MY LIFE IN TELEVISION – WORLDWIDE

 

Chapter Headings

1. Early days in radio, 1959-60

2. Starting young; television for kids and teens 1961-64

3. Birth of a new network: BBC2 1964-65

4. The Big Time: Panorama 1965-66.

5. Interlude in Afghanistan, Spring 1966.

6. The Money Program 1966-68

7. Birth of an Independent: Prestel Productions 1968-71

8. Promoting Britain; life at the Central Office of Information  1971-73

9. Going international; life at Reuters Visnews 1973-79.

10. Independent again; Kensington Film Services 1979-83

11. The Franchise Game: Television North 1980-81

12. Bangkok Thailand; ClearviewCable gets cloudy 1983-84

13. Middle East Television: Jerusalem and Beirut 1984-86

14. Coming to American academia. 1986-2008 and continuing…

15. Why Regent ? A note on choosing graduate education in Cinema/Television

 

1. EARLY DAYS IN RADIO 1959-1960

Making movies, making television, begins with writing. Whether it is a few headings scribbled on the back of an envelope, or a detailed shooting script, picture ideas come first from the mind, then from the paper.  The idea that you can simply go out and shoot anything that moves is a receipt for some very boring footage.  Footage, you say, why footage?  Because when I began in television back in 1960, television was limited to the studio; all location filming was done on 16mm film.  The longest you could film at any one time was ten minutes, which represented a full 400 feet of film running at 25 frames a second.  Britain and most other European counties used the PAL TV system which required the cameras to run one frame faster than the traditional 24 frames a second invented back in 1927 in Hollywood when sound on film first began. 
Film was expensive; the fact that it took time to load a film magazine was a very good check on the director, who was constantly reminded that he or she needed to make every shot count. 

My training as a program maker began in radio; in September 1959 I won a temporary trainee appointment for three months as a writer reporter for the BBC World Service.  My job was to go to press conferences and write about anything new in technology and science that had been announced in London that day.  So I went to lots of trade shows and soon discovered why some British journalists are alcoholics; the liquor flowed freely in order to persuade journalists to write favorably about the latest invention.  Alcohol in Britain was expensive; free booze was just too much of a temptation to resist. The London satirical magazine had a famous fictional columnist called “lunchtime O’Booze”, and there were many “lunchtime O’Boozes” around.  Most press conferences were in the morning so as to give journalists the afternoon time to write their reports.  Radio reporters had just begun to take along a primitive tape recorder called an L5; a BBC invention that recorded 7.5 i.p.s. (inches of tape per second) for interviews, and 15i.p.s. for music.  However as all my pieces were to be translated into some of the eighty different languages broadcast by the BBC World Service,  I did not at that stage need a tape recorder. My job was to write four minute reports in clear English in a style that could be easily translated.  Having written for Oxford University magazines like Cherwell, Isis and Oxford Opinion, I thought this would be an easy task.  How wrong I was; after my second report I was summoned to meet my boss, the great Martin Esslin, a Jewish Austrian refugee from the Nazis, who later wrote the definitive book on Berthold Brecht.

“Vat is zees?” he said in his heavy German accent pointing with disgust to my first report:  “you do not know how to write your own language; do it again.”  The trouble was that my oblique style of writing was ill suited to hard pressed translators who were desperate to make news deadlines.  I began to write plain English, which should be the aim of every reporter.  At that stage I had never seen Professor Strunk’s admirable little book “Elements of Style” with his strident commands “do not overwrite” and “do not overstate”.  Under Martin Esslin’s kindly guidance, my prose style improved vastly.

My next assignment was to the London region’s nightly news program.  Now I was loaned a tape recorder and told to find stories.  I remember standing in Hampstead Garden suburb seeking “vox pops” (man on the street type interviews), and learning first that heavy traffic noise can ruin any interview and second that those portable tape recorders with large batteries were very heavy to carry.  Getting good interviews was much harder than I had expected, but my skills improved with practice. I also discovered that trying to park a car in London was always difficult; much better to take a taxi, and the BBC was generous with taxi allowances, the theory being that if a reporter took a tape on the subway system, the magnetic fields generated by the train’s electric motors might wipe the tape. So taxis were always permitted, and many reporters made a point of taking tapes with them everywhere simply to obtain taxi expenses.   If you needed to record music, then you booked a BBC Radio recording car, which came with a skilled engineer.

I remember with great pleasure recording a South London jazz group in a pub, and then spending thirty hours of a skilled tape editor’s time trying to cut down the recording to a few brief minutes.  Such prodigal use of editing time earned me an official rebuke, but that was about the only time that I was ever accused of extravagance; while the BBC paid its staff modestly, it was generous with program funds. 

I was poor but I was happy.  My starting salary was $1400 a year, which covered the cost of a room in Swiss Cottage, then a shared apartment in the East End of London, and the running costs of an ancient three wheeler car, a rare prewar breed called a Raleigh. The steering wheel was in the front, but if on a wet night you put a passenger in the back seat, the front wheel had minimum contact with the road, and you tacked rather than steered across London.  After a couple of years I moved to an East End apartment in Stepney, at the top of an old rectory next to an architectural marvel, Nicholas Hawksmoor’s St. George-in-the-East church.  One night a week I ran a youth club for a great bunch of cockney teenagers whose irrepressible good humor was a tonic in an area with so much devastation from the bombing, and from street crime.  In 1960 the walk from Aldgate East metro station to Cannon Street road took about fifteen minutes, and there was a prostitute standing in every doorway. Government legislation cleared the streets, but did not end prostitution in the area; we used to escort the girls to their homes when the youth club closed to make sure they were not mistaken for ladies of the night.

In the Spring of 1960 I was assigned to the BBC’s West Country regional headquarters in Bristol, surely the most friendly BBC regional center in Britain.  My job was with the BBC Religious department; I had to arrange for Sunday “outside broadcasts” (remotes) from churches in the region.  This gave me the chance for a great deal of travel all over the beautiful counties of Dorset and Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, surely the most beautiful counties in Britain.  I contributed to the regional news on a regular basis, and became very interested in the gypsies, who suffered considerable lack of civil rights.  They were not permitted to enter most public houses, were frequently attacked by farmers who wanted them to move on, and whose children completely missed all educational opportunities.  The local police forces protected gypsies from a hostile public.  I remember trekking one evening across a “blasted heath” with my friend Raymond Cozened to find three gypsy caravans parked on common land.  By firelight I recorded the life story of an old gypsy woman who had spent her whole life “on the road” and who was only persuaded to speak in English rather than her native Romany language because I pointed out that none of my listeners would understand Romany.  I eventually made a radio documentary on the persecution of the West Country gypsies.  Another radio documentary that helped my career was concerned with Bristol’s housing development.  The program was a considerable success and garnered flattering press coverage, and good reports from the BBC’s sophisticated audience research department.  I was ready to be promoted to national network radio in the shape of the daily morning “Today” show.

Working on the “Today” show meant sleeping in a small cubicle in Broadcasting House, and rising at 5.00 to put the show together.  At that time in the morning I made mistakes; the one I best remember was with a quiz segment I had invented for the program.  The idea was to play a popular song from a movie; the test was to identify which movie and who was singing the song.  One of the questions was who sung in the movie “And Man Created Woman”.  I had obtained the record from the music library, and on the record label it stated that the singer was Brigitte Bar dot.  Scores of listeners rang to complain that Bardot did not sing the song herself; we were forced to apologize, something the BBC never likes to do. But my nice boss was supportive; she stated I was entitled to believe what was printed on the label.  I enjoyed my time with the Today  program, but I was still determined to go to television.

2.  STARTING YOUNG: TELEVISION FOR KIDS AND TEENS 1961-64

In September 1960 I got my wish; I was transferred to Children’s Television in Shepherds Bush.  My very first program was called “Adolphus the Carthorse” which used a series of black and white drawings mounted on three stands. Three cameras were trained on the pictures, and the task was to cut between the cameras as the storyteller told the story, the drawings being changed after every shot. 

On the first day I tried to direct, the studio talk back system failed and I sat paralyzed in the studio, unable to communicate with the floor.  The Deputy Head of the Department almost decided I would never make it, but fortunately gave me another chance and soon I was directing a series of children’s programs for the network. But what I needed was a job, not just an attachment, which was the temporary rank assigned to all trainees, and which lasted only a few months.  Finally my chance came in the Spring of 1961; Schools Television needed a young studio director, and I got the job, assigned to a man who became one of BBC’s best known documentary directors, Peter Montagnon.  Peter went on from Schools TV to produce the award winning series Civilisation with Sir Kenneth Clark, The Long Search with Richard Eyre, and finally his series on China The Heart of the Dragon for Channel Four television, produced by his own company Antelope Films.  

In 1961 Peter was producing the Schools TV series Going to Work, and I became his assistant.  I could not have had a better boss; he immediately took me on location so I could watch him directing.  His P.A. Ray also taught me a lot about organizing studio and film shoots.  By the summer he gave me my first episode to direct called “Working in a Carpet Factory”.  I was to shoot it in Northern Ireland, at that time a peaceful country.  The carpet factory chosen was in Donahadee, a pleasant seaside resort; I flew out to prepare the program, and a month later turned up with my four person camera team to shoot the movie.  I felt intimidated by the whole task, but the crew, two on camera, one sound, one on lighting were very helpful, and helped me to avoid the most obvious mistakes like “crossing the line.”  The series Going to Work always featured a teenager who was adapting to the work environment; my chosen lead was a young sixteen year old with a strong Northern Ireland accent which was not always very comprehensible. Shy as she was, she accepted camera directions happily, and the two week shoot went smoothly.  The editing process was fascinating, and I was pleased with the final program.

