About

“I am a freelance writer with a background in newspapers and radio and a passion for history”

Felicity Goodall is a former journalist who has written for The Guardian, The Listener and the International Herald Tribune. A former freelance foreign correspondent, she covered Norway for the Sunday Times, Daily Express, Business Week and other international publications.

While her bread and butter came from covering oil politics for an international wire service, career highlights included breaking the news of the shooting of Olof Palme, the scandal of heavy water sales to Israel, and the unmasking of two Cold War spies. In addition to learning Norwegian, Felicity took her first steps in broadcasting and on her return to the UK, freelanced for BBC Radio 2 as a researcher before working as a researcher, presenter and producer for BBC Radio 4 based in Bristol.

Felicity produced many of Radio 4’s flagship literary programmes: Poetry Please!, With Great Pleasure, A Good Read, Fine Lines, Stanza and Dear Diary, as well as researching, producing and reporting for the weekly topical history magazine series, Age to Age.

She has also made stand-alone documentaries and series, among them the first programme on Anne Lister, Gentleman Jack of Halifax (1993); the series Gardening Gurus with Monty Don; Lost Villages; A Question of Conscience; In Search of Utopia; Taking the Medicine; and The Joy of Housework with Sue Limb. Felicity made several series with historian Robert Lacey including, The Year 1000, The Year 1901, The Year 1953, The Diaries of King George V, and Crown and People. She produced the series The Wardrobe; The Vegetable Patch and Behind the Scenes at the Museum, as well as Points of the Compass with Simon Armitage. She was researcher on the Sony award-winning series, Booked, and the award-winning Radio 3 docudrama Soldiers in The Sun. She fire-walked and learned to dowse for Radio 4’s magazine programme The Afternoon Shift and made an archive hour about Missionaries.

Felicity has also worked in television notably on the documentary Women on the Railways and as assistant producer on BBC2’s docudrama series A Skirt Through History. She researched and conceived a trilogy of plays about women journalists for Radio 4, Sirens of Fleet Street, which included the play about Mea Allan, Change of Heart, which she wrote and directed. The series was first broadcast in 1999.

Since moving to Devon, Felicity has written and presented short films and audio trails for Devon Natural Landscapes, formerly the AONB. She has also written and directed five community pantomimes – topical feminist reworkings of traditional stories!