William Carver is a reporter for the BBC.
He has been one for quite a few years, easily enough to be called one of the veterans with the media company and be rather proud of the distinction. His talent and gift was to sniff out the faint aroma of a good story and then dig and pry enough to turn the scent into an actual tasty morsel of interesting news to occupy a few minutes of the viewers and listeners his bosses needed informed.
Unfortunately, as he would find out in a meeting at the beginning of the first recorded adventure, being so senior had its drawbacks. For one huge thing, his experience and time served entitled him to decent earnings and the now apparently cash-strapped 'Beeb' was calling on its managers to pare the fat.
Not that Carver, described as a bespectacled man somewhere around sixty, thinning on top and heavy in the middle, would have thought of himself as fat, despite his waistline. But according to his editor, the bosses "want their people multi-platform these days ... journalists who can write the online piece, file the radio bulletin, do the TV two-way and be Tweeting and Facebooking as they go". Carver admitted to himself then that he understood about half of what his boss was saying. As is mentioned elsewhere, Carver was "an analogue man in a digital world".
This then is the Carver we will follow, a man still wanting to find the good story in war zones around the world and report on them to the best of his considerable abilities but also a man knowing that his days of doing that were reaching an end. Before they were gone for good for him, though, Carver would be constantly looking for those international locales where intrigue was strong enough to make a story interesting enough to be told.