Taylor Downing

BEHP Interview 0699 transcript

Taylor Downing (TD)

Interviewer: Murray Weston (MW)

Camera: Dan Thurley

Other crew: David Sharp

Murray Weston: This is Friday 21st April, 2017 and this is interview number 699, with Taylor Downing and the recording is for the British Entertainment History Project. Hello Taylor.

Taylor Downing: Welcome.

MW: Thank you very much for having us here today. With all of these interviews we always start at the very beginning by asking all our subjects where were you born? Where did you come from – so tell us more about where you grew up.

TD: Well, I’m a Londoner, grew up in west London, went to school in Hammersmith, Latimer Upper, direct grant school. It was then a very, very, mixed school, socially very, very, mixed; went to read history as an undergraduate at Cambridge, and then studied film, as a postgraduate at Bristol, and was very keen to try and find a way to bring these two great interest of mine, film and history together, and I couldn’t see any way of combining them it just…I was going to have to go in one direction or another, and then towards the end of the course at Bristol, a guy called Jerry Kuehl came and gave a lecture to us. We used to have lectures every Friday afternoon from outsiders, and Jerry was talking about the making of the series The World at War, which was a few years before this moment when I was at Bristol.  And suddenly the penny dropped and I can still remember that Road to Damascus moment was ‘television historical documentaries.’ Of course! That’s it! That combines my interest in history, my interest in film and television, and so when we left Bristol, left university, had to finish the course we had to fill out a little questionnaire: where would you like to be in two year’s time? And I said I would like to be a researcher on historical documentaries working at Thames Television. And I’m happy to say that two year’s later, that’s where I was.

MW: How wonderful! So few people manage to achieve exactly what they want to do in so short a time. So, were you under George Brandt then at Bristol?

TD: Yes, that’s right. Yes.

MW: So he was there then.

TD: He was an absolute pioneer. The story went that he was the first university lecturer that ever got a tape recorder installed in his department. It was the English Department, it became later the Drama Department at Bristol University. Yes, he was certainly a mentor, a guru of film teaching, film studies.

MW: Now I understand that you had some relationship at the University of Leeds at some stage, so did you leave Bristol initially and go to Leeds, or-

TD: No. It was going to be fairly tricky getting into television as a researcher, particularly in an ITV company, where at that sort of level you are going to need a union ticket, an ACTT ticket, so my very first job was at the Imperial War Museum Film Department. My very first boss was Anne Fleming (BEHP Interview No 0698) Say no more. And when I was there, because that was actually an ACTT shop I managed to get a card, an ACTT card, ACTT ticket, membership, but it was a temporary job – they needed somebody to do some film cataloguing and my task was every morning to view film, every afternoon to research the background and so on, and write up the entry for the catalogue and at the end of every month somebody put some money in my bank account. I couldn’t believe it, this was an absolute ideal job for me, viewing historical footage, cataloguing it in a place like The Imperial War Museum which was then a very, very, lively place to be, it was a very young establishment. There were lots of us who had passions for different aspects of history, film and so on. So a very exciting place to be.

But, sadly, that was only a job for about eight or nine months. It was always going to be thus. A temporary task to catch up with film cataloguing that they’d got behind on; and then I got a job teaching history at the University of Leeds, so that was my second ‘proper’ job as it were, teaching fellow at the School of History at Leeds, where I taught Twentieth Century History and ran a course for a guy called Nicholas Pronay, who is well known in the centres of the circles of historical analysis of film, and film as evidence. He was very much a pioneer in that area. So, I went and taught – he had a course called Propaganda in the Twentieth Century, and I taught bits of that and it was while I was up there that a job became free at Thames Television as a film researcher on a series called Palestine, that was being made.

5 mins

TD: Three, well it started off as one-hour, but it was slightly longer at the end but anyway three documentaries on the British Mandate in Palestine from the First World War to 1948. And I heard about the job, applied for it, and was lucky enough to get that job, so in fact, within a year of leaving Bristol I’d done these two jobs for just over a year and then very, very luckily this vacancy came up, which I got because I had the ACTT Ticket, I was able to use that to start work in an ITV company.

MW:  And the Palestine series, who was actually directing it or producing it?

TD: The principal Producer was man called Richard Broad, who was one of the very great ITV documentary directors of the time, [who] now lives in the West of Ireland; if you want to interview him you have to travel over to Ireland because he never comes back to London.

MW: Maybe. Go on.

TD: He had made a tremendous run of pioneering documentaries, particularly about the Third World. The Black Man’s Burden was one of his films, he made films of early warning about climate change – this is all in the seventies – but he hadn’t worked on The World at War, which was the Thames Documentary Department production in the early seventies, and he’d always, he’d quite fancied the idea of looking at a historical subject, making a film on a historical subject.

He was rather cautious about it because he thought it was basically trying to make a film with other peoples’ rushes, it was other peoples’ archive material that you were using, rather than his own that he’d generated himself, so he was a bit cautious about it, but we got on very well together, and my interest in film and the story of how the film had been made was particularly relevant in something like the story of the British Mandate in Palestine, and where the Zionist movement had promoted itself on film right from the very beginning. The Palestinian Arabs only ever really appeared as strange figures wearing tea-towels on their heads, backward, primitive and obstructive, violent, chaotic, incapable of their own government: that was the image that came out of the film records, so we had an imbalance in the material we were using to make that series, that we then had to editorially try and balance out and find a way of making a far more even-handed story. In fact, the series went on and won an Emmy in America – a documentary Emmy, and was very highly regarded at the time, and I do remember one of the reviews, in The Listener, in fact - his names has just gone out of my head, the guy who is at Lincoln, now-

MW: Brian Winston?

TD: Brian Winston, thank you.

MW: He’s not there anymore – or is he, I can’t remember.

TD: Oh right, okay.

MW: Maybe he’s leaving. Doesn’t matter. Brian Winston, yeah.

TD: One of the reviews of the series, the Thames series Palestine, by Brian Winston spoke about in The Listener spoke about the Academy Award winning film research, so that went straight onto my CV [Murray laughs] and I thanked him. Every time I see Brian Winston I thank him again for this huge boost to my career that he gave me. So aged about 24 or 5 or something I had this wonderful credit, wonderful review and that was the beginning of my TV career.

MW: I seem to remember the Palestine series with BUFC [British Universities Film Council. DS] as it was at that time, there was a collaborative meeting at Windsor Great Park-

TD: That’s right there was. Yes, after the series.

MW: And there were a lot of security issues because it was such a hot topic.

TD: Difficult to remember now but in the late seventies, the series was made, very loosely to mark the fortieth anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, so it was made for 1978. We didn’t go out in May which was the actual anniversary because we hadn’t finished the series but it went out that summer, prime time ITV, extraordinary to think of an ITV broadcaster today transmitting a historical documentary series.

Richard’s concept behind the whole series was that it would be balanced between the Jewish Zionist community on the one hand and Palestinian Arabs on the other. Doesn’t sound very radical today, but up until that point the Palestinians had always been represented by others: by the Jordanian government, the Egyptian government; the PLO was out in the wings, on the fringes. And so the idea of balancing the whole story between what was the Zionist movement doing, what were the Palestinian Arabs doing was actually very, very radical, and I can remember being in the office one day: there was a big poster that had been produced that had the word Palestine on it, [that] went on the tube, buses and things like that, all round London and I can remember being called by the lady in reception.

