LONDON BRIDGE
CELEBRITY BULLETIN
‘Don’t think of yourselves as students; you’re already filmmakers at the start of your careers. And by the end of this course, you’ll be the shock troops who’ll storm the British Film Industry.’
Revolutionary words. And they came from Colin Young, the newly appointed Director of the National Film School. It was part of his introductory speech to us, twenty-five would-be filmmakers in the first (1971) intake. The NFS had been the brainchild of Jennie Lee, Arts Minister in the 1964 government of Harold Wilson. Her discussions with George Elvin, the General Secretary of the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians had unlocked the previously existing ‘closed shop’, whereby film work could only be taken by members of the Union, but membership of the Union was dependent on having previous professional experience. The guarantee of Union membership at the end of three years of NFS training made graduates eligible to accept a professional contract.
The old hands’ prejudice against us upstarts was all too apparent. For work experience during one vacation, I volunteered as a runner on a Children’s Film Foundation film. I was shocked when the boom swinger reacted to my friendly greeting. ‘Get yourself a fucking Union card if you want to speak to me!’ he said.
We were a disparate bunch – American, Australian, Israeli, Welsh, Scottish. Even English. We crewed on each other’s films, the idea being that we would learn from our mistakes. There were limits, however. I was clapper/loader on Michael Radford’s first film, and committed the cardinal sin, when loading the camera, of omitting to engage the film sprockets ‘in the gate’. The whole roll ran through the camera unexposed. At ‘rushes’ the following day, when we viewed what we’d shot, the screen was blank. Mike fired me on the spot.
In the second year, the arrival of specialists in the technical grades – camera, sound, editing – freed us directors from working in those grades. We recruited people who knew what they were doing. Mike Radford teamed up with Roger Deakins – knighted in 2021 New Year’s Honours List in recognition of ‘his outstanding contribution to British film’. As far as I know, during his long and illustrious career, Roger has always remembered to thread the film into the gate.
On graduation, we set about finding work. At the time, the accepted wisdom was that the British Film Industry was alive and well and working in television. As directors, our potential employers were the Heads of Drama in TV companies: the BBC and all the companies grouped in the ITV network – London Weekend TV, Thames, Granada, Harlech, Yorkshire (the game-changer for us directors, Channel 4, didn’t come along until 1982).
I saw Innes Lloyd at BBC Television Centre, David Rose at BBC’s Birmingham Pebble Mill Studios, and Peter Eckersley at Granada in Manchester. All three made time to see me and view my showreel. They were the future, and the surly boom swinger would go the way of the dinosaurs.
These meetings led directly to contracts that kept me busy for the following three years. I shall be eternally grateful to Innes, David and Peter, the fairy godfathers who bestowed on me the gift of a television career.
David commissioned a remake of my second-year NFS film THE HEALING, written by my wife Laura Lamson, and set on a Northumbrian sheep farm. However, there was a six-month hiatus between graduating and the start of the BBC contract. To keep the wolf from the door, I took a job as a researcher on the London Weekend children’s magazine programme, LONDON BRIDGE. Sally James – who, along with Lenny Henry and Chris Tarrant, eventually presided over the organised chaos of the hugely successful kids’ show TISWAS – was the main presenter. Produced by her husband, Mike Smith, its format was simple – Sally interviewed someone famous, and an audience of teenagers was invited to ask questions.
The production team – Sally, Mike and the researchers (me, Alan Lubin and Vicky Poushkine) would meet every Monday morning to write the show, which was recorded on Wednesday and broadcast on Saturday.
My job was to monitor CELEBRITY BULLETIN, a database of upcoming entertainment events and celebrity appearances, to spot celebs in town to promote their current project – film/music release, whatever it might be. I would then ring the agents and managers to persuade their clients to appear on the show. Once the main guests were booked, I took them to lunch on Tuesday to brief them. I had an expense account, and in those days when the ITV companies were flush with cash, lunches could be lavish – and expensive.
In this way, I took David Putnam to Verrey’s Restaurant in Regent Street. He was five years into his movie-producing career – soon to take off spectacularly. He charmed the studio audience with stories of his start as a postboy in an advertising agency and answered their questions with self-deprecating good humour.