In the Autumn I also got my first overseas location; we were filming the story of a young Royal Air Force mechanic, and we followed him out to the RAF base on the island of Cyprus.  Aphrodite’s Isle was indeed enchanting; we stayed at the glamorous Ledra Palace hotel in Nicosia, a marbled hall palace with an outdoors dance floor.  I have the happiest memories of dancing there with my P.A. Ray under a full moon; there was always the temptation to fall in love with your PA on glamorous locations, but fortunately this did not happen.  The Ledra Palace hotel features in various books and novels of the period as the haunt of spies and journalists during the “Enosis” period, the Cypriot armed struggle for independence from Britain.  Greek waiters would tip off journalists about where the next attack on the British occupying forces would take place; no money ever passed hands for this information, but your laundry bills would be enormous!  By 1961 there was a time of peace in Cyprus; the island had not yet been divided into Greek and Turkish sectors; it was still possible to drive up through the mountains to the seaport of Kyrenia for dinner.  On the last evening we drove down to eat on the beach at Limassol; the moonlight made the evening unforgettable. My dream at the time was to shoot documentaries overseas for the rest of my life. Surprisingly over the next twenty years that dream came true.  Peter Montagnon had taught me a fast amount about filming documentary; now I wanted a film series to direct and produce on my own.

The Head of Schools Programs was a brilliant man, a war hero who still suffered from serious wounds, an ex-teacher called Kennneth Fawdry; his book about Schools Television Everything but Alf Garnet is still one of the best descriptions of what can be achieved through educational television.  At one of the departmental meetings Kenneth  lectured us all on the importance of  the classroom experience; those of us who had never taught were encouraged to get an attachment to a London school to find out how tough life could be in the classroom.  To his surprise I volunteered to teach, and soon found myself in a tough East End school attempting to deal with unruly teenagers.  I found the task far more difficult and less rewarding than making films; four weeks was enough to last me for a very long time.  Later I was to marry a teacher from an East End school; how she could silence an unruly class with a look was a skill I never mastered, and I am still in awe of her abilities. 

Having survived the London blackboard jungle, I was given a film series of my own called Challenge,  a series of twenty minute films shot on locations all over Britain about mountaineering, underwater swimming, sailing, cycling, and other adventure sports.  The first of the series was about Britain’s most popular individual sport, fishing.  We chartered a canal boat and made most of the program on the Macclesfield canal; the cameraman was Alan Featherstone who later retired to run an excellent pub somewhere in the home counties; for some reason I still seem to have a lot of photos of that shoot, reproduced here.  I always remember one amusing incident connected with the fishing story; there was an old couple sitting on the tow path watching the water, and I grabbed a cutaway shot of them.  Afterwards the old man came up to me looking worried and asked me if I would not show the shot of them on television. Since I did not have their written release I readily agreed, but asked why?  “The lady I am with is not my wife” he replied blushing, and hurried away before I could ask him anything else.  To this day I warn my students to get signed releases of people they have filmed.

The mountaineering episode was shot in Snowdonia in very bad weather; the subject of that program was an inner-city teenager who had never climbed before.   Half way up the cliff face in very wet weather, she lost her nerve and became paralyzed with fear.     The camera crew and the instructors quickly realized what had happened; being roped she was in no immediate danger, but the light was  failing and everyone was getting very cold.  I realized that there was little I could do to help from the bottom of the cliff face. gf. To her great credit, my star mastered her panic and completed the climb. Afterwards the camera crew and instructors discussed whether this situation could have been avoided, and decided that it could not have done so; the series depended on its authenticity.  We had shown a girl paralyzed with fear; we had also shown her conquering her fears.

The underwater and sailing films were made in the attractive little port of Salcombe in South Devon; I rented a large motor cruiser to provide a stable camera platform, and the entire crew lived on board.  The BBC expenses department soon got to hear of  this ingenious plan and announced that no hotel allowances were payable on this location.  It reminded me of the cameraman in Cyprus who spent all night filming a forest fire and then claimed his overnight allowance.  But said his administrative officer, you were filming all night so you never needed a bed; request denied.

The underwater filming provided the greatest challenge; the cameraman Jeff Mulligan knew how to swim underwater but the sound recordist did not, so we did without underwater sound. I took lessons in a swimming pool in order to learn to direct underwater, but swimming underwater in the ocean is a different experience.  The first problem we encountered was poor visibility; heavy weather had stirred up the sandy bottom of the sea, and it was hard to see.  With two underwater camera mounts both Jeff and I decided to operate a camera each below the surface, though we tended to lose each other in the murky visibility.  We swam around for about forty minutes, and then with our air supply getting short we both surfaced together to see an amazing sight; the assistant cameraman was also emerging from the water soaking wet, carrying the surface camera, an Arriflex 16mm BL.  He had been filming from a small dinghy using a heavy tripod, and the weight of the camera and tripod had capsized his boat. Clearly sea water is fatal to delicate camera mechanism and the only solution is to emerge the whole camera in industrial alcohol, a strictly controlled substance. The local pharmacist asked if we were planning a big party, but fortunately believed our story and supplied the required alcohol. The camera was rebuilt and went on for many more years with the BBC. 

The second incident on that shoot nearly cost me my life.  The skipper of a diving vessel had told me that water conditions were much clearer out to sea, but the difficulty was that in deeper waters there were some powerful underwater currents.  We sailed out into deep waters; the water looked clear from the surface, but I decided to test it, and dived in alone.  With my weights not properly adjusted I sank to about forty feet quite fast, and realized that I must come up slowly in order to decompress adequately. 

Though forty feet is not a great depth, as I slowly ascended I experienced what divers call “rapture of the deep”; I was nearly overcome with a completely irrational desire to tear off my breathing mask and dance in this beautiful undersea environment.   I was also aware that I could no longer see the diving vessel; a strong undersea current was dragging me away further out to sea.  My cameraman ordered a rescue dinghy launched, and when I finally surfaced the dinghy was not too far away.  There was an awkward silence when  I finally climbed back on deck; Jeff remarked cheerfully that he thought he had lost his director. With conditions clearly dangerous, we did no more filming that day.

 

3. BIRTH OF A NEW NETWORK: BBC 2 1964-65

Much as I enjoyed Schools Television, my desire was to get into network public affairs programming; the flagship programme was called Panorama, a program very like the American CBS series 60 Minutes.   The directors and producers in these jobs were regarded as an elite, and vacancies were rare.  I doubt if I would ever had made the grade, but for a lucky break.  In 1964 the BBC launched its second channel called BBC2, and there were vacancies for studio and film directors.  As I had experience of both, I applied, was interviewed by the brilliant program editor David Webster, and to my delight was appointed to the two BBC2 public affairs programs, Enquiry and Encounter.  Encounter was a studio based interview program in which three experienced interviewers questioned a world famous figure.  While I was directing the Encounter studio we profiled Indian prime ministers Shastri and Indira Ghandi, Democratic presidential candidate Humbert Humphey, and African American leaders Malcolm X and James Baldwin.  Meeting the great and the good was an exhilarating experience, and fuelled my life long interest in politics.    

Enquiry was a location based film program hosted by the then unknown new journalist David Dimbleby, son of the famous Panorama anchor Richard Dimbleby. I was at that time very interested in the social services, and wondered how other nations dealt with the problems of looking after the aged.  The Dutch were among the most advanced in this field, so David Dimbleby and I set off for the land of the windmills to cover Dutch treatment for the aged.  We stayed in Amsterdam’s best hotel, and filmed in ancient alms houses and modern centers for the aged.  David was a brilliant reporter, and after initial caution we ended up respecting each others’ skills.  In the USA reporters wield all the power, but the British tradition is different; while the reporters are important, the final say tends to go to the program directors and producers, not to the reporter.  Another Enquiry program posed the question who are the best and worst drivers in Europe?  We went to Stockholm in the dead of winter to film Swedes racing cars on frozen lakes, and to Belgium where there was at that time no driving test, and where Belgian drivers were frequently arrested in France for bad driving, and their cars confiscated. I loved Sweden, and met there a beautiful Swedish lady called Siv, but that is another story.

The only factor that held us back from shooting more stories overseas were limitations to the travel budget; we could not afford to ship camera crews overseas every month.  So a great deal of ingenuity was exercised in finding free flights.  For our enquiry into the future of the British Navy we wanted to film aboard one of Britain’s new American- designed nuclear submarines, but these were based at Gibraltar, at the gateway to the  Mediterranean.  How could we get there?  The answer came unexpectedly; the Head of the RAF transport command was a friend of the Governor of Gibraltar, and decided to spend a bank holiday weekend seeing his friend.  So naturally if you are head of Transport Command, you don’t buy your own airline ticket to your holiday destination; you take a Hercules cargo plane and pilot out there yourself, complete with a full RAF crew,  just to keep your flying hours up.  Into the huge empty hold we loaded our camera crew and equipment, and enjoyed a noisy flight to the Rock. 

That night we went out to the wardroom on the nuclear sub to enjoy a few drinks and discuss what we would be allowed to film on this top secret vessel.  The answer was encouraging; we would accompany the sub on a test firing mission the following day.  Next morning found me and then camera crew ensconced in the forward torpedo room watching magnetic torpedoes being loaded and launched.  “Fire One; fire two; fire three; fire four:” the commands were barked over the tannoy.  I sent the camera team back to join David Dimbleby in the control room which was quaintly still called “the Bridge”. More torpedoes disappeared with a hiss, then suddenly the submarine seemed to stand on its nose, and dived with a great rushing and vibrating of the whole hull.  I vaguely wondered whether something had gone wrong, or whether these gyrations were part of normal submarine maneuvers.