10 minutes

 

TD: I was the only person on the office, I think it was lunch time, [she said] “Will you come down here, there’s a man in tears down in reception.” And I thought ‘Oh goodness me this will be some Zionist who is furious and wants to strangle me.’ I went down there and it was this middle-aged Arab gentleman, Palestinian Arab as it turned out, who said he’d just seen the word Palestine on a bus in London and he wanted to come and thank us for using that name. So at that point, late seventies, even the word Palestine, well it was controversial but it was loaded with meaning. It was a very radical series and when we had the preview at Thames, I remember, a very long time ago now but the idea was to invite the Israeli ambassador to see it and the PLO representative in London, but we had to orchestrate two separate screenings so that they wouldn’t meet, because neither recognised the existence of the other at that point, and it all went terribly well until they both decided to go to the loo at the same time [Murray laughs] so they met in the gents at Thames: the first ever meeting between a PLO representative and the representative of the State of Israel actually took place in the gentleman’s lavatory on the third floor of Thames’ old Euston building.

MW: Intriguing, how these things happen. That series, we haven’t seen much of again, have we?

TD: [shakes head] No.

MW: When compared with The World at War for instance. Or other series that have been around a lot. I imagine that the rights and some of the clearances and that sort of thing that were cleared at the time would not allow it to be seen again. It’s unfortunate we don’t see it again.

TD: Yes, yes. There’s a – one of the radical things that Thames did with its historical documentaries, it really started with The World at War, was to take the commercial view that it was better to spend rather more on acquiring the archive rights at the beginning by buying world rights in perpetuity. [It] usually meant at least doubling the cost of the payments, but Thames as a commercial operation saw very foresightedly , with great foresight, that this was an opportunity to buy programming that would have international appeal: that would stay on the shelf. And, of course, The World at War was the absolute classic…about which recently – or a few years ago – I wrote a book about the making of the series, because I wasn’t involved with it at all but I was very much in the shadow of it, in the ‘wake’ if you like of The World at War, and always had been fascinated by it. And unlike the BBC for instance, when they were making The Great War series in the mid-sixties, where they only bought a brief licence for the archive all of which expired in that series until it was re-cleared for the 2004 anniversary of the First World War completely disappeared. But Thames had taken the view that they would buy out rights, right from the beginning, and that has kept The World at War on the shelves for forty years. It’s over forty years since the series was first made, and there’s no real reason why it won’t still be being watched in forty year’s time from now. It’s a hugely successful series, wonderfully well made. Very, very powerful use of storytelling, very fine commentary from Laurence Olivier, fantastic archive research, tremendous range of interviews, many of whom of course are now long dead. So, it is an extraordinary series of programmes that is still available.

Now, Palestine, we worked on the same principle. We bought, where we could, rights in perpetuity, but there was lots of material where we simply couldn’t buy those rights, so it would be quite an issue to clear it again. I actually saw an episode: Richard Broad showed an episode in Ireland last year, and I went over to see it with him, there was a big sort of screening, and it stands up very well. It looked strong.

MW: And certainly part of that pedigree, of course… And The World at War of course set a standard with having Laurence Olivier as a voice-over and there is just so much class isn’t it? Thames put a marker down there.

TD: Yes, absolutely, but it’s not just the voice, which I find a bit eccentric in places.

MW: Okay. No it’s the writing.

TD: I get a bit irritated when he talks about [imitates] Schtaleen, rather than Stalin … [indecipherable Russian name] he is very theatrical, and he hated doing it, by the way.

MW: I know.

TD: He was a performer, a very physical performer and he hated sitting in a little recording booth with no audience other than the Producer and Jeremy Isaacs, sitting behind a glass panel, and he’d been asked to do lots of commentaries after that but he turned them all down, he hated doing it. In fact, he walked out of the whole project after about four recordings but Jeremy persuaded him to stay on for the duration. But it’s also about the writing, the quality of the writing, and I think that’s something that I’ve always learned and always tried to aspire to: that very crisp, concise narrative telling.

15 mins

 

MW: And part of that DNA it seems to me might have been Jerry Kuehl because he went back to the First World War series, didn’t he, with the BBC.

TD: Yes.

MW: The Great War. Which surprised me because I reminded myself when I saw the programme again and there’s Jerry’s name on it. I thought it was pre-Jerry, but not.

TD: Yes, that was one of the very first things he did.

MW: And was he not involved in Palestine at all – in some capacity?

TD: No he wasn’t involved in Palestine. He was involved on the fringes of the Cold War series, that’s sort of Jerry’s, jumping forward twenty-odd years. To the late 1990’s. I think Jerry’s real contribution was making everybody think about the authenticity of the use of archive material. He would send memos to people saying “You know, I really admired your episode 7 about war in the Atlantic but I would point out to you that you used the same shot of this German U-Boat four times-

MW: -and turned it round three times – [laughs]

TD: - and turned it round three times, and in fact it’s completely the wrong marque of U-Boat for that stage of the war anyway.” So Jerry kept everybody thinking about the use of film. Of course, you can’t always if you are describing a moment, the footage that you have is often generic, rather than the [specific] ship or the ‘plane or the tank, or the soldiers at that moment of time, but nevertheless Jerry becomes the conscious, conscience of the production, making you think about these things and I think he made a very important contribution there. Not so much in the writing, but in the use of the archival visual material.

MW: Now, Palestine: was this a contract or were you on the staff?

TD: No, no I was very much, [chuckles] I was a freelance film researcher and as soon as Palestine ended, I was given another freelance contract, but it was a relatively short one, to start work on a series that eventually became the history of Ireland, Northern Ireland, and there was an industrial dispute at Thames as there were many industrial disputes at Thames when I was there and this one involved the film researchers and the management, and the staff film researchers decided that the way to make their protest, was to block the renewal of any further contracts and mine was the next contract that came up for renewal so I was in the unusual position, as a freelance film researcher at Thames, of the Shop Steward coming down and telling me that I had to leave the building [Murray laughs] as part of industrial action for the rest of the staff film researchers, so I went to work for Granada. Got a job in those days, seems extraordinary now, but you left somewhere on a Friday, started somewhere else on a Monday. And I got a job with Granada for several months.

MW: And what were you doing at Granada at that time?

TD: I was a researcher on a series called Camera, which was a history of photography.

MW: Right.

TD: With several illustrious people: Maxine Baker was the Producer, Martin Smith was one of the Directors, first time I’d met and worked with Martin, who again would feature very substantially later.

MW: So you were based in Golden Square [London] rather than in Manchester.

TD: Golden Square, yes that’s right. Golden Square.

MW: Interesting, I remember Maxine being around there a lot of the time.

Now, at some point Vicky Wegg-Prosser-

TD: Yes.

MW: - becomes part of your world, and Vicky had been Keeper of Documentary, I think at the National Film & Television Archive.

TD: Yup.

MW: And I was sort of around in 81 Dean Street and I think she’d left at the point where I’d arrived in ’78, or maybe I’m wrong about that, anyway, never mind, but I know that you joined up to create Flashback Television.

TD: That’s right. The story goes, there were various things from Palestine onwards, there was a series called The Troubles – in fact an Israeli had said to Richard at the end of Palestine “It’s all very well you people coming over from England telling us what’s wrong with our society, you should look at your own society [gestures pointing] look at Northern Ireland.” He said. So, Richard took that away and said “actually that’s a very good idea, why don’t we do a series on the history of Northern Ireland?” So that’s the next one that followed, I worked on that with Richard, ended up as an Associate Producer on that series.

MW: Was this with Robert Kee?

TD: No, that was a rival series, made by Jeremy Isaacs for the BBC. Neither of us knew that the other was actually planning this at the time. At one point Jeremy rang me and said “Would I care to join the BBC and be researcher on it?” – his series on Ireland and I said “You’re doing a series on Ireland? But I’m working on a series on Norther Ireland Jeremy.” “Are you?” he said. “Well, who is that for?” and I said “Thames Jeremy.” Having been Controller of Programmes at Thames and the guru behind The World at War, had left to go independent, and he was working with the BBC and Robert Kee.

