1987

Worcestershire, 1987: When cash-strapped Vale Television, the smallest station on the ITV network, goes bust, Victoria Bloom sees her career come to a crashing halt.

Forty years later, happily retired, Vicky reminisces with her granddaughter as they watch a show she once worked on, now repeated on a nostalgia TV channel. Later, when a stranger offers her the chance to revisit the past, Vicky returns to the start of the year when it all went wrong.

Back in her old role as Head of Programmes, she has the chance to save Vale, but that won’t be easy at a station where the main news studio is a converted cowshed, and the flagship soap has a budget one-tenth that of Crossroads.

Borrowing ideas from the hit shows of the future seems like a winning strategy, but with a finance director putting the brakes on, money is in short supply. Somehow, Who Wants to Win £500? just doesn’t have the same ring about it.

Join Vicky on her trip back in time in this warm, humorous story set in the golden era of British television.

1987 is part of the anthology series, A Year in the Life. Each book revisits a different aspect of life in the 1980s, and each story can be enjoyed standalone.