In 1970, I skipped out of the Royal College of Art in London, clutching my Master of Arts Degree in Film and Television. I’d had three fantastic years playing with the medium of film, had made a short fiction film and, in my graduating year, a 30-minute documentary which went on to win a coveted college Silver Medal. While at film school I’d assistant edited for a BBC series with Paul Watson. As a renowned documentary filmmaker and pioneer of the ‘fly on the wall’ style of documentary filmmaking, he’d given me a glowing reference and I thought the world was my oyster. In fact, it turned out, ‘the world was my lobster’.
In those days there were only two places to go for an aspiring documentary filmmaker in search of a job: the BBC, or one of the new ITV Network companies.
ITV operated a Union ‘Closed Shop’, so to get a job you had to have an Association of Cinematographic and Television Technicians Union ticket, and to get that you had to have a job … Catch 22. So the BBC was my first port of call. I was given very short shrift. They told this secondary school girl that they ‘preferred Oxbridge graduates’ and that they could teach them, in a few weeks, what I’d learnt at film school.
I shook the dust of the BBC off my feet and headed back to my native town of Leeds, where Yorkshire Television had set up only two years before. I took my graduating film into the canteen there and sought out an executive producer called Tony Essex. I just went up to his table as he was having his post-lunch coffee and asked if he’d look at my film. He did, and three weeks later I was offered a job as a trainee cutting room assistant. This got me the precious union ticket and my career in commercial TV became possible. Editing was my second choice of career and I really enjoyed it. With a strong union, once you were in, life and pay (£20 a week gross) were pretty good. I continued to make little films, and spent quite a lot of time in the studio bar, chatting up cameramen with clockwork Bolexs to spend a day with me for free, or rostrum cameramen and graphics people to do bits of animation and then editing the stuff at night, after work.
Through people I was filming I met David Geen, a freelance BBC cameraman, who was moving up to Leeds to supply a programme called Nationwide. We made a film together and he offered me a job as a sound recordist at £40 a week. So I left YTV
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after a year with an upgraded full union ticket and became Britain’s first female location sound recordist. After three years with David I spent 6 months with cameraman Paul Berrif, before calling it a day. However exciting, it wasn’t my career choice and I decided to move into research, which in those days was the accepted route to directing.
I ended up at Thames TV as freelance researcher on This Is Your Life. It was here, after almost eight years in the industry, that I got my break into directing, winning a place on their Trainee Directors’ Boards. I began my directing career in the Schools and Children’s Departments making half-hour films and studio inserts, and directing the live studio shows, Magpie and Afternoon Plus. In 1978, the ACTT was still a very powerful union. I had an eight-man crew: camera; asst. camera; sound; asst. sound;
sparks; grips/driver; researcher; production assistant and me. If very large lights were used, you had to have a spark for each light.
A day’s shooting schedule had to strictly adhere to union rules of working practice. As I recall, a shoot starting at 9am at a location 30 minutes from the studio would mean a minimum 7.30am crew call. Half an hour to load up, a minimum half an hour travel allowance, and half an hour to unload at location before shooting started. A tea break was required after three hours, at 10 30am. Lunch could be no more than 5 hours from call or it was a chargeable no-lunch break. Lunches usually took up two hours. You had to allow half an hour travel, one hour actually eating and half an hour back. So a 12-noon wrap for lunch would mean a 2pm re-start of shoot.
Final wrap would be at 4pm to allow one and a half hours to load up, travel and unload before 5.30pm, and avoid a ten-hour break penalty incurring time-and-a-half next day. I once worked out that, under these rules, an exterior shoot during the winter gave you around two hours of useable shooting time.
It was restrictive, and often the bulk of the crew were in the crew-van while you and the cameraman and sound-man got on with it. The plus side of all this was that, as a director, if you knew how to deal with the numbers, you had enormous support and all you had to do was direct, and all those assistants learned their craft thoroughly before getting promoted, and were well paid while getting this training.
So despite the restrictions, it was a very positive and exciting time for the then still reasonably young ITV Network.
ITV companies in the mid-1970s were still franchised under a watchdog with teeth, which insisted that they all include a quota of documentaries in their programming. Funding came from advertising and the Big Five – Granada, Central, YTV, London Weekend Television and Thames – took the largest slices of revenue.
Thames, I think, had 12 one-hour slots a year that they had to fill with documenta-ries. I left Thames after two years and became a freelance director taking myself, and sometimes my ideas, around these companies and establishing relationships with different Heads of Documentary Departments. If one didn’t like an idea, another might, and they had the slots to fill. Unlike today, a Yes from them was a Yes to the film being screened.
In this way, for more than 20 years, I managed to work an average of eight months a year making a whole range of films. The unions were still strong but, thanks to Thatcher, their power was weakening. By the late 1980s crews were getting smaller 158 MARILYN GAUNT
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and rules less constricting, but still protective of over-working crew members. I considered this to be a good thing as a knackered cameraman never gives his best.
Throughout this period I experienced enormous freedom to make my films in the way I wanted. Executive Producers and Heads of Departments, like John Willis and Catherine Freeman, never asked to see a film until I was ready and it was fine cut and perhaps a few minutes over-length. They had total trust in both me as a director, and their own judgement in choosing me to make a film in the first place. This, more than anything, has changed dramatically over the past few years.
From 1989 to 1993, I made six of 18 sixty-minute documentaries following ordinary people over a year, no sensationalist story lines, just films about the extraordinary within the ordinary. It was for Paul Watson’s Present Imperfect series on BBC2. We filmed narratives over a year, not knowing if it would have a ‘good’ ending, or a real ending at all. They made compelling viewing but were of a kind that was to be commissioned less and less.