There were two rival series, and I remember when we used to go in and out of Belfast, I was always stopped by security, every single time: young, long-haired, radical looking, whatever, they stopped me. [Adopts Belfast accent] “Excuse me sir, are you hear on business or pleasure?” You know, so I said “On Business.” “What business is that?”

20 mins

 

TD: “Television. Working on a historical documentary.” “Oh, are you doing the BBC one or the ITV one!” [laughter]. So, there was that, and then I got a break, an opportunity to direct, I was 28, 29 and I went to Central [Television], I think they’d become, yes they were Central by then to direct a series of their local half-hour documentaries which was a fantastic opportunity to learn and to develop and to actually be in charge of a crew. Nothing to do with history at all it was an … observational series about the police in Nottinghamshire, something completely different and really a very, very great challenge, and then I went back to Thames as a Director. It was made clear to me that you could never go up through the system at Thames to be appointed a Director, you had to go somewhere else if you wanted [that], anyway then I went back and directed – directed, not produced – a series called The Longest War. The Producer was David Elstein.

MW: Yeah.

TD: Which was a set of programmes again looking at the Arab-Israeli conflict from different angles – I did the Palestinian angle, and it was about that time, it was about, that would have been the early part of 1982, that Jeremy Isaacs was appointed as the new Chief Executive of Channel 4 and announced they were looking for ideas, and Vicky and I were at an event together, sorry Vicky Wegg-Prosser and I were at an event together, and she said “Why don’t we submit an idea together?” It was her idea to put an idea together, we came up with this idea that we’d use film, the film record as a way of looking at different aspects of Twentieth Century history and I can remember very clearly I went to the meeting to discuss this – Vicky must have been away somewhere, because we did everything very much as equal partners, but I went to this meeting and they’d just moved in to Horseferry Road, and there were people still laying the cables under the floor and in the ceiling and all that sort of stuff that went on in offices. I went in and said “Well, this is our pitch.” He said “It sounds very interesting, and we have to go through the processes, but you’ll need to form a company in order to make a programme.” And I said “No, no, I’m a freelancer, Vicky is a freelancer at the BBC, we’re both freelancers, just show us where the freelancers sit.” [Murray laughs] “We’ll sit there, we’ll make the programmes and then go off and freelance for somebody else.” “No, no, no, you’ve got to form your own company.” I said “Well that really – we’re going to need accountants and lawyers and it seems ever such a lot of effort just to make a set of programmes.” “No, well that’s the way its going to be, it’s a new model that we are inventing here.” So, because I was convinced that we would just make this one set of programmes that we had already called Flashback, we called the company Flashback, and then when we’d done that we’d fold it all down and get going.

Anyway, that was 1982.

MW: I think they would have been Charlotte Street, probably, wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t have been Horseferry Road. Without picking you up too much.

At that time.

TD: Oh sorry. Yes, of course, Charlotte Street. Of course you are right.

MW: Because it’s the very early days of Channel 4 isn’t it? It had just started.

TD: That’s right, yes. I’ll tell that story again.

MW: It’s okay [laughs]

TD: I can remember the very first meeting I went to at the brand new offices in Charlotte Street, where they were still putting in the cabling, building the walls and working the office space out again and that was where we had the discussion about having to form a limited company and I just thought that was such a lot of effort, why don’t we just go and sit in the room where the freelancers would gather, make a programme and then move on to do something else.

So that was 1982. We got one of the very first commissions from Channel 4. We were well in production well before Channel 4 went on air in November ’82.

MW: I believe Vicky had been the researcher on the Ireland series for BBC with Robert Kee because that’s why I put the two together.

TD: Yes, that’s right.

MW: I realise I’d made a big error there.

TD: That’s right. I’d forgotten she’d been the film researcher on the Robert Kee series. With Jeremy. So that was the first time she’d worked with Jeremy.

Jeremy – I can’t say I really knew Jeremy well, I obviously knew who he was and passed him. I can remember one story – sorry, this is just going back to Palestine, but one little story I can remember getting in the lift at Thames, and we were on the third floor I think it was, and he was going up to the fourth floor, it was just the two of us, he came in the lift, the doors opened, he got in and [they] shut, and I knew of course who he was, but Jeremy Isaacs turned round to me and he said “I don’t know you – who are you?”

25 mins

 

TD: and I said “Oh, I’m Taylor Downing.” And he said “Oh yes, you’re the new researcher in the Documentary Department, aren’t you?” and at that point the lift stopped and the doors opened and he turned and looked at me and said “Fabulous job, that! A researcher in the Documentary Department.” And off he went and the doors closed. Such a brilliant piece of personnel management.

MW: Mm, I know.

TD: I mean it left me feeling eight feet tall. The idea that at that point it was still possible for a senior manager to recognise that there was somebody that he didn’t know. I mean, later on, there were so many, the staff had grown so much that no senior management figure would expect to know all the people, but the idea that he gets into a lift with somebody he doesn’t know, and then just leaves them feeling so good about their role. So, I knew Jeremy, Jeremy got to know me a little bit and so again I think it was part of Vicky’s thinking we were both known by Jeremy, we were both known for our work with archive film material, so why don’t we pitch an idea to the new channel – and that’s how Flashback came about.

MW: I seem to remember Vicky did something with the Institute of South East Asian Studies in Cambridge about, now what was it? About empire, End of Empire was it?

TD: She’d done a programme about the Peace Pledge Union.

MW: Was that with you, or independent?

TD: No, that was pretty much an independent project. Because before then she’d also worked with Stephen Peet [BEHP Interview No 163] at the BBC on Yesterday’s Witness, so she had a good production record and as you say she’d been a senior player in the National Film Archive at the BFI for some time. I think she left the BFI to have a family and then had gone into television as her boys grew up a little bit. I think that was roughly how it worked. Anyway, you’d have to ask her.

So we formed Flashback, one of the first independent production companies to be formed in the UK with that hugely exciting period when Channel 4 launched. I can remember going to one of the early meetings where Jeremy gave a little speech about how Channel 4 was going to be so very different to the rest of the broadcasters. I can remember coming out, thinking ‘this is so exciting, this is exactly where I want to be. What a thing to be part of this new wave, of this new contribution to British broadcasting.’ It was really very, very exciting.

MW: Was this IPA, the Independent Producers Association, or was it one of those organisations that brought everyone together.

TD: Possibly or even before then. I can’t now remember exactly what the nature of the meeting [was] it might just have been people who’d got early commissions or something or who were likely to be doing business with the channel had been invited to this little pep talk from the Chief Exec. But he was a very inspiring – still is – a very inspiring leader, Jeremy, and we really did feel that we were going to have an impact and make a difference, and I think it’s probably fair to say in the long sweep of things, Channel 4 did have a very big influence. On British broadcasting and around the world, the idea of independent producers being commissioned is something that was pioneered there, although there had been independent producers in Britain and America and elsewhere, but not in this sort of role playing an important part of television production.

MW: You mentioned Jeremy Isaacs for his comment to you and how it was good leadership. I imagine it’s something which you’ve thought about since.

TD: Mm. [agrees]

MW: I mean the whole question of what leadership is, because you were later to run quite a large enterprise, in the sense that Flashback became more than just you and Vicky Wegg-Prosser, didn’t it, and it grew. You’ve learned a lot from Jeremy Isaacs because it seems to me, he had an editorial nous and also clearly a light touch ‘get the troops to follow’.

