Coming back, we were asked to lecture to lots of groups, and soon enough, with the others off making programmes, I did all the lectures. A huge production audience at The Groucho Club, who all took notes, and a small hostile engineering audience at a tv company in Bristol. Around the country I went, and to Ireland. I did the lecture at IBC in Amsterdam, walking on with my suitcase and tripod bag and setting it up as I talked, then showing what we had made with the gear. It was a tiny audience in a large lecture theatre, and outside in the huge exhibition halls the companies had no DV gear at all and everything cost tens of thousands. It wouldn’t last.
Soon after Amsterdam, I was in the office when I had a phone call on the mobile. I had shared the session with two others, a man from Granada and a South African. The call was from Howard, now back in South Africa – “Would I like to give the lecture in Johannesburg?” . Hmmm – let’s think…..
My last five years at the BBC went very well. For a tiny moment, I was the man who knew stuff. In 1996, in just a few days, I was asked to make BBC Children’s first DV documentary, to work on an Arts series called How Buildings Learn, and to run a new department called Smart Production. I took on the first two and turned down Smart, because I thought that the people setting it up had the wrong ideas on how to do things. Such luxury – to actually be able to turn something down.
I didn’t tell anyone, but I’d never made a long film – at age 49, the childrens documentary, part of The Lowdown series, would be my first film longer that 4 or so minutes. I decided to think of it as effectively 7 four minute films about the same continuing subject, blended together. That way it wouldn’t scare me too much. I decided it would be about some teenagers making a school website, itself a new thing at the time. A more important step was to try editing the film myself on an office Optima system like the one we’d used on PoV. This was another step into the unknown, but a natural progression from being your own camera crew. Although I’ve edited a lot of films myself since then, this first step was quite traumatic. Exec Producer Eric Rowan was enormously indulgent, both during filming and editing. After three weeks on Optima I had made a competent but dull film. We had always planned to have a professional editor join in, and her and Eric’s ideas made the film much more watchable. We achieved a high audience for the slot, and the film was featured in an exhibition at MOMI in London.
Interlaced with filming The Lowdown I worked on How Buildings Learn with the producers in the Arts department, doing training and working on various locations, effectively being the cameraman. Over the next few years I did this quite a few times, looking like the older cameraman working with young producers, but actually there to make sure we came home with workable rushes. I didn’t mind – I had nothing to prove, and enjoyed the trips.
Still lecturing through all this, I extended the content to include editing. A new system called Final Cut Pro was about to come on to the market, and we had a beta. It would run on a Mac laptop at broadcast quality. I had great fun at the end of lectures just opening the laptop and demonstrating what we could do. Astonishment all round.
Of course, being the BBC, they didn’t quite know what to do with me. A producer who was leading a technology revolution wasn’t making much in the way of programmes, but still, in the great Birtian world, had to be paid for out of a department budget. Features didn’t want to carry me, but didn’t mind if other departments paid for what I did. I had offered them a fly on the wall DV series about a charismatic doctor immediately after Morning Surgery, but got a memo reply which said “We don’t make this sort of programme”. A year later, and every year since…….
I worked for Arts on various things, then for a few months I found myself working in a demonstration area at White City (called The Smart Centre, not to be confused with Smart Production), and then on loan to something called BBC Production Training (not to be confused with BBC Training). The BBC had taken on a very nice lady to manage a big budget but who knew nothing about broadcasting. Hmmm…… In return for being attached to her department and eventually running a training scheme for series producers, I could pretty much do as I wanted around the edges. This was mostly good stuff, and I convinced her that in order to understand and teach, I also had to do. I made a number of short pieces, and another 30 minute film, this one about bomb disposal men. This time the editing went very well, and I was proud of the film from the start. The budget was £8000. At the same time, a producer I knew in Documentaries was making a series on a similar subject in a conventional way. She had £80,000 an episode. Hers looked the same as mine.
In 2001, Greg Dyke became Director General and started to undo the worst of the Birtian BBC. The new world wouldn’t include the BBC Production Training department. A lady in Personnel said – “why don’t you join the staff of the department, and you’ll have to be made redundant or redeployed”. So I left Features, where I hadn’t really been for some time, and joined a dying department as Manager of the Series Producer Development Scheme. Soon enough, someone told me “your job is vulnerable”. I worried quite a lot, but then worked out just how much they’d have to pay me to go. Wooo….!
I left the BBC in April 2001 to go freelance, just about 35 years after I had joined. I went out of the door on Friday, and was working again for the BBC the next Thursday, doing a lecture at Evesham. Soon, more freelance work came along. I worked for some years doing days as Duty Producer at BBC Weather. It was pretty tedious stuff, but the people were nice. I felt – and feel – sad for them, stuck in a security closed room doing the same thing over and over again.
Just before I left the BBC I emailed all my contacts to offer my freelance services. A reply came back from RTE in Dublin, where I had lectured for the RTS a while back. They needed to introduce new ways of working, as they were slightly stuck in the equivalent of the 1970s BBC. Having been lengthily interviewed in a cafe at Terminal 1 Heathrow, I started running courses for them, and did so for over 2 years. They flew me business class to Dublin, where I did four days a month, sometimes in two blocks of two, teaching DV skills and editing with FCP. Lots of fun, and I was sad when it came to an end, but it did seem like I’d trained the whole organisation at least once.
I stopped working for BBC weather in 2006, after becoming very annoyed with the current boss, and then realising that I no longer needed to be annoyed over work. So that was that, I was retired.
For about three months.
I went to the London TV equipment show, the one which seems to change its name most years. There I bumped into Susan Scotcher, who had been an attachee to Presentation a long time earlier. We chatted and looked at the gear we were both interested in, then she offered me a job. And ever since I’ve been working as a (very) part time lecturer at Kingston University, teaching the same sort of stuff as I did at RTE. It’s lots of fun and very satisfying, and I hope to do it for a good while yet.
So – that’s the working life of Bernard Newnham, up to now.
All in all, not bad.
Bernard Newnham 8/11/2010
PS – 14th December 2018. All things must pass, and the course I was working on at Kingston closed, so now I’m retired for the third time. I must admit that I went from “I’m not working there any more” to “I’m not working there any more!!” in just a few days. Further education in the UK has got into bad problems, and the students I was teaching really shouldn’t have been there in the first place (apart from a few). It can’t go on like this. Meanwhile I’ve signed up to teach at the Woking U3A. What that will bring I do not know.
BTTF
No Description
(One of my personal favourites of my trails, made in the early days of when editing had become an easy process, so you could make lots of cuts)
Earlier writings –
About DV (and more recent formats of similar ilk