David  Dimbleby told me later what had happened. One of the torpedoes had turned around and come back to its host; the first officer spotted this on his radar and calmly asked the captain for his orders. The captain replied something like  “hard a starboard; full dive”; the orders were quietly spoken without a trace of emotion or worry.  All gauges had been covered with leather patches to prevent the camera recording vital data; as the sub dived all the covers tilted sideways and the captain was worried we had filmed vital data; we promised to delete all telltale footage.  I went up to the conning  tower as we steamed back to port on the surface; the crew offered to take us back to England underwater, but we all politely declined.  The noisy Hercules cargo plane seemed much the more attractive proposition.

With the Defense budget being discussed in the House of Commons, the program proved to be of blockbuster value and was extensively advertised by the BBC before transmission.    The program went well on the night, and we all went out to dinner to celebrate after transmission.  I got back very late about 2.00am to find a huge note from my flat sharer on my pillow;  it read “ring Paul Fox (the Head of Current Affairs) immediately, whatever the time.”  My heart missed a beat; had there been some terrible mistake?  Was I about to be fired?  I called the number and a sleepy Paul mumbled “what  are you doing tomorrow? I need you to fly to Washington immediately.  Do you have a visa? If not get one immediately” The next morning was hectic, and by the afternoon I was at 33,000 feet gazing on the glaciers of Iceland.   What had happened was that our star Panorama reporter Robin Day insisted he had his own producer with him to arrange interviews while he covered the first visit of the new Labor Party Prime Minister Harold Wilson to President Lyndon Johnston in the White House.  There were no Panorama producers available, so they were reduced to sending a completely green producer from BBC2; I learnt fast; this was to be my lucky break. 

I woke at six to discover that my hotel, the Washington, was right outside the White House; by ten am I was to take my American stringer cameraman to set up on the White House lawn to film President Johnson welcoming the new British prime minister.   All the camera crews lined up in the sub zero weather (it was February) to watch the review of the Presidential guard, then they were to line up to focus on the small dais facing the press where the two world figures would speak.  President Johnston was a tall man well over six feet, and the microphones were set to his height.  Striding out without a coat (he was said to have had electrically heated underwear) he spoke for less than two minutes, aware that most of us had already exposed more than half our ten minute film magazines.

Then Harold Wilson spoke; he was a short man and none of us heard a word he said, since the microphones were set above his head.  Lyndon Johnston understood in a flash, and in a moment that symbolized the difference between the two nations, big man Johnston pulled down the microphones so that little man Harold Wilson could be heard.     

Wilson was muffled up in a huge fur coat he had hired from the clothes outfitters Moss Bros, and before we had time to hear what he was saying our magazines ran out of film. Most of his speech was lost to posterity as we struggled to reload.  How was I to get more footage?  I knew that Wilson was due to attend a White House dinner that night, arriving in the ambassadorial Rolls Royce.  I called the British Embassy and asked to borrow the Rolls for the afternoon; I wanted to put my cameraman in the back and film the view of the White House gates opening as the ambassadorial Rolls drove up to the front steps. This ruse worked well; in the evening I was at the steps to film Prime Minister Wilson emerging from the Rolls with the British ambassador and his wife.  Viewers got the impression that we had traveled inside the Prime Minister’s car. Next came cocktails on the second floor; we stayed inside the entrance to film the presidential party coming downstairs again to go into dinner, accompanied by the White House orchestra. 

As the tuxedo garbed diplomats descended the stairs the orchestra struck up with “Land of Hope and Glory” which some of the American diplomats confused with the British National Anthem, and so came to stop on the stairs in a respectful attitude standing at attention.  The British guests had no such qualms; they knew that “Land of Hope and Glory” was not the National Anthem, and so continued down the steps, bumping into the Americans who had stopped.  All was hilarious confusion right in front of my cameraman who recorded everything.  

Next morning I was due to go out to Arlington Cemetery where Harold Wilson was to lay a wreath on the grave of President Kennedy.  AS I was arranging for interviews with Senators Javetts and Church, I left that to the cameraman to record.  The results were highly amusing.  Wilson strode forward to lay the wreath; he should then have smartly about turned and marched back to the line from where he was standing. But Wilson who was in the war Cabinet never did military service, and had no idea how to about turn smartly.  Instead he attempted to walk backwards through the long grass, stumbled, failed and eventually shambled backwards to the line, looking clearly crestfallen.  I put the film in my briefcase and hand carried it through customs, arriving early on Monday morning; the film was to be transmitted on Panorama that Monday night. My luggage was lost, but luckily I had the film in my hands, and was able to rush it to the laboratory immediately.  The program as transmitted was quite amusing; the program makers wanted to make the new Prime Minister look inept and though my intention was not theirs, my footage gave them exactly the ammunition they needed.  Derek Amoore Head of Tonight programs and the Panorama bosses loved my piece; I was offered a job on this top program immediately.  I felt I had arrived at last.

 

4. THE BIG TIME: Panorama 1965-66

Panorama was an enormously influential program; after fifty years it still runs today. , and is the subject of an important book.  I soon discovered that working for Panorama was a 24/7 commitment; every Tuesday morning we had a post mortem on the previous night’s program, and starting planning for the following Monday.  The pace was thrilling, and by dint of scouring the newspapers I came up with some original stories that garnered good press reviews.  One of the most interesting was a story on industrial espionage.  A middle aged man turned up one day claiming to be a Foreign Office plant; his job had been to go to Brazil posing as an import-export agent, while all the while working on finding out who in Brazil set the price of coffee. The answer turned out to be an incorruptible member of the Central Bank; the question remained did he carry the coffee futures prices in his head, or did he have them typed out?  By engineering a dispute between two buyers sitting in his huge office waiting their turn, my spy found out that the bank director had a typed list.  After that is was a simple matter to bribe his secretary by telling her that the President of Brazil needed this information, but was unable to obtain it.  After we transmitted the program the Brazilian Embassy demanded to see the tape; we failed to oblige them.  Another company dealt with in the program was an American small parts group who had their office raided and all their sales contacts files removed by the sales manager of a rival British firm.  I told the story from the American point of view; when the program ended I received a call from an anonymous caller who said that the British company was only trying to regain their own files, which had been stolen from them by one of their own salesmen who was sleeping with the secretary of the American company. Even if I had known that earlier, what could I have said; there was no evidence that his story was true, though I suspect it may have been.

Working as Panorama’s studio director I also got to know the main news anchor Richard Dimbleby.  He was a fantastic professional; he would ask me how many seconds he was to fill while I was maneuvering the old turret cameras into the next position.  Unlike the newer zoom cameras, if you wanted a close up instead of a medium shot, you had to cut away to another camera while the lenses were swung into a new configuration.  This could take several seconds; we rehearsed the moves carefully,  and on transmission Richard would take the identical time for a move that he had taken during rehearsal. He always made the studio director look good.  I was also privileged to film the very last story he ever made, which concerned Sir Winston Churchill’s grave in Blaydon churchyard.   Richard was already desperately ill with cancer, but he was determined to make this one last tribute to the British prime minister he most admired. We drove up to Blaydon near Oxford, and decided to do the final stand-up with Richard sitting on Sir Winston’s stone columbarium; he was poor man, too weak to stand.  Two weeks later he was dead.

I confess I was not a good studio director; the stress of cutting between live cameras and cueing film inserts was not my particular skill, and one time on live transmission I made a serious mistake.  The program always began with forty seconds of wonderfully ponderous music while we showed film clips from the first story scheduled, which in this case was a story from reporter Michael Charlton about the famine in Bihar State in India.  During the final ten minutes of electronic adjustments called “line-up” just before the program went on-air the program editor Jeremy Isaacs suddenly decided to start with videotape of the Senate investigations into the Watergate affair instead.   I failed to run down the forty seconds of opening credits of Bihar, so when the substitute anchor Robin Day said “over now to Michael Charlton in Bihar” the whole Panorama program appeared to begin again with thunderous music and opening credits for the second time; We quickly switched to Robin in the studio who apologized to listeners on air and told them we would get the correct story in a moment.  Unlike Richard Dimbleby, Robin Day was unable to talk off the cuff, so we rang him again on the studio desk to say the story would be up in five seconds, and so it was.  That night a satirical program called “Late Night Line-Up” sent us up brilliantly.  They repeated the double start, and when the phone rang on Robin’s desk a sexy voice said “Darling I’ve forgotten the potatoes for dinner; I know you don’t like me calling you at work, but be a sweetie and bring some home with you”.  At the second call the same voice said “And I’ve forgotten to buy salad as well”.  Everyone told me about the Late Night Line-Up program the next morning and I agreed it was amusing.  The program editor Jeremy Isaacs did not find the incident funny; he complained vigorously the next morning, and I never directed Panorama again.  I then made the mistake of going on holiday; after three months of almost continuous seven day working I was earned huge quantities of compensatory leave time, and was ready to take a long break.  As Panorama was off the air in the Summer months, it seemed a good idea at the time.