TD: Management style, yes. Well, he was certainly somebody to aspire to. I can’t say I ever equalled in either creative or production terms, or in managerial terms, Jeremy’s work, but it was certainly an inspiration and later again I worked with him as a writer: we jointly wrote the book on the Cold War series. Well actually there are 24 chapters in the book, I wrote 23 of them and Jeremy wrote one but we worked very closely together. I’m not talking out of turn there because he actually admitted to that in his memoirs – so he’s admitted that. But we worked together closely and what I was talking about on The World at War with the scripts, the writing, the very clear, crisp focused writing was something that I got from Jeremy in collaborating on writing the book as well as I produced two of the episodes of the Cold War series too, so yes, he’s certainly been a very, very big influence and I’m happy to say he’s still a very good friend and colleague.

30 mins

 

MW: So your first commission with Flashback, remind us of it again. You’ve probably mentioned it already, but-

TD: Well, it was a series called Flashback. It was two series of half-hour programmes. The first that I put together was looking at images of war and pacificism through the Twentieth Century so we began with films made by the government during the First World War, no, sorry, we began with the Boer War, the first ever films that were made about a conflict for a British audience, some of the issues about faking footage and how scenes were staged and how the news was imparted through the brand new medium of film, and then The First World War, then the Peace Movement in the ‘30s; The Second World War, the mobilisation of documentary film makers in the Second World War.

While we were making the series, The Falklands War erupted and so we made the last programme about the film and television treatment of The Falklands War, which if you remember, because it was all off satellite connections in the South Atlantic, it took longer for an image to get back from the Falklands to London than it had taken in the Crimean War, for photographs to get from the Crimea to London so we had a very nice full circle, almost to go round in the series.

Then Vicky made a series about images of the family, and the state’s attitude towards family and family life, and my thinking always was that we’d make these twenty half-hour programmes for Channel 4, but that would be the end of it, close everything down and go off and be freelancers again, and towards the end of the series I had an idea – it was 1984 by now – the Olympic Games were coming up in Los Angeles, and I thought Los Angeles, Hollywood, Capital of film-making, let’s look at the filming of the Olympics. And that got commissioned by Channel 4, and then when that came to an end Vicky came up with an idea for a series and that got commissioned and… the years rolled on.

MW: And you rolled the projects.

TD: One thing rolled to another yes.

MW: And very successfully and for quite a number of years.

TD: Yes. Vicky and I separated our production activities, perfectly friendly, because I was also going back to some freelance work at Thames. In fact, I had a spell where I was partly working with an independent producer’s hat on and partly going back for some good pay and some interesting work at Thames Television, and Vicky stayed at Flashback, so we separated. We had two companies: I had Flashback Television Ltd and Vicky had Flashback Productions Ltd. And she went on making very successful series, a very long running series about the history of The March of Time newsreel. I believe that was actually sixty programmes.

MW: Wow.

TD: If I’ve got in right., fifty or sixty programmes that she made and that occupied many, many years, and then I picked up my half of Flashback and we had  separate offices and then that grew over the years to quite a substantial operation over many years.

I’ve often thought that the story of Flashback is very much the story of a smallish independent production company through the eighties, nineties, hundreds. One of the key things that happened was the 1990 Broadcasting Act which shows really how the legislative framework in which we all work is absolutely significant to the creative output that we all have, in that the 1990 Broadcasting Act laid down for the first time that there should be 25% of production in many areas – not in news, not in sport though with certain exceptions most productions, drama and documentary, 25%  should over a period of years come from independent producers, and I think that was a sign, Channel 4 having started in 1982, so within eight years the government’s production community has taken the independents seriously and we’d grown into our teenage years.

MW: That was public service broadcasters, other public service broadcasters like the BBC.

 

TD: BBC as well as ITV companies. Flashback for the first eight or ten years of its existence, it never really even occurred to me to go to pitch an idea to anybody to anybody other than Channel 4, that was where we worked. If you wanted to be an independent, you worked for Channel 4. I was lucky enough also to be doing some work for ITV, for Thames, …but with my independent hat on, with my Flashback hat on we were only commissioned by Channel 4, and then after the 1990 Broadcasting Act that said 25% of all productions should come from independents –

35 mins

 

TD: It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I should try pitching to ITV. Perhaps I should try pitching to the BBC and so that really ushered in the second period of growth of Flashback as a company.

MW: And diversification.

TD: Yes.

MW: To a degree away from historical subjects and into all sorts of different subjects.

TD: Away from history. Yes, absolutely, into – I mean I made a whole range of sports documentaries for many years…. We did a lot of drama documentaries. We pioneered a sort of way of making dramas we invented a particularly difficult situations: a very messy divorce; a domestic murder, where a woman has killed her husband and we had actors and actresses, actors and actresses briefed up as the central characters, but then working with professionals, professional social workers, professional police officers, carers, probation officers, filming over a relatively controlled period of time, the outcome, how they dealt with these very, very, difficult situations; so we did a whole load of those. They were all for ITV, right the way through the nineties. We did lots of those: adoption, divorce, domestic murder and so on. They were very successful at the time.

As the company grew, I attracted other people to come into it, and they brought other skills. I remember poaching a man called Neil Cleminson from – he was then at Granada but he’d been with David Attenborough on the very first of the Life on Earth series. He was a natural-history programme maker who had gone to Granada to actually make gardening programmes, and that was then a very successful strand on Channel 4. I poached Neil Cleminson from Granada to come to Flashback – he took quite a big step, but never regretted it. I hope I can say that. And so we then started producing gardening programmes, so there was a very diverse mix; and then the person who then became my long-term business partner at Flashback, David Edgar. He’d been a cameraman. A different approach to television than from my side, [my] slightly more academic approach into television, he’d grown up in the cinema, his father was a cameraman, he’d been an assistant to his father in the days when cameramen had assistants. He came with a tremendous amount of practical skills, he came in and developed several lines of his own programming: cooking programmes –

MW: With Nigella. [Lawson]

TD: We became the company that produced all Nigella’s programmes yes, for many years, yes. So, the company built up. We ended up with quite substantial offices in Farringdon, regular payroll of forty to sixty people, I would say, that sort of size.

MW: This is getting serious.

TD: Yeah.

MW: There must have been a moment in that transition from thinking do we really need a company to getting offices in Farringdon, where you thought ‘Hang on, I’m becoming a media mogul now’ I mean you must have thought –

TD: I never thought of being a media mogul, [Murray laughs] but what I realised – and there must have been a moment, I don’t actually recall that moment, it was more gradual – where I was doing less of the creative work, the front-end creative work, for much more of managing a team of people, and ensuring that we had enough work coming through to pay them their salaries at the end of the month and pay the rent and pay all the other overheads. In the main I was quite happy about that; I suppose as I was getting older, I was feeling that I was reasonably successful at doing that.

The other thing that developed in the 1990s was that I’d built up quite a good relationship with a man called Charlie Mayday who was one of the senior executives at Arts & Entertainment in New York. I used to see him every time I was passing through New York and we used to chat, talk about programmes and he was very interested in hearing my take on the British programme sector, and I was interested in hearing his talk on the American programme sector, and one day I got a call from him and he said “We’re going to launch a new channel, it’s called The History Channel.” So, I picked myself up of the floor and said “That’s funny Charlie, I thought you said you were going to form a channel called The History Channel.” [Murray laughs] “That’s right.” He said, “That’s exactly what we are going to do, we are going to form a channel called The History Channel, we’re going to make nothing but history programmes, and we’d like you to make some, have you got any ideas?” He didn’t say we’d like you to make some, he said “Have you got any ideas?” Again, when I got back onto the chair for the second time, I said “Yes, I think so.” And he was coming over to London and I arranged for him to go up to – I still remember this visit, we went up to Duxford, the Imperial War Museum’s base at Duxford.

