Southern Television - the region's first independent TV company - brought him on its evening news programme, Day by Day, in 1958.Goodland took early retirement from the NHS in 1981, helping his wife (as she became increasingly frail), his wife's mother and aged aunts. On his ancient typewriter Goodland wrote for over 80 publications. For 21 years he was monthly columnist for Hampshire, the county magazine created by a larger-than-life Fleet Street character, Paul Cave. "He had a dry sense of humour and keen perception, but his humour was never cruel," says Cave.Goodland started broadcasting on the BBC's as the "Hampshire Farmer" on The Farmer programme in 1949, launched his "Countryside Tales" on Radio Solent's Saturday Breakfast Show in 1982, and was a regular contributor to Woman's Hour. Sexton's Boy appeared in 1967, then Norman Goodland's Book of Country Craftiness (1981), Down on the Farm: his second book on country craftiness (1982) and Thicways and Athirt: a countryman's diary (1984). While in post he wrote Coronary Care (1970), the first British textbook for nurses on coronary disease, and General Intensive Care (1978).Apart from his novel, he had already started writing books about the countryside.
In 1953, with My Father Before Me (based on the story of his foster-father, a thatcher), he collaborated with the artist Frank Martin, who also illustrated Old Stan's Diary: autumn and winter on the farm, in 1963. Goodland found farming did not allow him enough time for writing, so he returned to nursing at Tatchbury Mount. Then, at the age of 30, he went to train as a state registered nurse, at a time when male general nurses were a rarity.He rose to be a charge nurse - equivalent of a sister - at both Southampton General Hospital, where he trained, and at the Royal South Hants Hospital. He was in charge of first a coronary care unit, then an intensive care unit. During his army service as a corporal he became a specialist in dysentery. He wrote amusingly of his experiences, in a book which he entitled Christian Soldiers.
It remained unpublished but his children read it to him in his last illness.After the war, he became a dairyman, married, and wrote a novel. Garnett Daubenay's Pipe (1948) was described as "one of the most faithful descriptions of workhouse and vagrant life ever written". It was at a local inn that Goodland learnt of the possibility of the job that was to launch him on a career in nursing. He was told about Tatchbury Mount, a home for boys with learning difficulties, classed in those days as "mentally defective".