Some years later, David and I met in the lunch queue in the NFTS canteen. We’d been invited to give evidence as to why the film school deserved its funding to Paul Channon, the newly appointed Arts Minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government. Amazingly, David remembered my name and where we’d had lunch. His advocacy for the need for an internationally recognised British Film School was powerful. However, it quickly became clear that Channon wasn’t interested. As events turned out, he was only keeping the seat warm and, in common with the rest of Thatcher’s cabinet, he was an uncultured barbarian.
During a promotion tour to London, Muhammed Ali made an appearance. Accompanied by Bundini Brown – his cornerman in the most recent of the bruising encounters with Joe Frazier – he agreed to meet a bunch of kids at the Keskidee Centre in Islington, a cultural hub designed for members of the West Indian diaspora. Mike Smith considered the event so important he gave me a film crew to record it. In a boxing ring set up in the Centre’s gym, Ali sparred with three kids at a time, allowing them to ‘give him their best shot’. The film we shot that day became one of the show’s highlights.
Behind his desk, Brian Anderson, governor of Ashworth Young Offenders Prison in Bristol, had a copy of the famous photo of Ali standing over the prone figure of Sonny Liston. Before entering the prison service, Brian had been a pro-fighter himself, and for a time held the British middleweight title.
Long after LONDON BRIDGE was done and dusted, I needed Brian’s permission to film inside his nick. I was making a guide to prison release, following a young lad about to be freed on parole. Security issues always make filming in prison problematic. Understandably, Brian was wary. However, when I mentioned the LONDON BRIDGE film, he was won over. Muhammed Ali’s name literally opened doors.
Another guest was Richard Williams. The founder of an animation studio, Richard later won two Oscars for WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT. I knew him from the animated sequences in Tony Richardson’s THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE. Though shy and self-effacing, he agreed to come on the show to judge flickerbooks produced by the studio audience. Like David Putnam and Muhammed Ali, he talked to the kids at their level and didn’t patronise them. Consequently, they adored him.
Mary Whitehouse was a controversial figure in the 1970s. Regarded as a narrow-minded bigot by some and a guardian of public morals by others, she was the founder and President of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, a ginger group whose purpose was to clean up broadcasting – particularly the BBC. As a libertarian, I considered the BBC of the time a beacon of free speech and artistic freedom. Under the benign stewardship of Director General Hugh Carlton Greene, programmes like THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS were commissioned that held the establishment’s feet to the fire – which I thought was all to the good. How dare a member of Moral Rearmament tell us what we could and could not watch?
With the agreement of the production team, I invited Mrs Whitehouse onto the show intending to turn her into an Aunt Sally. I assembled a panel of leftie six-formers, whom I briefed to challenge her bigotry. It didn’t turn out as I planned. Mrs Whitehouse became a matronly version of Daniel in the lion’s den and had the six-formers eating out of her hand. When we finished recording, she walked off the set. ‘Was I alright?’ she asked, then stretched her lips to reveal her gleaming dentures, top and bottom, ‘I didn’t have lipstick on my teeth, did I?’
In rehearsal for her later role in TISWAS, Sally interviewed several rockstars, including Russell and Ron Mael of SPARKS. Ron’s image was disturbing – hornrimmed specs, pencil moustache, and glowering unsmiling expression. I wondered whether this was his stage presence, or whether in private he was charming and effusive, like his brother.
John Entwhistle of THE WHO brought his dog to the studio – an Irish wolfhound, of huge proportions but gentle disposition. It became my job to mind it while John was interviewed. However, the poor animal’s feet had no purchase on the slippery studio floor and its legs kept splaying out. It became incontinent with fear and I was left with the task of clearing up the mess.
The six months I worked with the LONDON BRIDGE team were eventful. Every week, there was a new programme to write and new faces to interview. Those months went by very quickly, and when the time came for me to start my contract as a bona fide director, I left the world of children’s TV for good. In that time I learned that it’s hard to make television for children. The Reithian principles of ‘information, education and entertainment are easily ignored or distorted. There’s no point in educating or informing if the audience is bored silly – they just won't listen. The pill has to be sugared with entertainment.
LONDON BRIDGE got the balance right. It didn’t condescend to its young audience. Instead, it chose subjects that would stimulate a native curiosity. I was glad to be part of it and grateful for the experience.
One small admission – since then, I have never opened CELEBRITY BULLETIN again.