40 mins

 

TD: And we got him into a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, we got actually inside the aircraft and crawled around it [Murray laughs] and Charlie, the new Head of the History Channel sat at the giant joy stick which has Boeing right across the top of it and he [demonstrates] was so excited and he said “Wow, this is just amazing, I never thought I’d get to do anything like this!”  We never took off, it’s just on the ground but there he was sitting in the cockpit of a Boeing B-17 bomber, so excited, and I thought ‘I wonder if there is any way we can make a programme in which the viewer almost imagines that’s what they are doing’, be in an aircraft or a tank, or a ship or whatever it was. Anyway, we came up with a format that went on and eventually became forty episodes of a series for the American History Channel, and then came over here on Channel 4 and elsewhere. Again, in business terms, that was absolutely fantastically successful. I think most independents today regard having an international arm as part of the business model, whereas that very much wasn’t the case in the nineties and for the next ten years and I think I was one of the pioneers in fact in making that work. What I was always very proud of was that the programme that we delivered, the tape we delivered was the tape they transmitted, so it was written in an American style, it was edited with an American pace, it was entirely created for an American audience and we were able to do that sitting in offices in London, and I was sort of very proud of that. It wasn’t re-versioned out there for American TV or re-voiced-

MW: Which they do so often.

TD: Which they do so often: a great deal. And the lovely thing about working for the Americans is that after you’ve had a successful run of programmes, or even one programme – if one programme had gone out and rated, they are on the phone the next day to say [Adopts American accent] “Have you got anymore ideas like that?” Whereas on Channel 4, you could have a hugely successful programme, and you are pitching the follow-up and they say “Well, thank you very much for sending that in, we are considering it along with the 400 other proposals that we’ve had this week.” You say “Yes, but actually, we’ve just delivered for you a successful show, don’t you think you should view us fairly favourably?” “No, no, we’ll view them all equally.” Whereas in America nothing succeeds like success so you have a successful show or run of shows and they desperately want more from you.

That made the business of running a UK independent quite  lot more bearable because  we had these millions of dollars that were coming in on a regular basis, and eventually from Arts & Entertainment and The History Channel, we diversified to Discovery, various Discovery channels to NatGeo, National Geographic channels, and so on, so we were earning a lot of money in dollars which meant the business, we weren’t so reliant on the whims of UK commissioning editors. By this point the independent sector had become in many ways unviable – there were just so many independent producers who’d set up, so many people who’d left staff jobs with the BBC or ITV companies, so many people that the entry point was very low. Anybody could form an independent company and start pitching ideas, and I remember Laurence Rees from Timewatch telling me that he had – let me get the figures right now, he had 16 programmes a year he had to make, 4 of them had to come from independents and the other 12 in-house, and for the 4 independent commissions he had 1200 proposals [sharp intake of breath from Murray] and at that rate it was almost not worth the stamp that you put on the envelope to post or you know the time to send the email, with the proposal attached.  The chance of getting through, that sort of success rate, was very, very, almost impossible. And certainly impossible to run a business on any long-term. So, the American commissioning that came in thick and fast from about 1995, 1996 onwards, I can’t remember the first one, what year, but it was certainly the mid-nineties.

And that enabled me to do something that I thought was very important, I was very aware that I’d been lucky enough to – not exactly be trained – but I had had a post-graduate course in film-making and it seemed to me that training opportunities were closing down rapidly, particularly in the independent sector where there really wasn’t the resources for training and so I don’t think we ever really trained anybody in any formal sense but we gave people longish term opportunities, to people who really wanted to edit programmes.

45 mins

TD: We had enough work going on to ask them to edit some short half-hour documentaries…

MW: Bring them on.

TD: To bring them on, one-hour docs, features, people who wanted to shoot films, to research, to begin to direct or work with a director. So, we built up something of a repertory of talent which I was very proud of and very proud today watching TV programme credits going through and seeing people who started off as a runner at Flashback now producing programmes for the different broadcasters. It was an extended family sort of thing. That was very nice, a very nice feeling and it was only possible because we were having sufficient throughput of work: you finished that project so I want you to go straight onto this one. Completely different type of project, completely different type of programme, different criteria, different commissioning structures, go from this to that and people – there were a lot of freelancers who worked at Flashback, particularly in a sort of junior capacity for year after year and they would always get to the point where they would come to me, rather embarrassed [knocks] “Can I have a word with you Taylor?” and I ‘d sort of get the idea pretty soon, “I don’t know how you are going to take this but I think it’s probably time for me to move on now, I’ve been here for two years doing this.” I’d say “You are probably right actually, yeah I think you should probably go and seek new pastures.” And that was never a problem, it was all part of the process of bringing people on and letting people develop but also having a sufficiently broad production base to allow that to happen.

The independent sector started off being very much a group of specialist companies: there was probably always the man who made the films about yachting.

MW: Yeah.

TD: There was certainly the man who always made the films about natural history or penguins or, you know, I was one of those who often made films on historical subjects, so the independent sector began very much as a group of specialist companies, but I never thought that that was going to be viable or was any sort of long-term structure, and so was very keen to try and diversify Flashback as soon as possible.

MW: But then of course later came a period of aggregation, which we might later talk about in a moment.

TD: Yeah.

MW: But before we do, there is a good story, I’m sure about the making of Cold War, which we may have walked past slightly because I think that was in the 1980s in that Ted Turner-

TD: It was 90s.

MW: Oh, it was 1990s, sorry I thought it was 80s, okay that’s right, after The Wall [Berlin Wall] came down. So, Ted Turner thought basically he’d brought The Wall down and he wanted to put money into something.

Tell us something about that because I know you’ve got lots to tell, flying to American and so on. And I think it would be nice to hear it again.

TD: Ted Turner had started - in the 80s the Olympic Movement was very much undermined by the major boycotts… America boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; as a tit-for-tat the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact and entire Eastern Bloc boycotted the Los Angeles Games in 1984, and Ted Turner, the American TV mogul behind CNN and Turner Media Entertainment and so on, he had formed something called The Goodwill Games, which was just Russia, well just the Soviet Union and the US, and then after the collapse of The Wall in the 90s it was just Russia, the Russian Federation versus the US in athletics and the story goes that he was at the closing ceremony of the Goodwill Games in about 1993, something like that, and he announced to his staff that he had [American accent] “This Great Idea” and the idea was that The Cold War had a beginning a  middle and an end, and “Why don’t we make a series of programmes about it?” He was a great fan of The World at War. He’d seen it – Ted Turner later told me he’d seen it three times, “That’s 78 hours of my life I’ve spent watching that series” he said, so he was a great fan. He said “Find me the man who made The World at War, that Jeremy Irons [Murray laughs] find me Jeremy Irons and we’ll get him to make this series.”

Fortunately his people realised that it was Jeremy Isaacs, not Jeremy Irons. They contacted him. Jeremy was at that point Chief Executive of the Opera House, The Royal Opera House, in Covent Garden and didn’t want to go back into television, was absolutely agin it but was eventually persuaded. Ted Turner when he wants to turn it on can be very persuasive and he eventually persuaded Jeremy to initially develop and eventually go into production on the series.

