Freely, Madly, Deeply: British Broadcasters Collaborating (at long last)

It’s interesting and resonant to see the launch of Freely today (30/4/24), the new streaming service from Everyone TV backed by BBC, ITV, Channel 4 & Channel 5. It involves various of my former C4 colleagues including CEO Jonathan Thompson, Sarah Milton and James Tatam.

For the first time viewers can switch between live and on-demand TV from all the main UK broadcasters simply and gratis. It offers features like pause and restart, and gives access to additional episodes for free (the clue’s in the name). All that’s required is a WiFi connection, no dish or aerial. The idea is to offer “a single, unified platform” centred on British TV.

It has been billed as “the first time all four of Britain’s public service broadcasters have come together to launch a streaming proposition” – but that’s not strictly true. 16 years ago ‘Project Kangaroo’ bounced onto the scene. It was the secret working title for a VOD platform combining content from BBC Worldwide, ITV and C4. However Kangaroo fell at the fence of the UK Competition Commission (now Competition & Markets Authority) in 2009. That was arguably the nail in the coffin of UK TV.

It was the moment we could have competed against Netflix (just a year old at the time) and the emerging international streamers. It was perhaps the one time we coulda been contenders.

“You don’t understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender, I could’ve been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”

(Elia Kazan’s classic ‘On the Waterfront’ has just been re-released in UK cinemas to mark its 70th anniversary.)

The Competition Competition looked at the parochial UK situation instead of the Big Picture and in their folly probably killed (certainly severely wounded) the Little Screen in this country. It’s still playing out now all these years later.

BritBox was a pretty lame attempt to fill the Kangaroo void. ITV and BBC Studios founded would-be global streaming service BritBox in 2017 as a joint venture to showcase British entertainment (original scripted and factual shows, co-pros, etc.) to international audiences. Last month we heard that ITV has sold its 50% stake in BritBox International to partner BBC Studios for £255M, probably a sign that the partners’ imperatives had evolved in somewhat different directions.

So it’s arguable that Freely is 16 years too late. But I hope otherwise and wish them the best of British…

Important Television

Mr Bates & Mr Jones (Alan Bates & Toby Jones) – ‘Mr Bates & The Post Office‘

The UK media have been full these last couple of weeks with stuff about ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office’ and it has been uplifting to see such an outstanding example of ‘important television’. Where a few dogged, committed journalists kept the embers smouldering – notably at Private Eye and Computer Weekly and, of course, Nick Wallis on his website through crowdfunding and on ‘Panorama’/BBC – the flame finally burst into public consciousness due to the ITV drama series, due to good old-fashioned TV.

Ray Brooks & Carol White – ‘Cathy Come Home’

It’s the latest – and perhaps greatest – in a tradition of Important Television drama in Britain. The poster boy is ‘Cathy Come Home’, the 1966 BBC drama about homelessness and descent into poverty, written by Jeremy Sandford, produced by Tony Garnett and directed by Ken Loach. Loach shot the television play on 16mm film on location rather than in the studio making it look more like a current affairs programme than drama. His direction has actors Carol White and Ray Brooks come across very much as real people in real situations.

The impact of the programme was unprecedented. It boosted the launch of the homelessness charity Shelter that same year (1966) through its 12 million viewers on BBC1 (25% of the population). Another homelessness charity Crisis launched shortly after (1967) and then the housing/youth homelessness charity Centrepoint. In addition, it influenced government policy in the 1967 Housing Subsidies Act and then the 1969 Housing Act. As incorporated in the plot, the policy of splitting families – wives from husbands, parents from children – when people became homeless was ended.

Channel 4’s ‘Queer as Folk‘

At the other UK Public Service Broadcaster, my alma mater Channel 4, the programmes most in this heritage include Russell T. Davies’ ‘Queer as Folk’ (1999), set around Canal Street in Manchester, which significantly changed people’s attitudes in the UK to the gay community, and Peter Kosminsky’s ‘The Government Inspector’ (2005) which had a profound impact on how the Hutton Inquiry into the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 and the death of weapons inspector David Kelly played out. Kosminsky (with whom I was on the BAFTA TV Committee, where his rigorous attention to detail was very evident) employed drama-documentary techniques to clarify complex matters for the public.   

Also the early years of ‘Brookside’, the soap set in Liverpool which started the day Channel 4 launched on 2^nd November 1982, had real impact on the national conversation, not least in the lesbian kiss between Anna Friel (Beth Jordache) and Nicola Stephenson (Margaret Clemence) in 1994. That iconic kiss was included in Danny Boyle’s brilliant 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, streamed live to 61 countries (including places where homosexuality is illegal), making it the first lesbian kiss many people around the world had ever seen on TV (or at all).

