In 1985, we made a television documentary on the history of the
Pathé and Movietone newsreels, which for more than 50 years provided British
cinemagoers with seven-minute windows on world events. It featured a
conversation between the two famous voices of hundreds of these newsreels, Bob
Danvers Walker and Leslie Mitchell, and highlighted the rivalry of the
companies in chasing scoops, illustrated with numerous clips, much of it rare
footage.
At the same time, it provided personal memories of the two men
with snapshots of historic, poignant, and often humorous world events.
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Bob Danvers Walker and Leslie Mitchell
with Sue Ingle during production of Around The World In Seven Minutes And Four Times On Saturday |
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1930s newsreel cinema
Victoria Station, London |
Inelegantly titled Around
The World In Seven Minutes And Four Times On Saturday, it was in essence a
clip show which depended on several months of research, both visual and
written. The actual interviews were recorded in our post-production facility’s
control room, with Leslie battling against illness and often requiring
assistance from an oxygen cylinder just out of shot. There was a genuine sense
of adversarial camaraderie between the two distinctive commentators, whose
lives were a fascinating view into the changing face of British journalism and
news in the twentieth century. When the documentary first premiered on New
Year’s Eve, it was also a tribute to Leslie who had died a month earlier.
The program was a pre-buy for
the BBC, cash-flowed by Charisma Films, who we were working with at the time.
Head Of Acquisition at the BBC was Barry Brown, and we established a good
relationship with him, so he was open to further proposals. Based on using archive
material to make further shows, we came up with the idea of making a
documentary on classic British films.
The pitch turned into a proposal
for a TV series. Barry agreed and wanted 10 half-hours. And the secret to get
this made was going to be obtaining the use of a film library and coping with
legal clearances.
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Rank Organisation logo |
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Royal Command Performance of A Matter of Life and Death Empire Cinema, Leicester Square, London November 1, 1946 |
The natural company to
approach was Rank Film Distributors, who at the time were in the last throes of
making films. The company was the child of a Quaker businessman, J. Arthur Rank
who bankrolled so many of the most ambitious films of the 1940s and 50s, and
whose opening logo of the man banging the gong became synonymous with the
British film industry. More than just film production, it was a distribution
company and exhibitor, making it such a powerful outfit.
The Rank directors we met were
still working in the dusty Wardour Street offices that you could imagine had
barely changed since the days of David Lean, Carol Reed, and Anthony Asquith.
Indeed, the chief accountant we met had worked with them all and demonstrated
an active dislike for the financial waste of filmmakers – he was particularly
scathing of Powell & Pressburger, whose string of classics he claimed all
lost money!
In any case, our proposal to
celebrate their films was accepted and the resolution to expensive actor residuals
(and indeed permissions) were cleared by a standard clause in all performer
contracts, which allowed reuse of material for promotional purposes. A clause which
stayed in place until the late eighties.
From the beginning, our
concept was to make a series for a broad audience, an entertainment rather than
dry historical overview. No talking heads or technical commentary, instead
allowing the films to speak for themselves. The idea was to both capture
viewers who remembered the films and to interest a new audience. Together with
our co-creators Maurice Sellar and Lou Jones, we decided on a thematic
approach, taking a genre or general subject for each episode and then grouping
films under each heading.
Most of the themes for the
episodes were immediately obvious. “English Roses” and “Heroes”, for notable
actresses and actors. Spy films, horror, war, comedy, musicals, all easy
choices. And as we joyfully researched the Rank library titles, we were also
pleased to create some more distinctive episodes – “Power And Prejudice” took a
look at films addressing social issues, and the rather floridly titled “Fine
And Dandy” featured the visually striking and highly melodramatic Gainsborough
Studios costume films.
Having agreed the concepts for
the 10 episodes with Barry, we went into production during the summer of 1986.
And in truth that was all we expected to make.
Dividing up the shows with
Maurice and Lou, the process involved viewing a vast array of films to whittle
them down to around seven or eight per episode, and then select the clips to
illustrate the topic. That meant trips to the Rank archive to operate rickety
Steenbecks surrounded by towers of film reels as well as wading through stacks
of worn U-matic and VHS copies. It was an inexact process to time out sequences,
before mastering them from the best sources we could find. In the early days we
would collect the numerous cans of films from
Rank despatch in Wardour Street, piling them into shopping trolleys and pushing
them to the facility to transfer film to tape. It even included dealing with the
whirring beasts that were 2” tape, where locating a sequence was just as much
intuition as calculation. All this so we could then go into an edit suite to
put the selected clips together for each episode.
