And Cut

I had the Beeb here yesterday. A film crew from Rip Off Britain, which is apparently a TV show that some people watch, was here to have me spill the beans on the would-be scam that I didn’t fall for last December. Naturally I was expecting that nothing would have changed from my own time in telly, that four cars would turn up full of silver boxes from which they would disgorge lots of heavy black equipment which would be clunky and expensive, and all talk would be of meal breaks. That the electrician (ubiquitously known as ‘the spark’) would be a cheeky chappie who told jokes but didn’t really do any work, the Sound Recordist would say ‘pardon’ a lot, and the Director would be nervous and frazzled, saved by the all-knowing Cameraman. (They were always men in those days). Also that the radio mike batteries would keep going flat.

Instead, two people arrived in a rented Kia.

We shook hands, and they opened the boot to reveal a few bags, the kind that people who have expensive bicycles put them in when they take them on holiday. Except smaller. Zipped open, they revealed some flat panels that were apparently lights, but didn’t have mains cables, and weren’t round and heavy and unbearably hot. I didn’t see a Fresnel all day. There was a tiny radio mike whose battery failed to die. And a camera with no film in it. Huh. Young people today, they have it so easy.

Naturally, being an increasingly old git, I regaled the two delightful beeb people – I think one was called the Researcher/Director/Cameraperson, the other the Assistant Researcher/Director/Cameraperson - with hilarious stories of how it used to be in the bad old days. Well, I thought they were hilarious, anyway.

For example, I told them about the time four Ford Granadas turned up at a bungalow in Essex to do an important story about a Singing Dog. This, you will have instantly realised, was for that epoch-making BBC One show called Nationwide, or Notionvoid in internal parlance, which entertained the populace for an hour every evening with a mix of serious stories about major issues, done with a furrowed brow and lots of Letraset graphics, and films about skateboarding ducks. This particular opportunity to fascinate the nation with ephemera involved a dog – I think it was a Border Terrier, they always like to be heard – which had learned to sing. My Way perhaps. Or a piece by Johann Sebastian Bark. Probably not How much is that Doggy in the Window?. Anyway; the crew turned up, all seven of them, drank copious amounts of tea made by the dog owner, and filmed said animal, the Caruso of Chelmsford, for most of a day. And when it was all over, they packed their gear back in the heavy silver boxes, promised to send the owner a VHS (always known as ‘the biggest lie in telly’), and as they backed off the driveway, ran over the dog.

Today this would have caused ritual consternation in the Daily Mail and demands for the head of the Director General. In the early 80s, everyone thought it was hilarious, and they showed the film anyway. Different times.

My new BBC friends of yesterday were properly horrified by this story, which confirmed that a cultural shift has occurred in TV, from ‘do you not know who we are?’ to abject terror in the face of criticism. They were thoroughly pleasant, and I felt rather sorry for them, being paid a BBC pittance on short term contracts. I had a permanent job and a final salary pension aged twenty-three. And then my pity turned to shame, when I discovered that my daily rate in 1987, when I’d gone freelance, was higher than they earn today. And I don’t mean in real terms; in cash terms.

Then we fell to discussing which pictures to shoot to illustrate the interview they had recorded with no lights, because today’s cameras are so sensitive they don’t need any. Using ‘available light’ when I was in TV only worked if the sun was shining and you were outside. Preferably in Greece. The story was about my holiday cottages, so they asked me to act out some of the things I do as their owner. I didn’t have the heart to say ‘it’s all so delegated, I literally do nothing except get paid once a month’ and instead offered up some putative activities. ‘There’s a tree that fell down in the storm two weeks ago. Shall I get out one of my chainsaws and chop it up? I need to do that anyway’.

Well as you can perhaps imagine, that didn’t go down terribly well. Fit of the vapours. Elf & safety issue. I explained that I have professional qualifications as a tree surgeon, I have thus far failed to remove any extraneous limbs by accident, so far as I can recall, I would be doing what I do anyway, and they would just be pointing a camera at it … but no. Heaven Forfend. A risk assessment would be needed. I had a fairly shrewd idea what conclusion that would come to.

So instead, they filmed me staring into the distance, pretending to act like someone happy to have avoided throwing three grand away on a cheap huckster’s scam. I found this rather easy. I must be a natural thespian. Next step RADA. And then I offered to cut some grass. ‘Splendid!’, they said, ‘let’s get out the minicam’.

At this point an even tinier little case appeared, smaller than an eggbox, from which was produced something that looked a bit like one of those pens you had as a kid which clicked through ten different colours to impress your friends, then broke. It was six inches long and had an infinitely-adjustable head. And two screens. Oh, and apparently you could do something clever with your phone so if you moved, it would follow you. I imagine this requires AI. Most things do, these days.

I used to play with minicams when I made some ski films, which we hung off the end of a very long pole, taping the cable with furrowed brows and gaffer tape, then plugged it into a sound recordist who carried a heavy, bulky tape recorder which froze at minus 6 and used betacam tapes that lasted half an hour and devoured a lot of plastic. And the pictures were rubbish. But this thing yesterday – which, to be frank, looked like a particularly exotic vibrator – apparently it did 4k pictures and could record nonstop for two hours on a little flash drive. And it cost three hundred quid. Amazing. But it still fell off my lawn mower when I went over a bump. Should have done a risk assessment on that.

When my new friends packed their ridiculously cheap, high quality, light and flexible gear away into the Kia and I signed the release form, which allows the BBC to do anything it pleases with the pictures, in all media known and unknown, in the known universe (and presumably any future universes yet to be discovered by Jodrell Bank or the Hubble Space Telescope or whatever), in perpetuity (and, presumably, beyond), I took great comfort in the fact that the tripod hadn’t changed.

And that they reversed off my driveway very carefully.