ITV, although established in 1955 to provide a commercial balance to the public service broadcasting of the BBC, still has PSB obligations which it delivers through a variety of genres including news, drama and sport, forming a vital part of the unique British PSB system. Sir Peter Bazalgette, Chairman of ITV from 2016 to 2022, argued that the defining cultural purpose of PSB is original content “made by us, for us and about us” (“us” being the UK – UK talent and industry, UK audiences, and UK citizens). ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office’ is their greatest ever triumph in this realm, proving how drama and fiction can make the hugest possible impact on reality and fact, succeeding where other media and institutions fall short.

It is a very timely reminder – with the BBC under pressure and on the back foot regarding the licence fee (which could end as soon as 2027); with Channel 4 largely suspending commissioning; with Channel 5 equally under the cosh due to the TV advertising slump – that we really need to value and look after our broadcasters. By the time UK viewers realise what they’ve lost, it will be too late. TV still matters, is essential to our democracy and at its best is truly important.

Change, Chaos & Opportunity

“Probably the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to be able to change.”

Philip Guston (1913-80)

These are the words of painter Philip Guston who operated mainly in L.A. and New York – he began his career as a figurative painter, very influenced by Picasso and the Surrealists; went on to embrace Abstract Expressionism in the 50s and 60s; then returned to figurative imagery but in a very different style (see below) for the remainder of his life. The themes that cut across these phases remained consistent: brutality, war and violence, sin and injustice, evil  and upheaval.

‘The Studio’ (1969) by Philip Guston :: Philip Guston photographed by Genevieve Hanson

If you live in or near London or can travel to Tate Modern, you can get to see a large solo show of his work until 25^th February – and it’s well worth the trip.

Picking up on the previous post about having the courage to try new things, the first work day of the year for many is a good moment to acknowledge the importance of innovation and change for growth, both personal and societal. On the day Channel 4 announced massive job cuts, after a year of commissioning very little, the disruption to the television industry since 2020 in particular, but with its roots still further back, bring to mind the words of that poster boy of the pithy quote, George Bernard Shaw:

“Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”

I remember being in a meeting with the Chief Creative Officer of Channel 4 the best part of a decade ago and saying to her that the dog of television and the tail of digital would flip over sooner than she thought and quicker than she thought. In changing the Channel 4 app from being called All4 to Channel 4 last year the channel finally acknowledged the observation – the tail had become the dog. (But it might have been too late.)

Change, even in the form of destruction and disorder, is essential to development and growth. When edifices crumble, the gaps between the ruins offer spaces to be filled again. Whether anyone actually reads cover to cover The Art of War by Sun Tzu is a moot point, but ol’ Sun can give GBS a good run for his money on the quotations front:

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.”

2024 opens with chaos aplenty, so by extension opportunity aplenty…

 ‘Painting’ by Philip Guston (1956, Museum of Modern Art)

Quotation: Teach us rightly to number our days

On holidays and such circumstances we have a conversation in my family about tattoos. I’ve made 51 tattoo films in my career including In Your Face for Real Stories/Little Dot Studios (100M+ views) and The Male Body Handbook: Tattooed for Channel 4. The conversation springboards from the question: If you were to have a tattoo, what would it be? I always end up saying the only thing I would want to see every day is something that was or meant “Carpe Diem”.

As I sit writing this at my desk there is a marble tablet to my right – a cheap bit of tourist tat from when I visited Rome a couple of years ago to speak at MIA – the Mercato Internazionale Audiovisivo film festival/market. The tablet, quite heavy, says:

CARPE DIEM

QUAM MINIMUM

CREDULA POSTERO

Quinto Orazio Flacco

So the phrase we are familiar with actually has a broader context: Seize the day, put very little trust in tomorrow. It comes from Book 1 of (Roman poet) Horace’s Odes (23 BC). Quinto Orazio Flacco in Latin is Quintus Horatius Flaccus, better known as Horace.

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I don’t really like the look of Carpe Diem. Carpe reminds me of carp, the fish that Eastern Europeans love to consume for some reason. Diem contains “die”. So I was pleased to find another quotation this week (at the funeral of my step-father) which means much the same thing. It is from the Old Testament, Psalm 90 (verse 12):

Teach us rightly to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

I read this as an exhortation to value each day and recognise that it is one of a limited number we are each allotted – through that perspective, brought to mind daily, we can become wise at heart (as opposed to at head).