50 mins

TD: And all the development was done at Flashback. We spent, we had, quite a substantial budget to come up with a format of how we would make a series of what started off as 20 programmes, around the whole of the Cold War span, what its subject matter would be, how we’d resource it, the budget that would be needed and so on and all this was done at Flashback and I can remember very clearly the day that the big package of documents was eventually sent to Atlanta to Ted Turner from the Flashback office in Farringdon and Jeremy came over from The Opera House and the man from FedEx must have been very surprised when he came into the office to collect this package just like any other package and there are all these people toasting it with champagne, wishing this package good luck as it went off to Atlanta [laughter] and I was negotiating with the BBC for something and I’d been in negotiation for just over a year – this was for one half-hour documentary and the BBC had been backwards and forwards for a year, so I said to Jeremy “Well the one thing for certain is that a project this size it’ll take them years if they ever commit to this, if we ever hear anything again of this project, Jeremy, you know, I’ll be surprised.” Eight days later, Jeremy gets a call, it’s Ted Turner on his ranch in Montana, his Head of Production in Los Angeles and his Head of Legal Affairs in Atlanta, and he comes on the phone – and Jeremy in London and apparently the conversation goes something like “Can everybody hear me?” “Yes, yes.” I’m going to say this and I’m going to say it once – we’re going to make this series, Jeremy’s going to produce it, and our grandchildren are going to be proud of us for doing it. Get on with it – get on with the production, get on with legals, get on with sorting it out and get started as soon as you can!” Puts the phone down. [laughter] So the power of one person who has the authority to make a series as against the endless committees and controllers and assistant controllers and all the rest of it in the BBC was very, very vividly illustrated in that story.

MW: You did tell me though, once that you had to fly over there and that he’d said “Come over for dinner, Jane’s cooking.” Is that true? Or apocryphal?

TD: [laughs] I think that’s probably apocryphal, but I flew over there a few times. We went to a country club, just outside Atlanta, I don’t think Jane was cooking, but we went to a country club outside Atlanta and he asked me what sort of programmes I did and I said I do a lot over here in the States for the History Channel, and he looked at me and he said “History Channel? That’s a damn good idea, I really wish I’d had the idea of starting a history channel.”

MW: Very good.

TD: He was an interesting guy to work with, he showed so many signs of absolute genius, but was a little bit strange at times as well, and you never quite knew where you sat with him but he was hugely keen on this project.

I didn’t have the day-to-day dealings with him: Jeremy asked Martin Smith, one of the key producers of The World at War series to oversee the day-to-day production, and then Jeremy set up his own production company Jeremy Isaacs Productions, and so it ceased to be a Flashback operation, although we did share offices together in Covent Garden for some time, we had a second office in Covent Garden.

Yes, I went to the States on several occasions to sign up the key consultants and reporters who would work across the board on the series. Made two of the episodes which was fascinating, and then ended up with Jeremy writing the book of the series. Yes, it was an absolute fascinating example of what money – the quality – that money can bring. They were superbly well-made programmes, because they were very well researched they were researched in the Soviet Union. We were lucky because in the mid-90s, the former Soviet Union, the Russian Federation had opened a lot of archives up, we had a brilliant Russian researcher, who if we were looking for a KGB boss ‘Kruchkov’ she would just go through the Moscow telephone directory and she would ring all the Kruchkovs until she got the right one, and they’d be so amazed to be called by a journalist [they’d say] “Well I suppose you’d better come round, come and meet me.” And at that point things were open and we would get access to archive film-

MW: Fabulous.

TD: To individuals, to documents that as the Putin era came on in the early 2000s –

MW: -Are closed down.

TD: All those doors started to close down, so we were lucky to be making it at that time. Ted had always said right from the beginning he didn’t want this to be a triumphant series.  I mean Jeremy had put this to him, he didn’t want to make a series that was going to sort of celebrate America’s triumph in the Cold War.

55 mins

 

TD: And Ted agreed totally. It must be a series that showed the Soviet side as much as the American side. When it was shown in America it was criticised very extensively for what the critics called a moral equivalence. You know, the American view on the Cold War is they were right all along and the Soviets were wrong. The Soviet system was the wrong system it was an evil system, it was a corrupt system. But the fact that we put these two systems against one another, we were accused of moral equivalence you know, of making the two equal.

So, it was never a very successful series in the United States, unlike The World at War, which is still running, The Cold War, the series is very much more difficult to find in the United States.

MW: It’s not held back by rights clearances or anything like that?

TD: There are some hold backs but it was cleared for DVD release and it’s come out on DVD, and again hasn’t done particularly good business in America. It’s still used in education establishments, both in this country and the States. It’s used very extensively for teaching but it doesn’t have the popular impact that The World at War series had.

MW: As a maker of history programmes, as a specialist in that area, you’ve seen the period from before the opening up of the USSR, and so on, and right through. I wonder … if you could comment on access to archives, and so on, and what you’ve seen happen in that period. It seems to me that getting access and actually getting to use stuff from our publicly funded archives here – I mean you know the Imperial War Museum well, you know the National Film & Television Archive well, but that whole question of getting access to Krasnogorsk or wherever, in the former Soviet Union, and you mentioned that during the Putin period maybe things have closed down a bit now: I just wondered if you could reflect a little on that.

TD: Well I think there are different stories there. I mean the stories of working in what was the Soviet Union, or the Eastern Bloc countries, in the 90s it was largely a question of dollars. If you went in with enough dollars, you could pretty well get access to anything you want. I’m talking about film archives now. Written archives were slightly different, but again there was a genuine openness to look back at the Soviet era and try and understand some of the decision making and the thinking that had gone on. There was a genuine openness particularly prevalent with film archives. On a Flashback series I remember going to meet – this would have been later probably about 2005, 2006, we wanted access to the Mikoyan Archive, Mikoyan were the company that made all the MIG jet fighters, the most famous Soviet fighter planes from the Second World War onwards and the guy said “Yes, we have a very extensive archive.”: a lot of it was on 35 millimetre because they shot these things very well right up to the 1980s, right up to the end of the Soviet Union and he said “Basically there are two ways we can do a deal.  We can either do a formal deal and I can give you a contract and so on… and that will cost you x-thousand dollars, or you can just offer me half that sum. No paperwork but I’ll make sure you have the things, make sure you have access to the material.” Well, I, unusually, known to be a miser when it comes to spending money, I actually went for the formal route and signed a formal contract, and I could tell he was very disappointed at this!

So, there was a time when for many years, certainly visual archive material, photographic material, it was a question of dollars. You could pay. Now, it’s quite different. Putin has closed down on the media.

I don’t have very much recent experience of film archive work in Russia, but I do have a lot of experience of written archive material and again, that’s much, much, more difficult to get hold of now than it was ten years, certainly twenty years ago. I’m actually writing a book at the moment on a Cold War subject, set in 1983, and the American side is very, very, open, I can download material from the CIA, from the National Security Agency. Vast quantities of material from the United States. There’s nothing equivalent to that on the Soviet side, the former Soviet side at all anymore.

I think in this country there is a sort of different set of processes have taken place, that the changes in technology and the changes in the way people access material has really caused a revolution in the last ten years, that I haven’t been part of, but we haven’t got to the final stages of the Flashback story.

1 hour

 

TD: Maybe come back to that. But that’s largely left the public archives behind, and certainly The Imperial War Museum struggled to keep up with the new forms of demands for material and some of the older newsreel archives that used to be basically thinking of charging per foot or per second or per minute of usage is for one transmission or two , or UK rights, or European rights, or world rights, that’s not the world that we live in now.

MW: It’s dying.

TD: It’s gone, it’s dead, and I think what that has left is a few smaller groups, Getty and others sort of being able to draw in lots of other archives that haven’t actually been able to properly been able to keep up with the changes and offer almost a one stop shop for producers.

MW: Aggregation in the archive world, certainly in the commercial sector seems to be the name of the game because it’s all about numbers really, isn’t it?

TD: Absolutely.

MW: I think they used to say at ITN in the end that 5% of your collection makes 90% of your income.

TD: Yes.

MW: And that’s about the same for almost every archive, so the bigger the thing you make it, the bigger your 5% becomes. Which is intriguing.

TD: Yes. The trouble with that is that the whatever it is, the 95% that you’ve got in your collection, nobody wants.

MW: What is it?.

TD: So why bother to keep it?

