Stuart St Paul was trained by the BBC at their college in Evesham and worked for them from 1973 to 2023, from Radio 1 to his final show being Mrs Browns Boys. How the dyslexic lad from the East End of London went from DJ to a career designing action and surviving brain surgery and the challenges that went with it, is inspirational. He is an engaging speaker who has audiences gripped.
As a boy, he was a pirate radio fan. On Saturday 30 September 1967 at 7:00 am Tony Blackburn played Flowers in The Rain and Radio 1 was launched. It was the start of a massive change that the BBC had to undertake. Not only did studios need to change, the line to transmission, but training of staff.
A new course was started at the BBC college in Evesham to find young people who were working on popular music and might become program makers. Stuart St Paul was take from Sussex University, which he had hardly attended as he was working nightly as a DJ for Eric Morley in the Lyceum in the Strand (now a theatre) and the Empire Ballroom Leicester Square, and put into the A-course.
After years at Radio 1, and then being a breakfast show on commercial radio station Metro in Newcastle and Orwell in Ipswich, Stuart moved to Southampton to become the television DJ in the kids twice weekly soap Radio Phoenix which starred Sherrie Hewson as the station boss.
When the show was cancelled, Stuart became an actor working on various BBC shows, but saw a bigger opportunity to become a stuntman and action designer for the corporation.
He became one of the BBC’s go-to freelancers and worked extensively in comedy doing pranks for the BBC shows The Russ Abbott Show, The Laughter Show, Les Dennis Show, The Fast Show, Seconds Out, Alexei Sayle, and BBC dramas including Juliet Bravo, By The Sword Divided, Bergerac, Specials, Spender and Tripods. He was part of the team that started Casualty and was a regular at Eastenders.
He was also part of many of the BBC plays and early films including Macbeth on the Estate and The Great Kandinsky with Richard Harris and Dorothy Tutin.
Stuart also worked extensively at BBC Scotland on shows from ParaHandy and Strathblair
to River City, so it was inevitable that the Irish show, produced in London, and shot in Scotland would be next to call him back.
As a world renowned A-List stunt coordinator and director, who had won Best Director in the USA, awards all over the globe, 8 soap awards and been nominated for an NTA, and now working in movies and big box television, he nearly did not take the invitation to go back to the BBC for yet another TV studio comedy show like the ones he did early in his career.
However, he did. He went on to work on Mrs Brown’s Boys for the original series and d’Movie, and is the only other man to have worn the famous costume. It was yet another studio comedy which Stuart was adept in.
Stuart was trained by the BBC and worked for them for nearly 50 years.