The nearest tattoo I can find is Psalm 90:14, two doors down, nicely done but not at all the same:

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I am big on the word “joy” though – my daily mantra is “I will enJOY my day” – and I’m all up for being “glad all our days”, but it’s not for me.

However Psalm 90:12 is not quite snappy enough – it is great for an arch in a cemetery but not quite right for my arm.

Back to the fantasy tattoo drawing board…

In the meantime In Your Face has just been awarded the Best Documentary accolade in the Lockdown Short Film Showcase run by London Short Film, of which more tomorrow…

Story Snippet: The Old Forge

This morning found myself by The Old Forge in Mill Hill (London NW7), my childhood neighbourhood. It sits at the bottom of The Ridgeway, a road running along the crest of a line of hills. It is just beneath the old convent (St Joseph’s) where my mum used to take us for some reason to meet a nun called Sister Theo and where in 2011 we filmed Jamie’s Dream School for Channel 4 with the 3Rs: Rankin, Rolf (Harris) and Robert (Winston). Here’s one of the brilliant pictures Rankin (who hails from adjacent Edgware) took on that shoot:

As I was explaining to Enfant Terrible No. 2 that this white clapboard building which comes to a point at the junction of The Ridgeway and the road beneath the convent (once famous as a training place for missionaries) was the site of Mill Hill Village’s blacksmith and when I was a boy a tea shop (where I went with my friend Daniel Glinnert). As I was explaining an old fella emerged from round the corner, doing some gardening. He explained the place had been in his wife’s family for generations, that her father (grandfather?) had been the last smithy and asked us to guess what year the forge finally closed. I was miles out – it was 1932. He went on to describe how the focus had been on shoeing, not horses, but oxen. And then he shared a little known fact: oxen cannot stand on three legs (unlike horses). They had to build a special tight pen so that the ox could lean over while being shod. It’s fabulous what stories come to light in everyday life.

There used to be bee hives by the forge at the adjacent cottage (which used to be on the same family’s land, now sold off). They are gone now, the bees caught a disease. That little corner where the forge was is a just-about-hanging-on vestige of a lost age which you can really sense at that spot.

Coincidence No. 488 – Bletchley Park

The Mansion, Bletchley Park (Dec 2019)

I go to meet my cousin from Melbourne, Australia at my old home tube in Tufnell Park. We have never met before. She has come to London to work as a mathematician at the Alan Turing Institute in King’s Cross. Mention of Turing’s name prompts me to ask whether she has visited Bletchley Park yet? She has. I explain how it was very little known about until Peter Bate, David Darlow & John Smithson made the TV series Station X for my alma mater Channel 4 in 1998. We talk about how the men and women of Bletchley Park did not talk about it for five decades until the interviewees for the programmes got permission from the MoD. We talk about Sue Black who saved Bletchley and who I got to know originally during my time at C4.

I get on the bus to come home. I open my novel, Old Filth by Jane Gardam, which we are reading for my book group. (I’ve just looked it up because I suspected as much… Jane Gardam is the mother of Tim Gardam, now Principle of St Anne’s College, Oxford, in 2003 Director of Television at Channel 4 when I joined.) This was on the page I was up to and started reading on the top front tourist seat on the 263:

But they had me later in the War at Bletchley Park and there we met again. [NB Bletchley had not been mentioned in the novel before or had any role in the story] Bletchley Park was full of innocent, nice girls (not me) who had a very particular aptitude (crosswords) for solving cyphers and things, as you will be hearing in a year or two when ALL IS TOLD (the fifty year revelation).

The Mansion, Bletchley Park (Dec 2019)

Hut 1, Bletchley Park (Dec 2019)

The Lake, Bletchley Park (Dec 2019)

Moon Shots

The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission resonated strongly for me. I consider Neil Armstrong’s foot touching the moon one of the two most significant events of the 20th century. The other is the explosion of the atom bomb in Hiroshima.

I watched the moon in our back garden on the eve of Blast Off + Half-a-Century – it looked full, technically one night off I think. It was slightly yellow, the surface patterns visible from the suburbs of N2.

The moon, a eucalyptus and our garden shed

During the night I caught a bit of a BBC World Service podcast on Radio 5 – in the morning I started listening to the 11-part series, 13 Minutes to the Moon, presented by Kevin Fong.

But only in London, before the day was out, would you by chance cross paths with not only an Eagle lunar landing craft, but also a Saturn 5 landing capsule.

