Plans for talking CCTV in Derby led Evening Telegraph journalist Pete Pheasant to contemplate how things have changed since his days as a cub reporter, when phones were a rarity...

Walking through the city centre last week, I was struck by one of those coincidences that slap you in the face like a cold, wet flannel.

I was bound for a bookshop, intent on replacing the latest copy of George Orwell’s 1984 to have disappeared from my possession and thinking that I really should keep a register of who I lent my books and records to, instead of losing them in the mists of time.

Approaching Waterstone’s, I felt excitement at the prospect of recapturing the masterpiece which had done more than any other work to fire my passion for individual freedom and hatred of anything that smacked of Big Brother.

I stopped to buy the Evening Telegraph, and read of plans to install speaking CCTV cameras on our streets.

This is not a sermon about the evils of an all-seeing state. I fear we are way past meaningful debate. The electronic eyes have it and all we can do is behave ourselves and hope those at the controls act honourably.

What this episode triggered more than anything was contemplation of the way technology has changed our lives, particularly in communication and the media.

Ten years after I’d climbed on to the roof of the public toilets in my home town, with a group of fellow schoolboys, and fired pea-shooters at puzzled shoppers, with never a thought that a camera might be watching me, ready to bark out orders to stop on pain of an Asbo, I’d cut my teeth as a young reporter in 1970s Ilkeston, where even a GPO Bakelite telephone was a luxury in most households.

Thirty years on, I can still remember the four-digit numbers of some of the major employers. I used to dread having to cover stories about pensioners because a bus journey to gather the smallest piece of information was almost inevitable, since hardly any old folks had phones.

The newspaper I worked for had only one photographer, whose day job was at the local ironworks, so photo calls had to fit in with his shifts, and once he’d produced his weekly bundle of black-and-white prints, they were despatched (by bus) to the printing works at Ripley, where the images were etched on to metal plates, which were then fixed to blocks of wood ready to be fitted into iron frames from which the broadsheet pages were printed.

At the end of each week, the photo blocks were returned in a mail sack to the newspaper office, where they were tipped into an old outside toilet.

This was the photographic archive and if a picture of the mayor, for instance, was needed several weeks down the line, it was the trainee reporter’s job to rummage through a waist-high pile of inky wood and metal in the hope of finding one.

Today, papers like the Evening Telegraph have electronic archives of hundreds of thousands of pictures and it’s almost harder to say than to find the one you need and place it on a page.

Every cub reporter dreams of a scoop by which he will be remembered and occasionally, if I struggled to sleep, disturbed by the sounds of passing traffic and the eerie whines and whirrs of trains on the railway track a few hundred yards away, I would imagine an alien spaceship landing outside my house.

I’d be the man on the spot, first with the news that would shock the world.

But such a story would be nothing without a picture – and by the time I’d roused the part-time photographer, presuming he wasn’t on nights at the ironworks, and he’d driven across town with his equipment, the aliens might have moved on.

Today, of course, I’d snap them with my mobile phone – and the moving images of alien creatures in Ilkeston (a new phenomenon, despite what some unkind outsiders may say) could be on the Telegraph’s website within minutes.

All I need now is a visit from outer space, so if anyone’s watching up there, you know where I am...