Bernard Cornwell

How a spell in Belfast led to a career as a best-selling author.

It began with a divorce and ended with a marriage, which is not quite the usual way round, and it was all an accident anyway. It was back in the late 1970s and the Current Affairs department of the BBC in Northern Ireland was short one assistant producer. I was working in London then, on Nationwide, and my boss asked if I would like to do a three-month attachment to Belfast. The short answer was no. The longer answer was to ask who, in their right mind, would exchange London for Belfast. It was not just the Troubles, but Belfast? Those mean streets and endless rain? And what would happen to my London career? But I was newly divorced and there was an 'away-from-home' allowance that would more or less pay the legal bills and my boss swore on his children's lives that my London job would be kept for me and so, with a due sense of dread, I said yes.

Ten weeks later I gave up that precious allowance by asking to join the Belfast establishment. I had fallen in love with the place and with its people and I stayed another three years and still think of them as the best three years I spent in television.

We worked on Spotlight. Jack Watson ran it then and Jack had assembled an extraordinary team. It was not, perhaps, a very Irish team for we were fronted by Jeremy Paxman and Gavin Esler but that shows what an eye Jack had for talent. I was to take over from Jack and I inherited that talent which was supplemented by Roisin McAuley who made up in Irishness what our Englishman and Scotsman lacked.

We were lively. I forget many of the programmes now. They were mostly the quotidian business of current affairs - whither education in Ulster, that sort of thing - though quite how we managed to work a Porsche Carrera into the education programme I can't remember but it was fun.

A lot of it was fun. Jeremy, I recall, did a film about tourism in the six counties, much of it dwelling on the large number of Germans who had discovered the fishing and, wanting some oompah German music to cover a sequence, inadvertently (he swears) chose the Horst Wessel song. The West German consul gravely objected and we just as gravely apologised.

It was tourism that ended my stay. The Northern Ireland Tourist Board, in its ineffable wisdom, brought a group of American travel agents to explore Ulster. It was, and may it remain , the second worst year of the Troubles and the Tourist Board was plainly whistling in the wind (or else ridding itself of surplus budget). We filmed the visit, which cleverly managed to avoid any place where a uniform might be seen, and we milked it for amusement.

But the point of the story is that on the first day, as we filmed the travel agents arriving, I was struck. She was blonde and still is. 'I'm going to marry that one,' I told Gavin Esler, and so I did, and these days she and I live in Cape Cod and I write books because the US Government would not give me a work permit when I pursued her to the States and I did not need Washington's permission to write. It was a happy ending to three happy years.