At 09.32 on 16th July, the time of Apollo 11 lift off, I published a photo of Neil Armstrong from the Wall of Honour in our downstairs loo. It is a signed photo, the smudged signature proving it is an actual individually signed document. The smudge was made by Mark Reynolds’ auntie in Leeds who thought it was a printed moniker so wet her finger and wiped it through in 1969. She was wrong. Mark Reynolds was my trusty editor in the 80s. We made a documentary together about the first British astronaut, Helen Sharman. I swopped the photo Mark wrote away for in his childhood for a signed Damned single from Loppylugs in Edgware. One of my better deals. I’m reflected in the moon in the photo of the photo.

In the evening I went to a screening by Netflix of the documentary The Great Hack about Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica outrage, coming out on 24th July on a data-driven, aspiring monopoly digital platform near you. It was an interesting evening which included taking a leak next to the CFO of Cambridge Analytica and bumping in to an old college contemporary of mine, Chris Steele, author of the notorious Trump-Russia dossier. A chat with Riz Ahmed. Sitting in front of Brittany Kaiser, the protagonist of the film.

But the highlight of the evening – in the Dana Centre of the Science Museum – was walking out past the lunar lander on the left, covered in the crinkly gold foil mentioned in Episode 1 of the podcast, and the re-entry capsule on the right. Not something that remotely crossed my mind as I enjoyed that first episode some ten hours before and ten miles away.

Apollo Lunar Excursion Module (LEM)

Apollo 10 Command Module

On the tube home from South Kensington I was sitting chatting to Dr Kevin Fong’s agent – Kevin had been at the Netflix screening unbeknownst to me.

When I walked up my street on the way back home I looked up and caught the moon, now fully full, between two suburban rooftops and the disc was halved by the shadow of an eclipse. Wondrous.

As I write this it is Day 3 of the mission. Little Dot Studios where I have been working the last couple of years has brilliantly produced a marathon 6-day live broadcast on the notorious Facebook and the dubious YouTube bringing us the transmissions from Apollo 11 and Mission Control from NASA’s archive, courtesy of my previous employer, Channel 4. Moon Landing Live. (I proposed this programme in 2014 when I was still at C4, a bit ahead of the curve.) If you shoot for the stars, you may hit the moon.

 

Square Root of Instagram

In 2006 at Channel 4 (London) I commissioned a mobile-centred website called Big Art Mob. It enabled users to publish photos of Public Art (from sculptures to graffiti) from their mobile phones. In other words, it was basically Instagram 4 years before Instagram was invented. It was created with digital all-rounder Alfie Dennen (father of We Are Not Afraid) using a photo-publishing platform he had developed with partners named Moblog. I had been experimenting with Moblog for 18 months when a TV project about Public Art (The Big Art Project) came over the horizon and it struck me as an ideal place to apply Moblog technology.

The main difference from Instagram is that Big Art Mob’s photos were not in square format.

Today I went to see the Klimt / Schiele exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. I have been a big admirer of Schiele since I heard about him from David Bowie on a radio programme around the time Lodger was released (1979). At the time the Austrian painter was little known outside cognoscenti circles (eg the Marlborough Gallery in London). I was taught a little by Frank Whitford at Cambridge who wrote the Phaidon monograph on Schiele. And I won a travel scholarship at Girton to go study his work in Vienna around 1984. Last year while working at ORF in Vienna I got to do a bit of a self-shaped Schiele tour to mark the centenary of his death which I wrote about in On The Trail of Egon Schiele. I even had a stab at a Schiele in a painting class I recently attended locally:

The exhibition was excellent, bringing out the contrast between how and why Schiele and his mentor Klimt drew. Along the way it reminded me of Klimt’s distinctive adoption of the square format in his portrait painting. Which got me thinking about which other artists went square.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt (1903-1907)

Klimt’s famous portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer is 1.38m by 1.38m. It was commissioned by Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a Jewish banker and sugar producer, husband of Adele. The painting was notoriously stolen by the Nazis in 1941 and displayed at Schloss Belvedere in Vienna, until being returned by the Austrian courts to Bloch-Bauer’s heirs in 2006 at which point it found a new home in New York. It is considered the zenith of Klimt’s golden period. It uses Klimt’s trademark technique of cropping the figure top and bottom to create a pillar through the canvas, here set slightly right to allow the bulk of the patterned dress or aura to balance the composition.

Square and portraits reminded me of the excellent Hockney exhibition at Tate Britain last year. The square format works particularly well in the double portraits which were the beating heart of that show.