MW: [intake of breath] Yes.

TD: The story I used to remember from The Imperial War Museum Film Archive, that every year in the run up to June 6th, broadcasters from around the world would want to make their D-Day films, so they’d come to The War Museum or they’d email or contact the museum and the researchers would say “What we want is that shot where the landing craft goes up the beach and the ramp comes down  and you can see the town.”

MW: [chuckles] That one shot!

TD: The War Museum would say “Yeah that’s fine, but you know we’ve got 24 hours of material on D-Day, would you like to see some of that?”

 “No, no, my producer wants to see that shot where the ramp comes down-“

“Fine, we can copy that for you, but while you’re here, would you like to see-“

“No, no. We want the shot where the landing craft…” [demonstrates] So that obsession with familiar shots, repeating the familiar shot, I think, has actually diminished the power of a lot of historical documentaries. I was making programmes at a good time where a lot of the stories were fresh, the imagery, fine new imagery, people were willing to talk, the interviewees.

MW: And you were funded to do the research as well, probably.

TD: That’s right, yes. All of that does take time and the amount of research time and the people doing the research now – often it is the most junior members of the production outfit who ends up doing quite a lot of the research. From the other side now I get called regularly, people asking queries about different historical events and you know, really they just have no, or very, very, minimal knowledge. Of what they are talking about. And that isn’t the way to get fresh approaches to history. They are inevitably going to end up repeating the same thing, so you know, if we’ve seen that shot of Hitler waving his hands around once we’ve seen it tens of thousands of times. It is the one shot you see of Hitler on every documentary ever made about The Third Reich. And that isn’t good enough: there is a lot more material. Of course there are fabulous documentaries still being made, but I think they are the rarities, the flowers that bloom rather than the bulk of the garden that is now getting very predictable.

MW: Then there is the YouTube researcher, which is the other problem I think, we ‘ve found, you know they have found something, goodness knows from where, which ostensibly comes from somewhere and they don’t know where. The provenance is lost.

TD: Yes, that’s right. It’s the visual equivalent of fake news.

MW: Well, effectively yes. Another challenge.

TD: Quite what it is? I mean I used to go round the Flashback office, and see researchers day in, day out, sitting in front of their computers and made myself a right old dinosaur: “You shouldn’t be sitting here, you should be out there finding this material.”

MW: Watching it!

TD: Watching it and talking to people and so on. “Taylor I don’t need to do that, I can sit here and see it all, I can order it all, I can research it all, you know I don’t need – in your day, you might have to go to Denham, you might have to go to Berkhamsted, you might have to go to wherever to see these things. I can do it all from here!”

MW: But that’s a bit of an illusion as well.

TD: I realise that things have absolutely changed. This 95% of our money comes from 5% of our images has reduced the visual range of imagery that we get to see these days and of course there are lovely programmes that come up with new fresh images, home movies or images from totally different archives, all about the countryside or social changes or something.

1 hour 5 mins

 

TD: Fascinating to watch but they are the exceptions rather than the rules.

MW: Talking about the film archives, that’s one sort of aggregation, but we were going through the history of Flashback and Flashback was getting bigger, it was doing cooking programmes and all sorts of other programmes, fifty or sixty people on the payroll, hard enough to keep going on a monthly basis, just to make sure everyone’s mortgages are paid and so on, it’s a challenge. There was appoint when presumably you moved out of Flashback yourself, or at least Flashback may well have been – I don’t really know myself, but was it approached to be part of the aggregation into another group?

TD: Yes. Yes. We were approached many times, yes. I mean I talked a few moments ago about the 1990 Broadcasting Act and the transformation of the legislative environment that brought, and it was a very important stage in the maturing, the growing up of the independent sector, but we were still left with a lousy business deal in that we produced but didn’t own the content that we produced and that was eventually transformed in another piece of legislation, in the 2003 Communications Act. This time a Labour government that transformed the way that the independent sector worked by giving the copyright of what we produced to the producers.

That meant that the whole revenue opportunity was completely transformed and the relatively small operations suddenly could earn very significant sums of money. I remember there was one year in which RDF Television as it was then called earned £10 million from just the format rights for one show, Wife Swap, a show in which people lived in other people’s houses for a period of time and so on. That one format earned them £10 million pounds in a year. So that completely transforms that business and many, many, other businesses. We earned lots of money from format rights, from sales of programmes that we owned. Downing’s Second Law of Production always used to be that nobody ever made any money out of the net sales of programmes, because the broadcaster took the lion’s share. When we own the programme and start selling the programmes, we actually end up making really very nice sums of money, thank you very much. So that means these small businesses, small very creative very hungry for work businesses that characterise the independent sector, suddenly become much, much, larger, they start looking to merge, bigger companies take over the smaller companies and so on. And before long you had many independent companies that were bigger than some of the ITV companies that were around, so the whole production environment completely changed as a consequence of the 2003 Communications Act.

In many ways that was for the better. We were approached – Flashback was approached - by several people with a view to buying the company, and those who offered what I regarded as the right sort of money were people I didn’t want to work with, and those people who I thought we probably could work with, I could work with, were offering what I thought was-

MW: Not enough!

TD: An unreasonably small amount – not enough – money so it never happened, and basically, very briefly, the story goes that in 2010, the tenancy agreement on our offices came up for renewal and the landlord wanted to increase the rent by, I think it was, 125% and there was no way the business was going to be able to pay that sort of increase, to afford that increase, so we basically, my then business partner David Edgar and myself, we were faced with a range of opportunities: do we want something smaller? Do we want to keep the same space and try and get much more work in? Or do we want to go virtual – do we want to basically close the office down – this was 2010 – and then and ever since then it’s been easy to rent office space in London on a very short-term basis so we decided, long story, short, we eventually decided to close the core establishment of the office down. We wound down all the staff. That was one of the saddest parts of the whole process, seeing all these talented people move on. We helped most of them get work and at the very end, all those who were left on the Friday we closed down, all had work to go to on the following Monday, so that was pleasing. But I think it was the right thing to do.

1 hour 10 mins

 

TD: I was already feeling – writing has always been very much part of what I did, writing scripts, putting scripts together, editing other people’s scripts. Writing books to go with programmes where there were accompanying books. I’d written several, so I was itching to just spend a bit more time writing as an individual… so I was not wanting to spend the next few years immersed in this changing world of television. I think it is a cliché but I think it’s true: it’s a young person’s business and I think I was feeling that the challenge, the technological challenges needed other people to tackle and to confront. A challenge I didn’t feel quite equipped to do. I had this fantastic time in the 80s – 70s, 80s and 90s and it was time for other people to have a go so I was very happy that we actually took the decision to, happy at the end, that we took the decision to close the offices down. The company is still there, we still do things through the company, but it’s not anything like the same state as it used to be.

MW: Sure.

The reversion of rights, which you were talking about, from 2003, which is interesting for you was a watershed, because people standing outside the business wouldn’t fully understand what’s going on there. It’s a window is it of five years that the commissioner has before they revert, or…?

TD: Well, it very much depends.

MW: Oh, I thought it was a fixed period. No?

TD: No, no. Everything’s up for negotiation.

MW: Right.

TD: So, basically, instead of being commissioned with 100% of the money coming from one broadcaster, who then owns a hundred percent of the rights, we now license programmes to a broadcaster: it might be the same thing, you might license one broadcaster for five years of ten years or even perpetuity, but then you’d own the programme in other territories, to do what you wish, to sell or to reformat or whatever, elsewhere, but pretty well every negotiation can be individually negotiated now, and now there are new organisations that aren’t even broadcast companies, Netflixes and Amazons coming in. Again, they have a different model of financing, in working again with the producer usually owning the copyright, different forms of licence deals for different sorts of windows. Ten years ago, you know [they] hadn’t even been invented.

