Up Front 02/10

Last month the BBC’s My Story competition closed for entries and a list of finalists was later announced. It had been launched as a story telling competition with a difference – a competition for ordinary people with extraordinary true stories. According to the launch information, some of the best selling books and Oscar winning films have been inspired by true life stories, and competition finalists would become part of a huge BBC series, with five people to be offered a book deal. The competition had categories such as achievement, charity, bravery, adventure, sadness, romance and tragedy. I’m often asked what are the criteria used for the cover stories in this magazine. The fact is there aren’t any. Every life counts and the list at the moment is endless. One lady, a few years ago, was most upset because she had never heard of the person on the cover, and reading the story she couldn’t see anything that she felt merited the story being published. She had obviously missed the point and no doubt never picked up the magazine again. But I was reminded of it when reading a book published last year by the Village Voices organisation. The book, Who Were We?, delved into the past to highlight the lives of people in the Dorset community around Drimpton. An enormous amount of research was done to remember the ordinary lives of hundreds of people no longer with us, and the unwritten stories of their lives can only be guessed at. Editor, Andrew Pastor, made a telling point at the end of the book saying that knowing who our forebears were, helps us better understand ourselves. Speaking of the census he said, ‘They were all counted every ten years, and they all count.’