My Parents by David Hockney (1977)

The emotionally resonant My Parents is 1.83m by 1.83m, even more epic than the Klimt, yet with the most down-to-earth subjects. Each parent occupies their own half in a very different way – attentive mum, square on, in her own space; pre-occupied dad, at an angle, overlapping the furniture – subtly capturing the difference in parent-child relationship.

Hockney was born on 9th July 1937, eight days before my dad. Nine days later another German Jew, Gerda Taro, died in Spain. She has the tragic distinction of being the first female photojournalist to have been killed while covering war at the frontline. This evening I started watching My Private War for this year’s BAFTA judging, starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Colvin, a latter day Taro. Recently, also for voting purposes (BAFTA Documentary Film chapter), I watched the feature documentary Under The Wire, likewise about the life and death of Colvin (killed in Homs, Syria by an Assad regime air-strike). Taro was killed during the Spanish Civil War in a tragic accident involving a reversing Republican tank.

Republican militiawoman training on the beach outside Barcelona by Gerda Taro (1936)

Taro was another stand-out squarist. She was partner of Magnum photojournalist Robert Capa. (Capa was introduced to the world by Picture Post in 1938, where my maternal grandfather worked. The Hungarian Jew, who famously lived out of a suitcase for most of his adult life, co-founded the Magnum photo agency with Henri Cartier-Bresson and others.) I saw Tara’s first ever US solo show at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2007. Capa picked up the habit from Taro and there are a number of square photographs attributed to Capa which are widely thought to actually be the work of Taro.

These days I find myself photographing square by default. I’ve enjoyed using Instagram for years as a platform for photography only (none of the Stories bollocks or video). Initially it was an excellent way to syndicate your photos across your social accounts (when it was linked to Flickr – the monopolists must have disconnected on account of Yahoo’s ownership of Flickr I guess). Square poses its own compositional challenges which by and large I enjoy rising to – there are not that many shots I take which can’t be accommodated in the stable, equal-sided space. It encourages the use of diagonals which can be dynamic. Here’s one of my favourite of my square compositions:

Statue of George Orwell outside the BBC (New Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London) March 2018

The square is stable enough to carry the two dark figures on the right side. Orwell’s statue is characteristically smoking, hence the appeal of the BBC smoker – both are fag in hand. Of course Orwell like Taro was a graduate of the Spanish Civil War but he made it home to the BBC and to die in the relatively civilised surroundings of UCH (University College Hospital, established by two of my distant ancestors on the Picture Post grandfather’s side, and where both my boys were born). Orwell’s house (at 1 South End Road) is along the same road in Hampstead/Parliament Hill where my dad grew up. He was a child of refugees from Nazi Germany.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear

To round off these square stories, Taro was given a funeral, attended by thousands, by the Communist Party of France. She was buried at Père Lachaise on 1st August 1937 (what would have been her 27th birthday) in a grave designed by Alberto Giacometti. On the tomb is written, in French and Catalan

So nobody will forget your unconditional struggle for a better world

Fast-forward to the summer of 2016 – an open-air display of Taro’s Spanish Civil War photos was included in the f/stop photography festival in Leipzig. Leipzig is where my dad was born in July 1937 in the shadow of the Nazi fascist regime, a swastika and eagle on his birth certificate. When f/stop ended, it was decided that the display would become permanent. This was partly financed through crowdfunding. On the night of 3rd/4th August 2016 (two days after Taro’s 106th birthday), the display was destroyed by being daubed with black tar-like paint. This dark act of destruction was widely suspected to be motivated by anti-semitism or anti-refugee politics. A further crowdfunding campaign more than raised the €4,000 required to restore the vandalised photos. The equal and opposite forces of creativity and destruction, light and dark, squared up to one another.

Be there and be square.

Coincidence No. 400 – of Paramount importance

I am heading over to Channel 4 for a meeting from Tottenham Court Road. As I come up to the Circle & District platform on changing at Embankment tube I turn round and spot my friend Scott from Aspen. He is in town for one day only on Paramount Pictures business, flying back to Colorado from somewhere in Northern Europe via London. We get two stops together and mainly talk movies. Small world.

When I get to my C4 meeting – at The Regency Cafe, one of the best things about the Channel – I join the queue whilst waiting for my old colleague Thom to arrive. I notice just behind me in the line another Tom I know, the son of one of my old college friends. (He lives nowhere near there and doesn’t work in the area when last I heard.) Small town.

 

Superhumans v Ability

On the day of the Opening Ceremony of the Rio Paralympics, it’s interesting to contrast the UK television marketing of London 2012 vs Rio 2016

2012: Meet the Superhumans

2012: the week between the Olympics and the Paralympics

 

2016: Ability