 

5. INTERLUDE IN AFGHANISTAN, Spring 1966

My brother had just completed a two year residency in Pakistan where he was an agricultural adviser working for the Hunting Clan company on the River Sind irrigation project.  He suggested that I flew out to join him so we could drive home together through Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey and Western Europe.  I welcomed the idea, and bought a clockwork Bolex 16mm camera to record part of the trip.  I wanted to visit Russia, so booked my flight with a three day stop-over in Moscow.  In those days, international travelers were limited to 20 kilos of luggage, and by the time I had packed 20 cans of film and the camera. I was well over weight.  To avoid the overweight charges, I asked my mother to sew twenty film pockets into the lining of my anorak; I felt like a man wearing chain mail, and clanked when I walked, but avoided the extra charges.  When I arrived at Moscow’s airport, I felt I should declare the film in case they accused me of smuggling, or worse still, of unauthorized filming in the Soviet Union.  But I could find no one who spoke English, so I ignored the problem and went on into Moscow.  Staying at the Tsarist Metropole hotel was a delight; Russian caviar was very good and absurdly cheap, but I discovered that unless you tipped your waiter in advance of being served, you waited for ever.  Moscow was covered with a thick blanket of snow; burly Russian women cleared it, but did not appreciate me taking photos of them doing so.  ON the appointed day I went back to the airport only to discover that due to a mistake in London, the plane for Karachi had already left.  My visa now expired I went back into Moscow to wait for next plane three days later, an Air India jet bound for New Delhi.  I ran into my Intourist guide in the street who asked me why I was in Moscow without a valid visa, I explained and she smiled. On the Sunday when I arrived at the airport I was met by two plain clothes police who took me to a very warm underground interrogation chamber.  Sweating profusely in my film-laden anorak, I wondered whether to confess that I was smuggling film, and decided against it.  The two offices spoke in low terms in Russian, and then finally said in English “we know a secret; if we share our secret with you, you will tell no-one.”  “No-no, of course not” I gasped, wondering if my next stop would be their big prison for undesirable aliens.  “Your plane will not come tonight: he said conspiratorially; “we give you this document; it will buy you one cup of free coffee at the airport canteen.”  I gasped my thanks and hurried upstairs; the canteen was closed, but another English family were also standing there waiting for the same Air India flight.  “Ssstt” I said, I’ve just found out what is happening to our plane”. Sure they said, “its not coming.” So much for secrets under communism.

I spent the night in an airport hostel, and flew on the next morning to New Delhi.  I had arranged to meet my brother at a small hotel near the airport, but I had arrived three days late, and was not surprised when he was not there. There was no message.  How among India’s teeming six hundred million was I to find one solitary Englishman? The task seemed impossible.  I uttered a silent prayer, walked out into the street and there was Edward, himself three days late due to delays in his return from the Himalayas.  We embraced, and went on by taxi to Agra to see the Taj Mahal for the afternoon.  This surely is the most beautiful building in the world, but the heat at over 120 Fahrenheit was almost unbearable.  We went back to the airport and flew to Karachi, and then Lahore.  There we had our 1952 Volkswagen bug checked over mechanically, then photographed it under the signpost in central Lahore which reads “Karachi 650 miles, Rawlpindi 180 miles, London 5,360 miles.”  

The country leading to Peshawar and the Kyhber pass is spectacularly beautiful; we stayed in an old British army rest house full of pictures of my grandfather’s years on the NorthWest frontier prior to 1914, when he played polo and guarded the empire against attacks from the duplicitous Afghans.  My mother was born up here near Muree in 1912 while my grandfather was on a tiger shoot; he insisted on taking his wife with him to watch the sport, and she insisted on being placed up a tree with her amah (servant) to avoid being mauled by the man-eater.  The tiger decided to take its night-time exercise pacing round the bottom of the tree, thus preventing my grandfather from getting a good shot at it in case he wounded his wife and unborn daughter as well.  Next morning the baby was born in the jungle, and was loaded on an open oxcart for the two day journey back to the hotel at Muree. When they arrived the hotel was closing for the winter, so my mother and grandmother traveled on to the regimental base camp. Hearing of these adventures, my great grandmother insisted she send a trained Norland nanny to India to rescue the poor little girl, who thenceforward grew up in England.  You had to be tough to be a military wife in those days.

Let it not be forgotten that the British fought three successful campaigns against the Afghans who always tore up agreements made under duress, and lived to drive out their conquerors.  The Americans like the Russians and the British before them will find that occupying such a tribally divided country is no easy task.  But I digress; the next day we left the gates of Peshawar passing warning notices which stated that passengers who ventured further were now no longer under the protection of the Pakistan army, and did so entirely at their own risk.  We were in the tribal areas, now home to Al’Quaida and Osama Bin Laden.  The rock walls of the Khyber pass are covered with regimental memorials to fallen British troops cut into the rock.  We drove all day up the passes and arrived in the unlit city of Kabul at night; it looked then like a vast sprawling untidy village with dirt roads and garbage everywhere.  We stopped to ask the way; by good fortune the man of whom we asked directions was the son of the Afghan Minister of Agriculture; educated in Paris, he spoke excellent French.  He took us to the main hotel where he introduced us to the Head of Afghan tourism.

The tourism boss, thinking we were official guests, offered us safe passage to anywhere in Afghanistan that we chose.  Quick as a flash I requested a visit to Nuristan, an area high in the Hindu Kush where the descendents of Alexander the Great’s Greek army that had conquered both India and what was then Afghanistan were now living.  When the British were at war with the Afghans, they had sent a British Army officer, a Major Robertson to live among the Nuris, or Kaffirs as he called them from his African experience, to rise up against their Afghan masters.  His book (recently republished by Oxford University Press) is full of details of their Greek heritage; unlike the Muslim Afghans, they worshipped pagan Gods, used chairs and buried their dead in very Greek looking coffins.  I wanted to film the Nuris, and since they lived in the tribal areas, needed a government clearance to do so. The Tourism boss told me that there was armed conflict with Pakistan in that area, but that he would try and find a brave man to escort us to the tribal areas.  We were to call him back in five days.  We used the time to travel North over the Hindu Kush up to the Russian border at Kunduz. 

The Russians effectively controlled the North of the country with their “army volunteers” who oversaw road building programs.  They used gangs of Afghan tribesmen to build new roads with very little equipment.  In the South the Americans improved the roads with very few Afghans helping them but with enormous reserves of modern road building equipment.  The Afghan government hoped they were treating the two super powers equally, but under Kennedy American support for Afghan programs was withdrawn, and it became only a matter of time before the Russians took over.  Their key improvement was the Salang tunnel, a key all season road link that meant that they could resupply their troops South of the Hindu Kush at any time of the year.  Though the tunnel was not marked on any of our maps, we found the route to the Russian border fast and easy.  We stayed the night in a government hotel in the industrial town of Mazar-il-Sharif  which was almost entirely occupied by Russian engineers and a Chinese delegation.  When my brother and I as two Westerners walked into the dining room, the Chinese delegation rose as a body and walked out.  We cared little about this; in the evening we watched tribal dancing in which a young boy dancer achieved a wonderfully convincing simulation of femininity, as of course did the boys who played Shakespeare’s heroines on the Elizabethan stage.

The following day we drove down to Bamyan, the capital city of Bactria, the partly Greek kingdom that under various guises flourished until 600 AD.  At that point Ghengiz Khan attacked the city, and in the assault the son of his favorite mistress was killed. In his rage on her behalf, Gengiz Khan ordered the city razed, and every man woman, child, and all livestock utterly destroyed; he built pyramids of skulls of the fallen.  Fortunately a handful of Greek descendents, the Nuris, escaped over the mountains to the Kunar valley, and lived there undisturbed for twelve hundred years until Major Robertson tried to enlist them on the British side in the war against the Afghans. These were the people we wanted to film. Before we left Bamian we visited the huge twin statutes of the Buda carved into the mountainside that Ghengis Kahn had spared. Not so the modern Taliban; in 2001 they ordered their army to shell the statues and apparently nothing now remains.

The following day we set out to drive the 150 miles back to Kabul; what should have been an easy afternoon’s drive became a nightmare.  The unmade roads had been ploughed into huge ruts by large trucks during the winter, but a bigger problem was provided by the melting snow slopes; the road was severely flooded by what appeared to be large rivers of melting snow.  When we saw the first river, with two stones blocking the road my brother suggested that this meant there was a better crossing further up stream.  Half a mile up stream there was indeed another crossing over a wide expanse of presumably shallow water.  Edward took a run at the river and we hit the water at thirty miles and hour; the little VW bug with its flat underside literally skittered across the surface, and by the time we started to sink we had crossed to the other side.  We tackled another eight rivers in this manner, but it became harder as darkness fell.  Finally we came to the widest river of all; divided in the middle by a ridge of rocks.  On the other side clearly visible in the moonlight was an Afghan with a rifle, presumably guarding the crossing.  We could not go back so we had to go forward; the car reached the ridge in the middle, but a rock threw it out of gear with a dreadful clattering sound; Edward fought to get it back into and we inched forward towards the man with the gun. He never moved as we got closer, then at the last moment Edward threw the wheel over and we escaped.  Further down the road we stopped to bail out the water; we had taken a lot on board but the engine had never missed a beat. 

Back in Kabul we contacted the tourist ministry and were told they had found “a brave young man”, son of a local landowner in the area, who also spoke excellent English, plus a driver and a huge Russian Volga car, complete with government markings.  This may not have been such a good idea in a war situation, but we had no choice. We drove all day, forced various rivers and still had not reached Nuristan by ten at night.  All of a sudden we were forced to stop by a raging torrent that had taken out the road.  I suggested we returned to a village a few miles back to spend the night, but our guide assured me that any travelers at night would be assumed to be bandits, and the villagers would open fire on us before asking questions.  Instead he suggested we slept in the car; the front seat back let down to form a bed, providing just enough room for the three of us to sleep.  The poor driver was given the roof.

