Now 78, Keith has great hopes for five-year-old, Alfie. Keith and his wife Diane, a retired pharmacist, met at a disco in Dereham and despite it being a Friday 13th they went on to a happy marriage, two sons, Danny and Robin, and two grandsons. He loves Norfolk’s understated landscape, its history and people, and most of all its villages – and mourns both the sense of community and the countryside lost by the building of so many new roads and houses. The shining threads which run through all those articles, broadcasts, talks and stage shows of the past 60 years are his sense of humour and his deep love of Norfolk. Keith never took that shorthand exam but did go on to an outstanding career.

“My shorthand is outstanding!” he says, truthfully, explaining that when he was a trainee the big boss had checked everyone’s shorthand credentials and written “outstanding” against Keith’s name – not because of his brilliance but because there were no results to record. He had taken, and failed, some tests – unlike the shorthand test he was supposed to have passed to become a journalist. “They got their revenge by sending me to London for training where they said, ‘Don’t worry Keith, it’s just like driving your car.’” “I’m technologically dyslexic and haven’t a clue about microphones and sliders and faders but they needed someone who wouldn’t talk about Happy’s Burg or Why Moan Dom!” he said.

Radio Norfolk launched in 1980 with Keith on the staff. If Keith was not going to leave Norfolk to work in radio, then radio had to come to Norfolk. “How would I get back in time for rehearsals with the Rackheath Players?” he asked. He even went for an interview in London with Radio 2, but realised mid-way through that he could not take the job. At one point the boy who throughout his childhood had never left Norfolk or used a telephone, was offered a job in Derby. “I picked strawberries and played cricket,” he said. I really thought he was going to clock me! I think after that he quite admired me!” said Keith.Īfter 16 years with Eastern Counties Newspapers Keith decided to take a year off. “I hadn’t got a car but I managed to get to Blackpool before the coach and stood in the foyer and asked him whether he had a good journey.

Covering football is extremely difficult, to be impartial and fair you got aggro from the manager, from the supporters, from the players.”Īfter one argument with Ron, (“I used to give him a lot of Norfolk dialect he couldn’t understand!”) Keith was asked to leave the team bus en-route to Blackpool. “He felt that reporters should be more like supporters, but people rely on reporters to give a fair account of what happened. He travelled on the team coach, and the journalistic moment he is proudest of is being thrown off it by 1969-1973 manager Ron Saunders. If she'd had Growing Up Skipper (long off the market by the time she was old enough to appreciate it), or perhaps if her teachers did, the whole incident could have been avoided.Keith Skipper in 1965 with the teddy bear he won while reporting on a Great Yarmouth fete - Credit: Submitted by Keith SkipperĮventually he arrived in the big city and, swapping news reporting for sport, finally began venturing out of Norfolk to cover Norwich City’s away games. The faculty were projecting their own perceptions onto her nubile young body, the sick freaks. Now, the outfit was more modest than what at least some of her schoolmates were wearing that very day. Her attire, her teachers felt, was a little too mature for a junior high school student. Someone I know has told me the story of being called into the principal's office to be queried about her home life. I suppose (again, never having been a prepubescent girl) geeklizzard isn't wrong to say that menstruation is more disruptive, if nothing else, than bigger tits, but the visible bodily changes can be traumatic too. A friend, a year younger than I, says she had one of these growing up.įor actual women, I imagine, it was a way to experience the phenomenon at a remove, as it were. Maybe it's because I'm a man that I found this disturbing when I first learned of it-after all, I never had to deal with my own breasts growing, and the ensuing change in how I was regarded by my peers (actually, my breasts did grow, but I digress).

1974 growing up skipper