Dave Hulson worked at the Daily Express newspaper in Manchester as an errand boy for the Art Desk in the 1960s. His uncle also worked for the paper, in the wire room.

Jodrell Bank Observatory is the location of one of the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescopes, which has a reflector that measures 76 metres (250 feet) in diameter. The telescope is located with other smaller radio telescopes at Jodrellbank (formerly Jodrell Bank), about 20 miles south of Manchester. Immediately after World War II the British astronomer Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell, working at the University of Manchester’s botanical site at Jodrell Bank with war-surplus radar equipment, began research in radio and radar astronomy. Construction of the telescope began in 1952. Operation began shortly before the launching, on, by the Soviet Union of the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik I, on 4 October 1957, and the satellite’s carrier rocket was tracked at Jodrell Bank by radar. Most of the operational time at Jodrell Bank is devoted to astronomy rather than to tracking and communication, but the telescope has been part of the tracking network for the United States program of space exploration and monitored most of the Soviet accomplishments. The Jodrell Bank telescope transmitted the first photographs from the surface of the Moon, received on 6 February 1966 by the Soviet Luna 9 probe. In 1987 the 76-metre telescope was renamed the Lovell Telescope. It and another telescope at Jodrell Bank are two elements of a seven-telescope array, the Multi-Element Radio Linked Interferometer Network (MERLIN), which uses microwave links to connect the individual telescopes into a radio interferometer 135 miles in diameter.