Next morning we woke to a glorious sunrise; the air was fresh and sweet just like an Alpine morning, but our guide was worried; we had spent the night right on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and relationships were not good.  We went back to the nearest ruler’s house, a huge mud fort with armed men on the walls.  We were shown into the presence of the ruler himself, a wizened bandit-like little man with bullets strapped to his chest; he was cleaning his rifle. He told us through the interpreter that this was a bad morning to come; eight “bad men” from Pakistan had crossed the boarder and a local war had begun.  I replied that we had come a long way to visit Nuristan; could he lend us a jeep or horses so we could get there?  The ruler replied that the jeep was broken and he had no horses; the only way was to walk.  If we wanted to do that, he would give us six soldiers to guard us on the way.  The guide was very against this suggestion and I asked him to explain why.  He answered that the Afghans, like the British, were essentially sporting people who liked a fair fight; if we took six soldiers they would certainly want to shoot at us.  But if we were alone and unarmed the game was not worth the candle; shooting unarmed walkers was too easy and essentially unsporting. We left the driver to look after the car and decided to walk on alone, much to the ruler’s dismay.

I soon fell far behind the others; the long march at six thousand feet left me breathless since I was carrying the camera and film.   We met various herdsmen on the way and gave them the traditional greeting “Salaam a lekum”; they replied in the same words. Then rounding a corner I spotted a dead shepherd laying a little off the road; the others stopped to wait for me and I told them what I had seen.   They did not believe me, but I promised they would when the film was developed.  By late afternoon we still had not reached Nuristan and the guide confessed himself lost. He told me that the Nuris lived at the top of mountain ridges on grounds of safety; no-one could creep up on them undetected.  We would know a Nuri when we met one; they would be tall, dark and handsome with Western features.  Then a miracle happened; we were walking alongside a river with nothing in sight.  The next moment we were confronted by a tall dark European looking man who bowed low, brought us water from the river, found us a horse from a nearby stable and pointed to the mountain top where he indicated there was a Nuri village.  Since I was the most exhausted, I was put on horseback, laden down with all our packs. 

The horse had a string bridle, a string girth and no stirrups; I prayed I could stay on it as the horse scrambled up the mountainside like a squirrel.  Suddenly I was on the ground; my weight combined with the packs was too much for the string girth which had snapped. So it was that a rider less horse galloped into the Nuri village, which we reached some half an hour later to be greeted by a large circle of children who had clearly never seen a white person before.  Next the men folk of the tribe gathered in silence; I nervously asked the guide if he thought they were friendly and he replied he hoped so. Next an argument broke out between the leaders; they were apparently arguing who should give up his hut to the visitors.  The argument was swiftly settled, and through interpreters we were promised a hut for the night, food and a storyteller.  We were shown to a handsome wooden hut right on the edge of the precipice, with no retaining wall around the balcony.  There was a fire on the fire but no chimney; the smoke was heavy but no one seemed to mind.  The food consisted of naan, unleavened bread baked in the earth and full of gravel. As we were special guests we were also served glasses of sweet tea.  The storyteller spoke in Nuri; someone else translated what he said into Pashtu, and our guide translated that into English.  They told us it had been a hard winter and they were short of food; they lived in a barter economy and never used money.  I asked if any of the tribe had ever been to the UNICEF school situated at the bottom of the valley; they replied they had never heard of it. We slept in comfortable hammocks and I thought how difficult it was to realize that we had moved back in time a few hundred years.

Next morning we were able to film anything we wanted; they clearly did not understand the nature of cameras which was fortunate, as some Afghans hate to be photographed, fearing that you are stealing their soul. I watched two babies crawling around on the balcony and getting perilously close to the unguarded edge.  I asked if the babies never fell off, and was told that this never happened.  The babies got closer still and I pressed my host; yes he admitted sheepishly; the stupid ones do sometimes fall off.  This was truly the process of natural selection.  We would have stayed in the village for days, but the Afghan army arrived to quell disturbances and they insisted we leave, offering a jeep ride back down the valley to our car.  We gratefully accepted and were soon back in Kabul.  The tourist boss summoned us the next morning; he clearly had thought we would be stopped by the rivers, and never expected us to get there; who were we working for, the CIA or the British MI6?  I replied that we worked for neither; we were freelance photographers looking for an interesting story.  This he accepted; the word ‘freelance’ seemed to calm him, and we parted friends. 

That night we drove towards Kandahar on an unimproved dirt road; I thought my brother was driving a little fast, and we soon collided with a jeep.  No serious danger was done to either vehicle, so we drove on, stopping later for Edward to beat out the fender while I endeavored to prepare supper.  We were on the vast Afghan plains, and a local farmer came up to us to try and persuade us to join him in his high mud-walled farm house.  He kept saying a word that I did not understand, but he was trying to help.  What he could not explain was that the Koochi nomads were moving across the plains that night, hundreds of armed men and women on horseback and camelback, all very fierce and hostile to Afghan farmers.  One of their sports was to shoot at moving car headlights; the friendly Afghan was imploring us to get off the roads.  We ignored him and drove across the plain to the next government rest station, a nineteenth century British built Victorian building, complete with an antique British Shanks washbasin, but neither the faucets nor the drainline was connected.  The two hosts were clearly a bit scared, and bolted down the huge doors carefully. 

Next morning we rose at 4am to avoid driving in the heat of the day, and set off for Kandahar.  What a sight awaited us; the entire plain as far as the eye could see was covered with hordes of Koochi nomads driving their flocks North to the Summer pastures, as they have done for centuries. The borders between the Baluchistan sector of Pakistan and the border with Afghanistan meant nothing to them; they had been doing this annual trek for centuries.  Even though the Koochi nomads had been know to shoot tourists, I insisted that we got some film of this event; I stood on the running board as Edward drove slowly past them.  They ignored us completely, so we stopped the car and walked unarmed among these fierce looking tribesmen with their women looking magnificent on camel back, adorned with heavy gold and silver necklaces which represented the family savings.  They ignored the cameras, and seemed not to care that we had seen their wives unveiled.  When we turned back to the car we found it surrounded by tribesmen; we wondered if they would let us leave. They all pointed to their eyes; clearly many were victims of eye cancer brought about by the fierce summer sun.  We applied all the golden eye ointment we had to their eyes, and left to a chorus of good wishes. Others had since told us since that we were crazy to have done this, but we were clearly unafraid, and I think the Koochis did not consider us threatening in any way.   On another occasion my brother walked across a desert area along to find an early temple; when he arrived it was surrounded by a large band of Koochis, but he strode on unafraid; the Koochis knelt down and kissed his feet; clearly no-one had told them that the British no longer ruled India and Pakistan.

From Afghanistan we crossed into Iran, then ruled by the Shah; his border medical teams insisted on dosing us with very strong anti-biotics in case we had picked up plague or other transmittable disease in Afghanistan.  We were sick for two days; we also were questioned closely about our camera gear, and promised not to film in Iran; indeed my film was already all exposed.  We crossed the Elburtz Mountains to Tehran, and so on to Tabriz and the Turkish border.  The Trans –Asian highway was in construction, but little had been finished.  In Turkey we nearly fell into a bandit trap; I wanted to get a picture of a spectacular road accident, in which an articulated truck had gone over a precipice and ended up tangled at the bottom of a ravine.  We stopped the car and walked down towards the wreck where two men were standing; Edward was instantly on the alert. “Bandits” he said; “if they follow us they want to rob us.” We turned back towards the car and the bandits followed immediately, one trying to cut off our escape by heading up the steep side of the hill.  We were well ahead, though not out of rifle range; fortunately the car started immediately and we roared away to safety.  The rest of the trip through Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Austria, Germany and France was relatively uneventful and we arrived in London six weeks after we left Lahore in Pakistan.

 

6.  THE MONEY  PROGRAM 1966-68

When I returned to Panorama my desk and secretary were gone, and I no longer had a job on the show; for three days I haunted the halls of Lime Grove studios, wondering what my fate was to be. The BBC was a merciful organization; they did not fire you, only reassigned you.  I finally found out that I had been sent to a new program with the working title of The Money Program.”  As we producers never managed to think of a better title, we kept it and the name survives forty years later.  I became the senior producer and later the Acting Editor of the show; it was a great program to work on, and with reporter Alan Watson I traveled extensively round Europe bringing in any report we wanted providing it concerned money. Almost everything depends on money, so we were never short of stories. Our youngest producer was a brilliant Oxford graduate called David Elstein, who went on to become one of the most famous names in British television, both terrestrial and satellite delivered.   Another reporter who became famous as Head of the BBC Overseas service was John Tusa; I like to think that I particularly helped him make the switch from radio to television.

The Money Program sent me to Chicago to report on St. Patrick’s Day and other Irish American subjects; I enjoyed the trip greatly and told Alan that one day I wanted to live in America.  He laughed good-naturedly and told me that it must be because I liked the huge steaks and wonderful ice cream, but he was wrong.  What I loved most about American was its egalitarianism and its positive attitude to change. It took me another thirty years to move to the US permanently, but I tried to cross the pond every year.

