Letter: On the scrapheap

Sir: Thank you for printing Dan Ehrlich's piece "Don't call us: you're far too experienced" (Media, 31 August). To hundreds of middle-aged newspaper, radio and television professionals, disconnected from their hard-won careers just as they became very good indeed at their jobs, it must have given that much-needed sense - as it did to me - that someone, thank God, understands.

Like Ehrlich, we are spending our fifties looking for the odd chance to do the work we spent 20 or 30 years mastering - a notion which in itself irritates today's management raptors. The last time I was interviewed for work at the BBC (where I was a staff producer and director) I was told, "Sorry. You're just too tainted by experience."

ANN FREER

East End, Oxfordshire