WHERE do broadcasters go when they hang up their auto-cues? Some turn from reporting fact to writing fiction ? and Jeremy Carrad is one of them.
After a successful career in the sixties and seventies with the BBC presenting national and regional television and radio programmes he formed a company helping industry to improve its methods and styles of communications.
He has, in the last decade written four plays ? and now his first novel.
He presents his readers with a troupe of actors in a Pier Concert Party, the British Secret Service and a Polish nuclear physicist working on the development of the atomic bomb. Jeremy adds Hitler?s Gestapo and a fair sprinkling of the colourful inhabitants of an East Anglian seaside town and sets them in the dark days of the early 1940s.
He then sprinkles all this with a quantity of humour, drama, love and pathos. Result: a thrilling action-packed yarn called The End of the Pier Show by West Devon writer Jeremy Carrad.
With a romance blooming between young actress Peggy and Freddy ? a Polish nobleman in the audience who is an expert in nuclear fission ? the stage is dramatically set. Freddy will come to England if he can be reunited with Peggy. But he has unfortunately become a ?guest? of the Gestapo and she has to be protected as she is the bait for any country intending to use his unique brain.
Life for the pier concert party and its audiences must apparently go on as normal otherwise all will be lost ? and that includes the Second World War. This highly entertaining and gripping yarn is published by CCL Books £7.99.