Besides The Money Program I started making party political programs for the Labor Party and continued doing this long after I had left the BBC.  Political broadcasting in Britain is free; each party is allowed so much time in accordance with their voting strength. Working on these programs meant I got to meet and like all the British prime ministers of the sixties, seventies and eighties; Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Michael Foot, Sir Alec Edward Heath, Mrs. Thatcher and Sir Alec Douglas Home.   With Sir Alec I had an awkward moment; he needed to leave a program while we were still on the air, and I was detailed to smuggle him out via the emergency staircase, and then through the basement corridors to the outside.  I had never in my life taken this route, and began to get thoroughly lost in the maze of corridors; Sir Alec was unflappable but looked mildly concerned. Fortunately I found the right exit and was able to return him to his secret service minders who were looking a trifle uneasy. 

My travel sphere expanded to Asia; I had at that time a girlfriend in the Foreign Office who had been assigned to Jakarta in Indonesia; I immediately proposed to make a film about devaluation and its effects on a third world economy.  But then she was moved to Hong Kong, and I quickly had to invent another program, this time about the economic future of Hong Kong which copied the book title “Borrowed Time, Borrowed Place .”    

The Money Program did not have the budget for such distant locations, but by sheer luck the Observer newspaper did a news profile of the program and me and mentioned our future plans.  This rather forced the hand of the head of Current Affairs John Grist, and I was soon on a plane to Singapore and Hong Kong for a couple of half hour programs.  There I met a fascinating British missionary called Jacky Pullinger who worked in the forbidden Walled City of Hong Kong; later I co-wrote her autobiography entitled Chasing the Dragon which became a best seller and is still selling well twenty-eight years later. 

 

7. BIRTH OF AN INDEPENDENT:  PRESTEL PRODUCTIONS 1968-71

My colleagues from The Money Program Alan Watson and Terry Hughes resigned to join London Weekend Television, and with their friend Peter Marshall who later became general manager of Visnews they persuaded me to set up an independent film company called Prestel Productions.  This was a serious mistake from which my television career never really recovered.  Had we set up an independent company ten years later it would have been a brilliant idea, and today the British television industry has a large independent sector.  But we were much too early, and we anticipated the videocassette revolution ten years before it happened. In 1968 VHS videocassettes did not exist; we relied on a CBS invention called EVR which did provide a kind of cassette on 8mm film, but which did not have the ability to record programs off-air.  Our little company was seriously under-capitalized.  To make matters worse we also bought a Canadian presentation company called Impact Photomotion which had previously supplied the Tonight Program with all their backgrounds until they lost the contract.  We were able to use one of these expensive Photomotion machines to provide backgrounds for the Yorkshire television nightly program  Calendar, but the machine was labor intensive and based on an out-of-date technology.  Still, it was useful for Sales conferences, and we provide illustrations for many big sales conferences organized by major blue chip companies like Ford and General Motors, Kellogg’s and Lever Brothers. 

Prestel’s most faithful client was the British National Export Council, who used us to make films about exporting round the world.  Soon I was off to five countries in central and South America, using local camera people in every country I visited, one of the best filming trips I ever made.  In Mexico I found myself filming during the student uprising that nearly paralyzed the Mexican Olympic Games. From there I flew to Columbia, spent the weekend in Bogotá as the result of a airline strike and had great adventures there that do not belong to this account. In Venezuela I acquired a freelance war cameraman who was the most nervous shooter I ever worked with.  He shot with his camera defensively, as if he was certain that the other side would shoot back. We spent a wonderful three days in the Orinoco river basin at Puerto Ordaz, then the fastest growing industrial complex in South America, situated in what was then a remote area of jungle.  Then to Brazil, Rio and Sao Paulo, then to Buenos Aires and finally to Chile.  In Argentina I rented a twin engine Cessna to fly out to an estancia which they checked their beef cattle herds with the help of a British computer based in the capital.  As we were flying back the captain suddenly got a message from base; the company’s other Cessna had crashed, killing all on board. But our flight was uneventful. 

 

8. PROMOTING BRITAIN: LIFE AT THE CENTRAL OFFICE OF INFORMATION

In 1971 the Conservatives won the British General Election and promptly abolished the British National Export Council; we had lost our biggest client and were forced to close our doors, dismissing our remaining staff including my marvelous secretary Eileen who sadly died of cancer not long after.  My wife was a teacher, so her job was safe; freelance directors should marry someone with a safer job than theirs. I soon got a job as a television producer for the Central Office of Information, a British government information agency.  I commissioned a series of major documentaries about British institutions for the North American market, using outstanding directors like Richard Marquand. But my most interesting project was the first documentary on the supersonic plane Concorde.

Normally jet planes flying at speeds of 500-600 mph are filmed by prop planes flying at up to 400 mph.  The Civil Aeronautics Agency does not allow camera teams to open the door of a jet plane in flight because of the dangers to the fuselage.  Concorde flies at 1400 mph; it can fly much slower, but when it does so it is in a nose-up configuration, so everyone knows it is coming in to land.  In 1972 Concorde was scheduled to make a sales trip to Australia, via India, Singapore, and Japan: I was to take a camera team to follow her.  Taking with me a director called Richard Taylor, I worked with Captain Trubshawe, Concorde’s sometimes-irascible captain to try and get shots of Concorde in flight. 

We rented a Wescam device suspended from a helicopter, but the weather was too bad to film.  We commissioned an ex-kamikaze pilot in Tokyo to get shots of Concorde over Tokyo, and we spent long hours watching Concorde do “touch and go” landings and take-offs.  The most spectacular shot I planned was of Concorde sweeping low over Sydney harbor and the new Sydney opera house.   My problems lay with the Australian Civil Aviation Authority who were rightly worried that amateur flyers with planes that lacked radios would accidentally stray into Concorde’s path.  Eventually I got permission, and used a huge RAF VC10 airliner as my camera platform.  We placed our cameraman in the front window seat, and lined up ten members of the Australian Press in the window seats behind him;  As Concorde banked over the harbor, the superb RAF pilot flying above and to the right banked his plane too so that the cameras could get the best possible shot.  If the cameras needed to pan down, then the pilot banked his plane still further.  It was perhaps the best, most expensive and most elaborate shot of my life, and can now never be repeated since Concorde no longer flies.  Back in Britain we still needed shots of Concorde flying in level flight, so we borrowed a two seat RAF jet trainer which was just big enough to take the Arriflex fixed lens within its plexiglass cockpit screen. There was no room for the zoom, so if we wanted to go closer to Concorde we had to fly closer, which is dangerous if you get behind Concorde’s powerful jets.   The pilot go so interested that he forgot to look at his fuel gauge; finally Concorde radioed to him that by their calculations he must be out of fuel.  The trainer pilot broke away immediately  and just made back to Fairford airfield on his last drops of fuel.  The documentary Concorde; The Twenty Four Hour World  created a lot of interest, and provided a marvelous source of stock footage of Concorde in flight as well.

 

9. GOING INTERNATIONAL: LIFE AT REUTERS VISNEWS 1973-79

In 1973 I joined Visnews, now called Visnews Reuters, the world’s largest newsfilm agency owned then by the Commonwealth broadcasters and the BBC.  Boss of Visnews was ex- BBC comedy producer Ronnie Waldman, a marvelous boss who worked so hard it sadly killed him.  My job was to produce all the documentaries for the productions division; this included helping a range of commonwealth broadcasters in Africa and beyond, and with the Film Department of the Libyan government.  This lead to an interesting trip to Ghaddafi’s Libya where I wrote a series of scripts for their Ministry of Agriculture.  Living in a police state where your room is bugged was interesting; I had traveled in Russia and Eastern Europe but Ghaddafi’s Libya was somehow more sinister.

On my first trip I had an appointment with the Minister of Agriculture so I duly turned up at 9am and was courteously given coffee, then told that the Minister would like to postpone our meeting until the following day.  This happened for seven straight days in succession; finally I took my Libyan translator and researched my stories myself without ministry approval, which was much more satisfactory.  A Visnews colleague actually filmed the stories as I was involved with other projects; the films won an Arab Film Festival, and of course the Libyan Ministry took the credit; nowhere was the name of Visnews mentioned.

Our production division got involved in a lot of filming in the Arab Gulf; often I used other directors, occasionally I went myself.  On one occasion we were asked to send a camera team immediately to the Gulf to film the arrival of a huge floating crane belonging to a Dutch company.  We had just two days to get there.  I assembled the team and flew out overnight to Dubai. There was no-one from the Dutch Construction company to meet us, so I took a taxi into Dubai, then hitched a ride on the postal van the hundred miles across the desert to Jubail, the company headquarters.  At first they were unable to provide a four-wheel drive vehicle for the desert conditions; I made a big fuss and eventually they found an old Chevy suburban with a very sulky and uncooperative driver.  We took the suburban back to the airport, loaded up the crew and equipment, and proceeded to a company camp, before tackling the desert crossing early the next day.

The driver only took us to base camp, then refused to drive any further. With the time running out I seized the ignition keys from him and hit the desert trail across the sandy wastes.  The road was really only a track and driving was difficult. My cameraman took over, but he too found it nearly too difficult to drive, and he stalled the Suburban on a rocky outcrop. The vehicle refused to restart; the Arab driver clearly know that the vehicle was in bad shape and so had escaped the predicament in we now found ourselves.  We had no water on board, no radio and the sun was rising fast; the temperature would soon rise to 120 degrees Fahrenheit and we would be dead of thirst within three hours. The situation was critical; just to mock our fate a mirage of a desert oasis appeared, increasing our anxiety.  After forty anxious minutes a cloud of dust appeared on this little traveled desert track, and a truck appeared complete with Pakistani driver who immediately understood the situation, and tow started our vehicle.  The Suburban let us down again but never in the middle of the desert, and we from then on carried large quantities of warm coca cola which was unpleasant to drink but at least prevented death by thirst and dehydration.  We were able to film the arrival of the giant floating crane, and a day later the sound recordist turned up. He had flown in via Paris: in Charles De Gaulle airport he was put on a plane to Baghdad rather than Bahrain. On arrival in Saddam’s city he was promptly arrested, then exported to Bahrain. It had been an adventurous trip for us all.

