Tony James - a lifetime writing the headlines
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00:00 His work appears on the front pages of the West Somerset Free Press most weeks,
00:05 but it was back in the early 1950s that Tony first became a journalist.
00:10 My English master said at the time, "The only thing you can do as English,
00:14 "I would advise you to try and find a job where you are involved with words."
00:20 It was advice he took, securing a role at the Derby Evening Telegraph.
00:25 He rose up the ranks and was soon the paper's agricultural correspondent.
00:30 The news editor came up to me and said, "Put these boots on."
00:34 So I put them on and he said, "Do they fit?"
00:37 I said, "Yes." He said, "Well, you're the agricultural correspondent."
00:40 From typewriters to the keyboard,
00:42 so much about being a journalist has changed during Tony's career.
00:47 The great change has obviously been with things like Google.
00:51 I mean, research in the old days when we went to libraries.
00:55 He's interviewed thousands of people and he's still going.
00:59 As a writer and a model boatmaker too, he's a stickler for detail.
01:03 I can't do it halfway, which is a shame really,
01:07 because I've spent far too much time working on stories.
01:11 People will say, "Oh, that's all right. They won't know it's wrong."
01:14 I say, "Well, they might. I know it's wrong."
01:17 Tony has dipped his toe into retirement
01:20 last summer when the weather was nice.
01:22 It was a week, I think, and I thought, "Oh, I've got nothing to do."
01:29 And then something happened at the paper and the editor of the Times said,
01:33 "We're very short staff. Will you come back for a bit?"
01:38 And I said, "All right." And I never... I went back and there I am.
01:43 At 88, he's believed to be England's oldest full-time working journalist.
01:49 It's a job for life and one he's simply unable to stop.
01:53 Cheryl Dennis, BBC Points West, Carhampton.
01:56 [BLANK_AUDIO]