WHO IS ROGER WILMUT, ANYWAY?

If you found this page by searching on the name 'Wilmut' you may be looking for information about Dolly, the famous cloned sheep; well, she was the responsibility of my cousin, Ian Wilmut, and she certainly made him famous (and gained him a Knighthood, so we now have a Sir in the family). My own claim to fame is fortunately more modest, resting on six books about (mostly) broadcast comedy - more about them on a separate page (and I have written a separate page on the history of the Wilmut family)

I was born in Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, in 1942. My parents moved there when they were married in 1940 and my father, who had been teaching in Caterham, Surrey, got a post at King Edward the Sixth School in Stratford. My mother was delighted because she was a keen theatregoer, and as a result of all this I saw many of the Shakespeare productions at the theatre - all of them from the late 1950s to about the early 1970s.

I went to Warwick School from 1953 to 1961; the school was chartered by King Edward the Confessor and could be described as a minor public school (and for any American readers I should explain that 'public school' in England doesn't mean the same as 'public school' in America - perversely, it means more or less a private school: I went there on a scholarship.) I didn't have a particularly distinguished academic record, leaving with one A-level, in Physics. The most enjoyable part of it all was the music - there was a good choral society, and I played violin in the school orchestra.

My hobbies were (and still are) music - classical and classic jazz, mostly - hi-fi, cinema, and record collecting; I learnt the piano and violin, though I'm very rusty on both these days. As a result of my interest in hi-fi I became a BBC Technical Operator in Bush House Control Room when I left school in 1961, doing disc-cutting, and tape recording and editing. In 1968 I moved on to sound mixing as a Studio Manager, still at Bush House, which I continued to do until I took early retirement in 1995: I then went on doing it for a few days a month on a casual basis, until I 'really' retired in September 2007.

My record collecting has continued over the years, and I now have over 2,700 gramophone records, over a thousand of them 78s; and I've taken an interest in getting the best out of old recordings (hence the pages about the reproduction of 78s). I used to go to the cinema and the National Film Theatre a lot, seeing a lot of old films as well as modern ones, though I don't do as much of that nowadays - I tend to rely on Sky and Freeview, together with iTunes and Amazon mmovies on demand. I also have a large collection of science fiction novels. My other main hobby is cycling - nothing spectacular, just local riding, and that's getting curtailed by increasing age and a bit of arthritis.

Writing books came about more or less by accident, and I have covered this on a separate page.