In 1978 I was invited to go to Wheaton College Illinois as a two-week visiting professor of Broadcasting;  I stayed with the Dean Jim Engel who advised me to go down to Virginia Beach to investigate a new Christian college called CBN University.  Thus began a long and happy relationship with what is now Regent University, but at that time I had no leading to teach.   

 

10. INDEPENDENT AGAIN: KENSINGTON FILM SERVICES 1979-1983

In 1978 I was invited to go to Wheaton College Illinois as a two-week visiting professor of Broadcasting;  I stayed with the Dean of Communication,  Jim Engel , who advised me to go down to Virginia Beach to investigate a new Christian college called CBN University. I met both Pat Robertson and Dean David Clark, and thus began a long and happy relationship with what is now Regent University, but at that time I had no calling to teach. Instead I returned to Visnews where my boss greeted me with the shattering news that he no longer needed me; the terms were generous; I was to take a year’s salary and depart.  It was the perfect chance to start my own company again, only this time my wife and I would own 100% of the new company called Kensington Film Services, not a mere 25% as with Prestel.  A young Canadian called Gordon Woodside joined me and we tendered for a big Campus Crusade for Christ training program which we won. At its completion I was invited to work at Arrowhead Springs in California, and I moved there in the spring of 1979 family joining me out there in the fall.  My job was to develop two pilots for a new series called Come Help Change the World; a studio based program hosted by Bill Bright, it was to involve plenty of film inserts and I set off round Asia filming a variety of stories in the Philippines, India, Thailand and Hong Kong. The series never got off the ground, but thanks to Paul Eshleman I won the contract to do a series of foreign language versions of The Jesus Film, and my fledgling company Kensington Film Services ended up doing nearly fifty versions. 

 

11. THE FRANCHISE GAME: TELEVISION NORTH 1980-1981

Back in Britain in 1980 a call from a brilliant evangelical clergyman David Holloway started another project which took a year to complete, which was to apply for a commercial television franchise in the North of England.  In the upshot we did not win, but I had spent a busy year organizing a massive campaign to unseat Tyne Tees Television and replace it with Television North.  Though my expenses were paid I took no salary, so I hoped that with the birth of Channel Four, a new TV network dedicated to encouraging the work of independent film companies, we would win major contracts.  We made a series of suggestions for religious programs, but the religion editor called himself “an enthusiastic agnostic”, and regarded me with suspicion as a card-carrying Christian.  Some of our program ideas contributed by my excellent staffers Patricia and Elizabeth were brilliant, but everything was turned down.  We did eventually win a contract to produce a critical program about television, but the contract was never actually signed by Channel Four even though the production team had been appointed and had started work. Later the program proposals were rejected, leading to a High Court case between Kensington Film Services and Channel Four.  Channel Four subsequently dismissed the Commissioning Editor who had rejected our program ideas, but this came when it was too late to alter our difficult situation.

It was time for a change; I met a delightful young American in a coffee queue at the MIFED program sale in Milan, and since he was off to study theology at Harvard, he offered me his job as Vice President for Programming at Clearview Cable International, based in Honolulu, Hawaii. I flew out to Los Angeles for the weekend, won the selection board and before New Year 1983 was on my way to Honolulu, and later to Bangkok in Thailand.

 

12. BANGKOK THAILAND: CLEARVIEW CABLE GETS CLOUDY 1983-84

Clearview Cable was based on a simple idea which was to use Intelsat’s Pacific satellite to transmit US domestic cable channels to the Pacific Rim countries, and deliver them to subscribers via a pay cable system based on microwave technology called MMDS. An ingenious idea yes, a practical reality probably not.  Just clearing the copyrights on all this programming was probably impossible, but we carried on in hope that there were no problems which could not be resolved in the long run.  Clearview had a joint venture with Thai Television Channel 9, and we were expected to bribe the Minister of Communication to give us the go-ahead. But my boss Bill Monson was a Christian and a moral man, and he would allow neither himself nor his associates to pay bribes.  Though I and my family spent a wonderful year in Bangkok, the project went nowhere, and Clearview pulled out after a year, leaving me jobless once again.  In fact I had to pay the company’s taxes in order to leave Thailand, because if you reach the airport without a Ministry of Finance clearance, they turn you back.  (the company later repaid all expenses.)   I remember my year in Thailand with great pleasure, and I came to respect deeply the oriental approach to life. During that year I made sales trips to Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia.  Our potential partners in Australia were Swan Television run by the remarkable entrepreneur Mr. Julian Bond.  His plans to use the Australian satellite to deliver entertainment programming across the vast reaches of Australia which could never be served by normal cable television lines was brilliant, but the Labor Government of the time was opposed to such developments.  Today Australia is well served by satellite-delivered entertainment systems; it seems a distinguishing mark of my career that I get attached to ingenious schemes which are too far ahead for their time.  In television as in life, timing is everything.

I returned to England with no job, no apartment and no money; the situation looked bleak indeed. But I was not to suffer long: I rang my friend at CBN Marketing, David Clark and he provided me with a freelance contract to investigate opportunities to buy into European stations up for sale. Italy had recently deregulated their television systems, and though a host of small television systems were on the block, few were worth buying.  Only a giant in the Italian communication industry could really make sense of the deregulation confusion.  There was a more interesting opportunity in Holland, where an enterprising old Dutchman had acquired the rights to a Dutch satellite uplink.  Negotiating with the old man proved a nightmare; he would promise you everything you wanted at dinner in the holiday resort he owned, and then deny that he had agreed anything the following morning.  I called CBN for assistance, and they sent across the Atlantic a skilled team of negotiators who encountered just the same problems that I had identified.  In the end we got nowhere.  The Dutchman however had other plans to launch his own Dutch Catholic Charismatic programming, and they retained me as a television adviser.  This meant commuting by air to Eindhoven every week; I began to consider taking my family to live in Holland permanently.

 

13. MIDDLE EAST TELEVISION: JERUSALEM AND BIERUT 1984-86

Next came one of those wonderful invitations that prove life changing. Tim Robertson invited me to meet him for breakfast at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in mid October.  I had never been to Israel before, and the whole experience proved fascinating.

He took me to visit the CBN news bureau in Jerusalem, which regularly sent news about Israel by satellite back to the USA.  The same news bureau produced daily news bulletins in English and Arabic for CBN’s wholly-owned station in Southern Israel, called appropriately Middle East Television.  CBN had acquired this station from George Otis, owner of High Adventure radio, and CBN had expanded its service to broadcast programming in English and Arabic to Lebanon, Jordan and Northern Israel.  They transmitted the best of top American shows with Arabic sub-titles; they produced in Jerusalem a daily news bulletin in English and Arabic.  These were the days before CNN; Middle East Television completed successfully against Israeli and Jordanian newscasts which both betrayed their ethnic origins; MET tried to remain neutral, while sympathetic to the Israeli position. MET owned their own news bureau in East Beirut and Marjayoun in South Lebanon, and its information sources were consistently accurate.

CBN’s problem was that the State Department did not want Americans going into Lebanon on a daily basis in case they got kidnapped; the British were less worth kidnapping because the British Government never agrees to negotiate under duress.  Several British ambassadors had been kidnapped during the troubles in South America; none were ever ransomed; some died; others were released.  I was not offered the job of News Director during the visit, so reluctantly I accepted a continuing consultancy arrangement with the Dutch, providing they provided me with a written contract.

The Dutch team wanted me to go with them to Dallas to negotiate with a Catholic television group there; I explained that I would only do so with a written agreement for my services; they said they would meet me at Gatwick airport with the contract, and we would then take the non-stop American Airlines flight to Dallas.  To join them in the international departure lounge I had to go through passport control; when I reached them they still did not have a contract for me, but by this time the flight was ready to load. I decided to accept the situation and see what transpired in Dallas.  My experience there convinced me that I was not going to find them easy employers, so I politely excused myself, flew to Norfolk Virginia and signed up with CBN.  I spent a couple of weeks in Virginia Beach learning everything I could about Middle East Television.  I also flew up to Hartford Connecticut, to interview a former CBS journalist who might make a good reporter in Beirut.  There was something strange about him which made me cautious; his excuse was that he was just going through a divorce, and did not want to talk about personal matters.  I left it to CBN to decide whether we should employ him or not; the mystery about him remained unsolved.    

In 1984 the war between the Christians and the Muslims in Lebanon was still going strong: Israel had invaded Lebanon in 1982 to drive out the Palestinians, and then had withdrawn to a small area of South Lebanon which remained under Israeli control. South Lebanon was protected by the South Lebanon forces under General Lahad, who lived conveniently next to our broadcasting studio in Marjayoun. Providing South Lebanon remained under Israeli control, we were safe to continue broadcasting.  Our news bureau was situated in Jounieh, a small seaside town just North of Beirut in the Christian sector.  News video was sent from Jounieh to Cyprus and then on to Jerusalem; I determined to see if we could streamline the process in any way.  I flew to Cyprus to meet our man in Nicosia, a delightful Welsh pastor called Roy Bevan; he and his wife Eunice became lifelong friends.  Only in my hotel room on my knees did I realize that my new job was a lot more dangerous than I had expected; should I really want to risk making my wife a widow and my son fatherless.  My Afghan adventures had been when I was unmarried and without commitments; the Lebanon war was different.  On my knees that night I received a sense of certainty and peace that all would be fine, and never during the two years I was there were any of my news bureau staff in Lebanon and Israel harmed in any way. 

