As I see in the new year quietly for once, I’m remembering the turn of the millennium, a mere quarter-century ago, and being on BBC One as the nation’s Millennium Bug correspondent. I spent most of the day in TC1, the main studio at BBC Television Centre in London, while an array of presenters and guests were wheeled on and off, covering the New Year celebrations from around the world.

And once an hour it was my turn to step up next to Peter Snow and talk about what was happening with the millenniun bug, the error that would happen when software that used only two digits to represent the year had to cope with the switch from 99 to 00. Of course, a lot of people had worked very hard to make sure that impact was minimal, so Peter Snow never got his dramatic stories, but I had an excellent time.

I headed back to Cambridge in time for the midnight celebrations, then joined agan via the TV studio in BBC Radio Cambridgeshire as the dawn broke on the new millennium. I wrote about it ten years later in my regular column on the BBC News website:

“I spent the evening of 31 December, 1999 in the company of Rolf Harris, Peter Snow and a large number of other people in a studio at Television Centre in London, seeing in the New Year as the nation’s official Millennium Bug watcher”

And here’s a clip.

Of course, spending the time hanging out with Rolf Harris became slightly tarnished following his conviction for sexual abuse, but that wasn’t known at the time.

My time there was also my only known appearance in fiction, as you’ll see on p141 of Ruth Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being:

“Their move to the island was a withdrawal. The first New Year’s Eve, they’d spent on the couch, with her mother tucked under a blanket between them, drinking cheap sparkling wine and watching the world turn 2000. The BBC was covering the millennial celebrations, tracking the time zones and slowly working its way westward around the planet.”

That was me they were watching.