Last week I was on a test shoot down in Bournemouth — using the sound stage in the Poole Gateway Building at Bournemouth University — working with some new technology I’m sworn to secrecy about and can’t share here.

Someone on the crew looked familiar. It was the shoot’s university liaison who turned out to be none other than Karl Rawstrone, who I hadn’t laid eyes on since 1989.

We were on the same course: BA (Hons) Media Production at Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic, 1986 to 1989.

He’s Dr Karl Rawstrone now. After a career in broadcast editing and studio directing he is currently Principal Academic in the Media School at Bournemouth University (and a great person to talk to if you want to use their amazing facilities or the Uni as a location).

And he’d not only kept his copy of our degree show yearbook but had a spare copy which he very kindly gave to me. Mine either never existed or vanished years ago.

Opening it was a strange experience. Lots of familiar faces and all of us looking young and eager. And there I am — Michael J Drury, my parents’ old address in Sheffield, a landline phone number with a now non-existent code. The Sodium Blues, a thirty-minute drama shot in Newcastle. Role: Lighting Cameraman, Co-Writer, Co-Producer, Co-Editor, and — my own words, 1989 — “Co-Everything else!”

Underneath that, something I’d completely forgotten: first prize in the student section of the Royal Television Society Regional Awards, for a pop promo called Piston for the band The Toxic Kangaroo Babies.

The two in this photograph are Stuart Sargent and Timon Dowdeswell, who I made most of it with. We were shooting on U-Matic, carrying kit that weighed more than we did, thoroughly convinced we were the business.

Thirty-seven years on, I was standing on a university sound stage surrounded by equipment those young lads would not have believed, testing technology I can’t describe, and meeting a blast from the past, jogging fantastic memories of our formative years.

Same trade. Different everything else.

Thanks for the yearbook, Karl.