- Before his success as a writer for television he set up his own news agency in Blackburn, 'Star News'.
- From 1968, in parallel to his writing for the TV series Coronation Street (1960) , he was a football reporter for The Observer newspaper.
- He worked as a cub reporter on the Accrington Observer newspaper in 1942 (interrupted by a short period of service for the Royal Navy in the Far East). Subsequently he worked for the Lancashire Evening Telegraph, the Liverpool Post, and later the national newspapers the News Chronicle, Daily Express and Daily Sketch.
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