents. The village children at first are suspicious of the evacuees. Carol, Alan, Peter and Jenny encounter tragedies as well as good times with their friends, school and the local farmer and his wife.Visits to see their mother are curtailed by the devastation during the Blitz. During their first Christmas back home their mother is desperate to keep them safe as the bombing continues, resulting in a disaster close to their home. She makes the decision that they will have to return to the tram. A fascinating story of wartime Britain and the hardships experienced at that time.

Traces the history and development of Channel 4, one of the UK's best loved and most controversial TV channels. Identifies key figures and signature programmes such as 'Brookside,' 'The Big Breakfast' and 'Wife Swap,' as well as successful American imports including 'Friends' and 'Sex and the City.'

This book covers a dramatic decade in the fortunes of Britain’s quirkiest broadcaster. It opens in 2009, with the realisation that Channel 4’s biggest money spinner, Big Brother, had become a toxic asset and would have to be discarded, at the same time as advertising revenues were shrinking in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. Maggie Brown’s compelling narrative, which draws on interviews with key players in Channel 4’s story and unique access to the broadcaster’s archives, takes us inside the boardroom battles, changes in senior management and commissioning teams, interventions by the media regulator Ofcom, and the channel’s response to a rapidly-changing media and political landscape. Brown describes how the channel, under its new chief executive David Abraham, successfully fought off the threat of privatisation, which became a reality after the Conservatives’ general election victory in 2015. The price for remaining publicly funded was a substantial relocation of Channel 4’s operations, with Leeds announced in 2018 as a new ‘regional hub’. The Channel 4 story is also one of ambitious and innovative programming, with a new director of content, Jay Hunt, instigating radical changes in commissioning and scheduling. Brown traces programming hits and losses during this period, with the departure to competitors of celebrity chefs, Black Mirror and Charlie Brooker, horse racing and Formula 1, and a reappraisal of the remit of institutions such as Channel 4 News and Film 4. But there were successes too, with the 2012 Paralympics helping to restore a public service sheen, and new programmes such as Gogglebox in 2013 connecting with younger audiences, and, in 2016, the coup of taking The Great British Bake Off from its home at the BBC.