In the late eighties John Birt introduced “producer choice” – producers had all-cash budgets which they could spend anywhere. This was very much a two edged sword for us producers. It gave us total control over our budgets, and meant that we didn’t have to use departments we didn’t like. The BBC film department, where crews were often on overtime before you even met them on location, folded quickly. In VT, people would get you a coffee instead of the other way round. But a good number of stupidities arose, and didn’t get fixed for a long time. It was cheaper to go and buy a CD than get it from the Gram Library, and because for a producer all money, internal and external, was the same, essential services like the Gram Library suffered.
About the same time my career all went wrong. I had been doing more and more management stuff – being sent on courses, acting as deputy Promotions Editor, and sometimes Editor. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted this, but at 40 it looked like one had to give in and send the juniors out to have the fun whilst staying behind scheduling trails in the office. I did sometimes schedule stuff so that I was the only one available, just to have a little fun now and then. Each week I scheduled all the trails on BBC TV, it wasn’t a very difficult task. Apparently a whole department does it these days.
The further up the greasy management pole you go, the slipperier it gets, and a few layers above me, one of my bosses slipped. The ramifications for the whole department were pretty bad, and I was one of the worst affected, as a new management came in at the top. Presentation was a small world, we all knew each other, and no love was lost between me and my new leaders. They tried hard to get me to leave but by that time I had a family to look after, and was too old to join the bottom of some other organisation.
In the midst of the following rather difficult few months, came an odd interlude. I was made producer of BBC adverts. We had made a “trail” for the Radio Times for many years – “sell the magazine through the programmes it mentions” had been the brief. Now the new management decided that we would sell every bit of BBC merchandise on BBC 1. I suggested that it wasn’t a good idea, as we had been pushing the boundaries a bit for some time. I wasn’t just ignored, I was put in charge. So I and various colleagues had commercial fun for a few months, the biggest highlight of which was making an advert on 35mm film on a Tunisian beach.
For an ad for a diet magazine, I ordered up bikini-clad models to stand in Pres A. One of them arrived early and we sat in reception waiting for the others. She had her portfolio with her, which turned out to be a big folder of full frontal nude pictures of herself. The place was crowded – Michael Palin was a few seats away – and it was difficult to know quite what to say.
Soon enough, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission fell on the BBC like a ton of bricks. I never said “I told you so”, but we all knew. It probably didn’t help.
Eventually, an opportunity to escape presented itself. The producer of Points of View had finished his stint, and I was offered the chance to take over on an open ended basis. I took it, and went into exile. I spent four years working with Anne Robinson – enough said. PoV was a formula show, pretty much the same every week, but we had a big audience that never went below 6 million and often 8 or 9, depending on what we followed. “Annie” said we were like the butter in a sandwich – unremarkable, but important to the final result. My name, not a common one, was on the screen just before the news every week at 9.00pm – good advertising.
PoV didn’t occupy all the week’s hours, and although it was possible just to swan around, it was boring, so I didn’t, and used spare cash to make small films and vox pops just for variety. IMDB used to say that I had produced around 150 editions, and I think that’s true. I did some other small bits of innovation when possible. We were the first BBC programme to invite emails and have an address with @ in it. In the office was a 9600 baud modem, the first, and at that time only, internet connection at Television Centre.
Another thing I did to while away the hours was to write a computerised presentation scheduling system. I had tried a few years earlier for the previous management, but the new one was eager to spend megabucks rather that use my cheap idea. Then along came BBC World tv, which had no money. “Could I resurrect my system?”, asked Warwick Cross, who’d been put in charge. I did it, and soon more than half the material that went out on BBC channels was scheduled by my system, which went by the acronym of PILOTS. Meanwhile the big expensive system, called PICS, stalled for several years and was rumoured to be costing £20m. Mine cost a few hours of my down time and £3000 for the terminals, and was in use for nine years. It could have made for a major scandal, but I just wanted to keep my head down and feed my family. Broadcast magazine found out, though not from me, and the editor told me the story as she knew it and asked me to comment. I didn’t.
Four years went by, and the now no-longer-new management had more grand plans. The non-core parts of Presentation, mostly weather and PoV, were hived off – weather to news, and PoV to Features. We moved from Television Centre to White City, where our new boss tried to help ease us in by giving us an executive producer (make-work for him, I think). He turned out to be a rather – disturbed – person, and a very bad thing for us. The few months that followed were the lowest part of all my career.
Then it all changed.
It was the age of the information superhighway, and digital, whatever that was. Someone had realised that “digital” was the future, and maybe costs could be reduced in some way because of it. New Technology became the New Thing. At PoV I had bought, some months before, a computer editing system for the office. Although very expensive versions of these were already in use in VT, something that could sit in the office and be operated by assistant producers was very new, and we had the first one. I was asked to demonstrate it to Features department producers, who were somewhat astonished. When, a few weeks later, pronouncements came down to the departments to do digital things, whatever they were, I was the person to do something – anything, really – for Features.
So I did. I was taken off PoV pretty much instantly, and sat down in an office and asked to make digital magic. By a stroke of luck for me, Sony and other companies had just invented a new recording format – DV. I got hold of a camera, a VX1000, and was myself astonished at the quality of the pictures from the small camera and tiny tapes. The world was about to change and I was the one holding it in my hand. There was an advert on tv around that time for the National Lottery with a big hand pointing and saying “It’s You”, and for a while at BBC TV it was me. I was asked to show the camera at various management level seminars, and again, all were astonished. I became a bit famous around the place.
The first real test was when Science wanted to make a daily show in a hospital. This had been done as one offs before with major outside broadcast facilities, but this series was only being allowed a very low budget. Could I put together a way of using the new cameras with the production team operating the equipment? This is controversial stuff when published on a tech-ops site, and it was then too. I had no desire to put my former colleagues and friends out of work, but I knew this was the future – whatever background people had started in, they’d soon have to be producer, director, cameraman, soundman and getter of coffees. The budgets available on the new and ever expanding number of channels weren’t going to allow for big crews and that was that. So I built up some kits for the producers (including me) to use – a camera, some microphones and some lights. I think I’m the only producer ever to book a soldering iron out of stores – to solder up some sound adaptors, as no-one technical would help me. I made foam inserts for carrying cases by using an electric carving knive in my kitchen. All the gear was much smaller than the normal stuff used at the time, and could easily be carried by one person, though I insisted, and generally still do, that two people was the minimum team.
Morning Surgery was a great success, and I had fun making a piece about rescue helicopters.
All the films were made by the production team and glued together with other items and links made by an OB crew. Our OB scanner was a trolley with a Betacam recorder and a Grass Valley mixer on one end and a sound mixer on the other. I directed and vision mixed most of the shows – we’d pitch up in a hospital ward or wherever, plug in to a 13amp socket, and the whole thing would be ready to go in just a few minutes. Meanwhile the films were being edited on brand new technology online Avids in a disused operating theatre.
All the production people had been on a short course learning how to operate the kit, and my supposition that if you already knew what you wanted in a film, then learning in a few weeks what camera and sound people learned in their first few weeks was perfectly viable. In the next couple of years the executive producers of White City didn’t take the philosophy on board, and sent out completely untrained people saying “it’s just a camcorder, like your home video”. Many big disasters occured because they didn’t understand that it wasn’t the camera that mattered, but the camera operator. Many years on, I teach students who expect to work in just the way we started then. It’s the way it’s done.