The next morning I assembled in the International Departure Lounge at Limassol airport for the Middle East Airlines flight to Beirut; I was the obvious Westerner present dressed in a blue suit; all the other passengers were clad in Arabic gowns looking like a bunch of Amal suspects, Amal being the father organization to the present-day Hisbullah.  Middle East Airlines were the only airline to fly into Beirut airport, scene of some fierce gun battles.  They used their oldest plane, a battered vintage Boeing 707; the procedure was to fly over to Beirut, check with the control tower that it was safe to land, and if not fly away again; there was no guarantee that taking this flight meant you would actually arrive; sometimes the plane had to return to Limasol without landing at Beirut.   As we approached the city we could see fires burning everywhere, but we were cleared to land.  The plane came to a juddering stop in the middle of the runway; since there was no ground support the engines ceased their roar, and the lights and air-conditioning stopped. The cabin door was wrenched open by a gang of Amal Muslims toting M-16 machine guns, and we were shown off the plane at the point of a gun.  We traveled across the runway in an open truck to the shattered terminal where most of the windows were missing.  I was immediately accosted by a man in white robes who took me underground; he got my passport stamped and found my luggage; I never passed through passport control.  He explained that he could help me no further; he was Sunni and they only controlled the terminal building; outside was controlled by the Amal Shiites. He told me to leave the terminal building and stand outside the shattered building where 220 American marines had died in a car bomb explosion under the Reagan administration.

I was to wait for a man who knew my name; there would be plenty of taxis who would want to pick me up, but that would be a ride to certain death.  The forty minute wait seemed to take an eternity; many gleaming Mercedes taxis stopped and their drivers shouted “Hi, Yank, want a ride?” I politely declined, and finally a battered Peugeot with no glass in the windows stopped and the driver whispered “Monsieur Quicke? vite, monte”  We took a zigzag path down the road through the notorious Palestine refugee camps of Sabra and Chantilla. I asked Alphonse who was a member of the secret service working with the Lebanese Christian forces why he was driving this way, and he explained that if the shooting started he was less likely to be hit.  But he assured me it was a peaceful afternoon; there was hardly any firing on the Green Line and I was indeed fortunate.  He pointed out how the palm trees all had their tops shot off, and explained that the trash was now piled to second floor levels because there had been no trash collection for some seven years. The shattered buildings often had scraps of cloth flapping in broken windows; this indicated that people were still living in them because they had nowhere else to go.   We reached the Green Line between Muslim West Beirut and Christian East Beirut; Alphonse told me to keep walking, only show my papers if I was challenged, and someone on the other side would know my name. The central square provided no cover at all; any sniper could have picked me off without trouble, but none bothered to do so.   I kept walking, passed the guards at the check point and into East Beirut; a cheerful voice rang out “Hullo Andrew” and I was soon wafted away in a dark blue Peugeot through the bombed out streets of East Beirut to safety in Jounieh, a pleasant seaside resort North of the city where our bureau was situated.  My host was Richard Klein, a seaside young CBN producer who later became a key member of our team in Jerusalem.  Richard explained that our Beirut team consisted of a Lebanese bureau chief, Guss Hashim, two writers and a cameraman who was new; my job was to check him out, and encourage the team who were doing a fine job in very difficult circumstances. The next day we decided to try out the cameraman on a scheduled riot outside the Lebanese Foreign Ministry; students would be shouting slogans.  We drove back through the glass covered streets to a spot near the ministry; we left a driver to protect the car, since cars were frequently stolen and resold on the black market. 

There were no police or legal systems working; public order was enforced by Christian militia groups who kept the streets safe.  The riot was fairly peaceful until the camera arrived, then the students got more vocal.  I tried to get an interview with a diplomat but the building was deserted apart from a secretary who had been in the Lebanese Embassy in Washington and who spoke perfect English. She discussed the safest way to leave the building; the Syrians were shelling the streets behind, but that there was only small arms fire on the West side, so that was the best way to go.  She reminded me to walk down the center of the street so as to avoid being cut by flying glass.  We followed her instructions, arrived safely back at the car and sped North to Jounieh again. It was Saturday afternoon, and Richard proposed we motored North to Jubail through a safe area to see this remarkable Phoenician city, and buy cheap clothes at their outlet mall.  We sped through the fields when suddenly there was a tremendous bang. Richard stopped the car and we got out to try and see what we had hit, but could find nothing.  Only on the Monday did the cameraman point out that a bullet had glanced off the car roof just above my head, though who was shooting at us and why we never knew. 

My final task in Beirut was to select a young Lebanese newsreader for our Arabic news service; I selected Norma who was the only daughter of a Lebanese restaurateur; she was good looking and read the news faultlessly. She had never left home before, never flown in an airplane, and was to find living in Israel very lonely. But her parents needed the dollars she could earn, so sadly sent her away with me.  I put her in a taxi and took her to the airport.  This was a wise move, because cars carrying women were seldom stopped by the Muslim militia groups; two weeks later on the same road one of our reporters traveling was ordered out of the car at gunpoint by a militia group, and only escaped with his life because he had a Dutch passport. The group told him that had his passport been American or British, he would not have survived.  After this I banned all our staff from using the Beirut airport; if they needed to leave, they had to take the boat from Jounieh to Cyprus which was much safer.

My life in Jerusalem was busy but delightful; we rented an Israeli general’s house in Mevaserit Zion outside the city, and my wife taught English at the Anglican International School. Every morning we read the news tapes, examined news footage from ITN in London and our own footage from various sources, and recorded the news in English and Arabic at the Jersualem Capital studios about lunchtime.  Then a skilled taxi driver took the program tapes and drove the three hours to the Northern city of Metula, and then the tapes were taken across the Israeli-Lebanon border at the “Good Fence” and on to our studio at Marjayoun.  The actual transmitter was some twenty five miles to the West, linked to the studios by microwave.  Middle East television did in fact establish  microwave links North to Jenin and across the Shouf mountains all the way to Beirut, but the Muslims blew up the microwave towers, and we were back to sending the news via Cyprus, which was much slower.  Another way to send the news tapes from Beirut was to record the reports on ordinary VHS cassettes, and place it in the glove compartment of a taxi traveling from Beirut to South Lebanon. If challenged the driver was to say that it was an American comedy show, and if confiscated the driver was to make no fuss. These drivers were brave men; they had to travel through Muslim West Beirut, up through Wally Jumblat’s Druse controlled areas, and on to the Syrian controlled lands of the Bekaa valley, and finally across yet another check point to South Lebanon.  I am proud of the news we supplied from Lebanon; we were the only broadcasting service allowed to cross into South Lebanon by the IDF, the Israeli Defense Forces, and we frequently shared our exclusive footage with World Television News and ABC.

My one disappointment was with the ex-CBS reporter who became our Beirut reporter; the problem was that we seldom got any reports.  He complained about our Arabic cameraman, so we allowed him to bring in the cameraman he had used in Vietnam; we only paid the cameraman when the reports came. Eventually I ordered them to report to me in Cyprus, and when they could provide no convincing excuses, fired them both.  Years later, after the PanAm Lockerbie disaster, Time magazine revealed that both of them had been working for the CIA in Lebanon and Syria, using CBN as their cover story, and had allegedly warned the CIA of the threat against a US airline.  I decided to make no comment to Time.

 

14. COMING TO AMERICAN ACADEMIA: REGENT UNIVERSITY 1986-present

All good things come to an end; everything in television changes, and in due course my contract was to expire; with MET broadcasting half its news in Arabic it made sense to appoint an Arabic speaking American as the next bureau chief.  I was back in Virginia Beach on business when I was asked to go and see the Dean of Communication at Regent University; they had a vacancy for a Professor of International Broadcasting, and was I interested in replying?  I confessed I had not planned to teach, but that I would certainly apply.  And so it was that I joined Regent as an Associate Professor of Communication in the Fall of 1986, where I remain up to the present.  I love teaching, and think that film and television can provide one of the most satisfying careers in the world.  Too many think only in terms of Hollywood; the world of factual programming can also be very rewarding.  In conclusion my advice is that you should find out on your knees what your particular calling is going to be, then pursue it relentlessly.

 

15. Why Regent? A note of choosing graduate education in Cinema-television

People sometimes call me and ask which is the best graduate school for film.  They are usually considering UCLA, USC and NYU,  all fine three year programs that are very expensive.  My reply is that they should seriously consider the world view that those schools promote, and the advantages of much smaller schools where the school pays for the costs of production as part of the fees.  Under those criteria I suggest that Regent becomes the best choice, because it is a small school where each student’s individual needs are seriously considered, and where you are never ordered to take the producing track, or the directing track, or the editing track; each student chooses the path they prefer.

Second, the Christian world view promoted by Regent is enthusiastically embraced by the vast majority of our students. Third, a two year M.A., or three year MFA,  with the school paying for the film stock and  materials vastly reduces your total expenditure on graduate education.

 

To be continued…