The writing had been on the wall for social documentary, since the new round of ITV franchise bids came in 1991. I remember seeing the franchise applications and only two, Border and Scottish, actually mentioned Documentary, the rest hid the genre under the heading factual programming. Over the past eight or so years changes in the industry seem to have accelerated.
When I skipped out of film school in 1970, there were only three television channels: BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. There were over 40 million viewers, and ITV had access to them all. Today there are around 50 million viewers but hundreds of channels vying for their attention. Advertisers, who paid extortionate rates to ITV in the good old monopoly days, now have the upper hand and call the tune. Bums on seats and thumbs off the change-channel button are what they expect and demand.
This is not only true of commercial channels. When I returned to the BBC briefly in 1998 I found it to be far more viewing figure orientated for documentaries than Thames TV had ever been in the 1970s.
Budgets are getting tighter as revenue gets spread ever more thinly, with the resultant exploitation of young talent (made possible since the disempowerment of the unions) often working unrestricted hours for little or sometimes no pay, in order to ‘break into’ television. From this grows a different ethic and different working practices. Crews are becoming increasingly rare on social documentaries. My last four films were Triplets, Kelly and Her Sisters, Living on the Edge and Lin and Ralph: A Love Story, all for ITV. Triplets I shot with a three-man crew, plus a researcher. Kelly, 40 per cent shot by a two-man crew, 20 per cent by my Assistant Producer and 40 per cent by myself. Living on the Edge was 80 per cent me and 20 per cent my Assistant Producer. Lin and Ralph, 100 per cent me, as a one-woman band. Many might say this is a good thing because, on observational domestic documentaries, it helps to get intimacy you can’t get with a crew. Although there is some truth in this, it is not universally the case and no-one can be a master of all trades. If you are a one-man band, your directing suffers.
So much of the pleasure of filmmaking for me came from the joint creative power that working with other talented people gave me. As director you could be the eyes in the back of the cameraperson’s head, be assessing the wider picture while the MY LIFE IN TELEVISION 159
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crew were literally focusing on one detail. The crew were not rude mechanicals, but co-creatives who were often great sounding boards. I’m not saying that good films can’t be made by one person, but doing it continuously, and with increasingly shorter time-frames, must lead to burn-out.
Television now follows the factory model, where programme making is becom-ing an homogenized process and all signs of true originality are bebecom-ing sacrificed in the interest of fast and cheap manufacture. An American academic once said that in the American TV industry the commercials were the product and the programmes the effluence. At the Sheffield International Documentary Festival in 2003, Channel 4 Head of Documentary Peter Dale admitted, ‘I produce eye-candy for advertisers.’ This from the channel that was set up initially to push the boundaries and open up the airwaves to minorities. This sea change led to concepts like formatted documentary series, where you make the viewer comfortable and loyal because they know what to expect, and Reality TV, where you can be certain of a good outcome before you start out, by choosing extreme characters and situations to provide confrontation and sensational incidents. No surprise, either, that the increased need for ‘delivering’
viewing figures has also led to increasing interventionism from commissioners and production executives. While on the one hand I hear pleas from documentary commissioners for passion and authorship from new filmmakers with great ideas, on the other I hear tales of commissioners wanting to select crew (if any), view rushes while shoots are still in progress, dictate style and content from music down to seeing and re-writing commentary and deciding which shots should be in the pre-title hooker, even re-editing and re-scoring films after the director has left the scene.
On one film I produced, the commissioner’s philosophy was that serious documentary of the ‘old-fashioned sort’ is ‘like muesli, we know it’s good for us but it’s not the cereal of choice. We have to re-package it in a Coco Pops packet to get people to watch.’ The danger of course is that by doing this the muesli becomes Coco Pops. A good quick fix but ultimately shallow and unsatisfying fare, junk food for the mind. To me, this attitude illustrates a total lack of belief in the intelligence and sophistication of ordinary viewers, and a patronizing insistence that they have to be spoon-fed or they’ll switch off.
It would be unfair to say all commissioners and production companies are this bad but it does seem to me that there is a growing orthodoxy that sees directors as mere suppliers of the raw material, rather than authors. They are the hunter–
gatherers who go out and use their skills to bring back the goodies for their masters to cut up and serve as they wish. Trust and integrity are central to the special relationship that good observational documentary makers have with those they are filming. To lose all editorial control to people who have no personal or emotional commitment to participants presents the filmmaker with real ethical and moral dilemmas. Persuading people to take part in my films is becoming harder and harder, and experience has made me cautious about making editorial promises I may not be able to keep. People aren’t stupid, and because of tabloid-style documentaries and Reality TV, they observe what can happen to people who open their lives and souls to the camera, and see no reason to believe my assurances that I have no hidden agendas.
160 MARILYN GAUNT
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When I made Living on the Edge in 2003/4, all the kids involved had diary cameras and were constantly talking on them about Big Brother and the antics of Jade.
They loved it, but they knew she was being exploited. We overheard one 15-year-old lad asking a little girl we were filming, ‘What are you having anything to do with them for? All television’s interested in is viewing figures and money!’
I probably read like some old dinosaur, moaning on about the loss of a golden age, but it’s not all bad news. Great documentaries are still being made and seen, in the cinema, on the festival circuits and even, if less frequently and often sidelined to minority channels, on television. Thankfully, unlike when I started out, television is no longer the only place for documentary filmmakers to go to fund their projects.
The recent revival of cinema documentary has given the genre a huge boost.
In my early days the cost of film and equipment was prohibitive and the really positive side of new technology is that anyone with the talent can make a sophisticated documentary very cheaply, and the Internet may well ensure it gets seen. With the state it’s in, the world needs documentary filmmakers with commit-ment, passion and a point of view, more than ever. The golden age of television documentary may be coming to an end, but it is my fervent hope that a new golden age, appropriate to the next generation of documentary makers, is dawning.
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