MW: And so rights are still reverting to your company…so you found that transition for yourself over your career as quite an easy one in the sense that you’ve got into being a businessman, very much so, when you realised at some point that you were much more of a business man than-

TD: A producer.

MW: A creative producer because of force of circumstance and the need to do it.

TD: Yes.

MW: But it sat well; happily, with you.

TD: It sat okay, yes. My collective noun for independent producers is a whinge. [Murray laughs] Of independents, because you rarely had a gathering where people weren’t complaining about the programmes they were having to make, the commissioning editors they were working with, deals they were being forced to do, and so on. And I used to say to people over and over again, at all these gatherings that we used to have that if you are really that unhappy…just give up, go and work for NatWest, go and do something else, don’t [whinge]– we are lucky to be in a creative business, we are privileged to be here and if you don’t feel you are doing what you want to do, go and do something else. And I think I sort of got to the point where we weren’t making programmes that were that interesting, they were too cliched, there was no value or original thinking or original research. We were being asked to tell slightly silly stories with commissioning editors whom I’d ceased to respect. Not always, we did fantastic work up to the end but the sort of bread-and-butter work. I can almost hear my voice saying to me “Look…if you’re not enjoying it, if you don’t think what you are doing is that good, perhaps it’s time to do something else.” so I sort of responded to my own dictum to a degree to say “Maybe it’s time to do a bit more writing, and a bit less working for these very unpredictable, or very ungrateful, ungracious, and often quite ignorant commissioning editors.”

MW: Looking back at the excitement of the 1980s, when Channel 4 started and there was this head of steam with the likes of IPA and so on, all these people who wanted to create television programmes and wanted a new outlet, is there an argument that the aggregation of the independent companies under some of the larger combines like the Ten Alps effect

1 hour 15 mins

 

MW:  – I don’t want to cite any particular aggregator but it means that young producers actually want to see the same thing happen again in a way. With a public service broadcaster of a sort.

TD: [Tentatively] Yes.

MW: But in a way it’s sort of closed itself down a bit? Or am I making that up?

TD: I think things do go in cycles, and I think one of the most exciting things about the 80s and the 90s was that the independent sector was a very creative place to be. A lot of the innovative ideas, a lot of the best formats, the finest documentaries were coming out of the independent sector. That isn’t to say there weren’t brilliantly talented people producing quality programmes in the BBC and ITV companies, but I felt that [we had] the edge, I felt we were that bit hungrier. You know if there’s 1200 proposals for these four slots of Timewatch, the ones that got through were going to be something special about them and I think the independent sector seemed to have that edge and I genuinely don’t feel that’s quite the same today. I think it's much more even, although again there are, the industry is full of creative people, although the circumstances are such that it would be impossible to see a World at War made today. No broadcaster would have the ambition or the cash to make a series like that. Cold War – any series on the Cold War today would have so many teams, commissioning editors and executive producers overseeing every stage of the process that the sort of independence that was given to Jeremy Isaacs, to Martin Smith in the making if that series just wouldn’t be possible today.

So you know I was there at a very lucky time. And had a very, very, lucky career, so I regard myself as a very lucky person.

MW: But now you have a new career really, as an author, a published author.

TD: Yeah.

MW: And you are writing one or two books a year?

TD: Well not quite that, no.

MW: You seem to have quite a long bibliography now.

TD: Well, it’s sort of – yes, I write two types of books: I write popular history books which are in many ways just a continuation of the television documentaries I have been making over the years. The books are written for people who aren’t specialists, who aren’t historians or aren’t academics, who are going to be interested in the stories that I’m telling just as that was for whom I always thought I was making TV programmes. Intelligent people who wanted intelligent content. But I also write on the history of film and television, and have written, well a book on the making of The World at War, a BFI book on the Leni Riefenstahl Olympia, on the Olympics and I write a monthly feature on classic war films for a history magazine, so I write a whole range of things, but I don’t – I see it in content terms as a continuation.

MW: I’m just looking behind you for a moment at some of the awards that are on your shelf, and they weren’t placed there specially for today – we know they were there. Remind us about some of the. I know that when you received the Grierson Award, ‘cos I know you were very pleased, because the Grierson is seen by you and many people as one of the upper echelon documentary-producing award.

TD: Yes, in this country certainly yes. That was for a film about a Cold War story set in 1983 [1983: The Brink of the Apocalypse DS] and the Director of the Programme, Henry Chancellor is the person who really receives the Grierson Award, it always goes to the Director, the creative director but it was a story that I very much wanted to tell and found the access to it in Washington with some ex-CIA people, so yes feel very proud of that, and the Grierson is an award that’s very worth having. Not sure what else is up there [he turns]-

MW: There is an RTS Award.

TD: An RTS Award. We did programmes, we worked, well one of the other things that Flashback did in the late 90s was that there was a huge boost going on into regional production and we opened an office in Bristol that was run by a guy called Sam Organ who was ex-BBC Bristol, sadly passed away now. And we ran a regional company for many years that again did perfectly well for us, and we also picked up a big contract with an operation called Teachers Television to make educational programming, and the person who came in to do those programmes was Ingrid Falck [who] went on to Al Jazeera where she worked and we got a whole run of commissions from Al Jazeera, and this award here [points] is for a series of programmes we made in Nablus about different Palestinian schools and businesses and the difficulties of trying to run an educational establishment or a commercial establishment under Israeli military occupation in the West Bank. So, it goes back to earlier interests and brought them well forward into this century.

MW: So – and finally: as you stepped out in effect of active production as an independent producer, although you are in it, but you are not as heavily in it as you were, and you mentioned there is a newer world, a world developing which has other skills required of an independent producer, where do you see that going? What would be your prediction – if you have one? For the way now we have social media, all sorts of online delivery, we have Netflix, we have Amazon Prime working in 4K and delivering cinema quality down your line, what, where do you see the challenges for the guy who is coming up to fill your place?

TD: Well, I suppose I think two trends here: there is all the new formats on which, new platforms rather on which people will be receiving images. That isn’t just a temporary phenomenon I think that’s going to partly transform the way in which people receive information, entertainment, music – well we’ve already seen that in music and audiovisual forms as well. I don’t think that’s a temporary fly-by-night thing, that’s going to completely revolutionise the way people access audiovisual entertainment.

On the other hand, I think there is always going to be a place for the television in the corner of the living room, which is a collective experience. Whether that’s high-end drama, whether that’s natural history programming, sport, whatever it is, there is a process for the collective enjoyment and engagement with the audiovisual medium right across the board. And I think I don’t have a prediction as to quite how that’s going to work its way out, but I think we are going to see two different sorts of media emerge. I don’t think – people have been saying for years the television in the corner of the room is going to disappear and we’ll all be watching on smartphones and things that are getting ever smaller. I’m sure as I say they are going to stay but I don’t think we are ever going to lose the collective experience and I suppose that’s been my career [which] has been spent in producing material for people to see collectively. For families to watch, for people to engage with rather than just this sort of one-to-one very personal experience of seeing something and I would hope and I’m convinced that there is certainly going to be a future in that as well.

MW: Well Taylor, I’m looking to David just in case there are things we should be asking.

David Sharp: [off mic] No that’s fine.

MW: Thank you very much.

TD: Well, we must have covered just about everything.

MW: Well, we’ve covered most things. And there’s always things we don’t! Thank you very much for your time today.

TD: Good questions – thank you very much.

MW: Maybe we’ll do it again to catch up on your new developments, another day in the future. This was great. Thank you very much.

TD: Thanks very much. Thank you, gentlemen.

END

Transcribed by David Sharp Jan 2025.