IT began, not among the yellowing tomes of an ancient library, but in a modern television studio complex on London's Euston Road. At an age when many of my friends were graduating from university, I was working as a 21-year-old journalist on the set of This is Your Life. It was here, as one of the undercover agents secretly unearthing stories for the big red book, that my obsession for research took root. Original ideas, imaginative proposals, painstaking planning, unceasing determination and careful checking had to be matched by consistent commitment and dedication. Having spent some of my teenage years researching and presenting surprise tributes to celebrities in my home town, I found myself working with Eamonn Andrews among the national stars of the day: one programme, which saluted a famous sportsman, brought me face to face with Liverpool's George Harrison who appeared as one of the guests.

The detective skills I acquired in the world of TV showbiz later accompanied me to the realm of the roving news reporter. Whether broadcasting from Bethlehem, Belfast or Bondi Beach, I have always been energised by the intensity of research towards the final piece, almost as much as a live transmission. Integral to the journalism have been my encounters with people – religious leaders such as Rowan Williams and Basil Hume, political figures such as Mo Mowlam and Gerry Adams, sporting heroes such as Henry Cooper and Pat Cash, not to mention crime writers, among them Minette Walters and P. D. James.

But nothing in my privileged portfolio of reportage could have prepared me for my academic trail as a doctoral sleuth, a five-year investigation which began in southern England in the summer of 1997, took me across the Atlantic and back several times, came to fruition in the academic cloisters of Liverpool Hope University College, then culminated in a magnificent graduation ceremony in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool, on 11 July 2002. The date was extraordinarily significant, for it had been on 11 July 1993 that the BBC had broadcast a programme I had made on the very person who would become the subject of my PhD thesis: the spiritual writer and pastoral theologian, Henri J. M. Nouwen. Fortunately, I kept a copy of the raw, unedited interview.