If the Rank gong was so well
imprinted in the British cinemagoer’s psyche, we were lucky enough to get
another indelible symbol of cinema with our chosen narrator Sir John Mills. Since
he featured in many of the films, it was a genuine thrill that he agreed to join
us. Approaching the first recording session, we were
apprehensive of how he would regard our approach to the films, never mind the
narration we had written!
We needn’t have
worried; he was a generous collaborator and was genuinely delighted to
celebrate British cinema. He respected the scripts, while at the same time
making judicious re-writes.
Little did we
know that we’d be working with John for the next four years!
We ended up
recording fifty-seven episodes with John, and sharing with him stories of
family, healthy living, and his latest diet at the time. And lots of his acting memories. Being the
consummate pro, he would always remind us to think of him for any future films
we might make. After all he was a working actor, always insecure in not knowing
where the next job was going to come from.
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Anthony Quayle in The Eagle Has Landed (1976) |
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Harry Andrews, Anthony Quayle, Sylvia Syms and John Mills in Ice Cold In Alex (1958) |
For the first
season of episodes, we edited off-line at Compass Productions while the on-line
and sound work was completed at Paul Miller Post in Lexington Street. For all
the seasons that followed, our base was in Camden Town; AirTV for visuals and
Videosonics for audio recording and
mixing. The only season when John wasn’t available to us was when we were
mining films from Sir Lew Grade’s ITC library. Instead, we managed to hire Sir
Anthony Quayle, which was ideal since he featured in several of the included films.
This time round it was Tony who claimed he was apprehensive – since he was
taking over from his friend John, who had now been established as the
voice of Best Of British.
Most of the VO recordings were
booked into small booths, since we didn’t record to picture. But for Tony, we
were bumped to a dubbing theatre, so he was seated in a larger space facing a
huge blank screen. Not even the fact that some X-rated scripts from a previous film
recording session were left on the desk would throw him off track!
In fact, both of our narrators
proved themselves keenly prepared and relished keeping to schedule. It helped
that the scripts were kept to a minimum, mainly acting to setup a given film
and give it context within an episode’s theme. Both of our stars were such an
important part of the series’ success.
Delivery to the BBC was a
relatively painless exercise, with approvals of content, both technical and
artistic, and usually a formality. Two aspects, however, stood out from the
first season. The first was the prohibitive standards the BBC set for colour standards.
In particular, we noticed how the vivid Technicolor of 1940s films was neutered,
brilliant hues flattened to conform with other shows on the channel. Specifically,
we complained about the treatment of the marvellous Powell and Pressburger
films, which demonstrated such a mastery of light and shade. At the time there
was nothing we could do. For a show on BBC 1, those were the rules.
The other contentious issue
arose concerning the completed horror episode, “Things That Go Bump In The
Night”. ‘Horror’ being a somewhat exaggerated description for the ghost stories
and eerie comedies made in the mid-20th century. Nevertheless, we were invited
to Barry’s office in the business building opposite the BBC’s White City HQ,
and informed that they had to make a few cuts in order to conform with the scheduled
primetime timeslot. Apparently, it was just too intense and scary for
mid-evening viewing. Our jaws dropped when we found that almost ten minutes had
been savaged.
Nevertheless, it did teach us
a specific edict from Barry that’s stayed with us ever since: no matter how
precious you believe a sequence, scene or even a single moment might be in your
creation, the viewer will only ever see the final version – ‘what an audience
doesn’t see, the audience doesn’t miss’.
It's a quote we’ve often
repeated to ourselves and collaborators on film and TV productions.
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Dame May Whitty and Michael Redgrave during The Lady Vanishes (1938) |
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Peter Sellers, Danny Green, Alec Guinness and director Alexander Mackendrick during The Ladykillers (1955) |
The BBC decided to schedule
our series Wednesday evenings on BBC1 – which was good. The timeslot was
7:30pm, opposite the ITV soap juggernaut Coronation Street – was very bad!
However, the viewing figures surprised everyone, especially us. We regularly
achieved 5.5 million households, and even peaked at 7.2 million. A second
season was a natural.
This time it was another 16
episodes, further mining the riches of the Rank library and covering a myriad
of different topics. It was still through the BBC acquisition department, which
meant money remained tight, but this added quantity meant we could establish
our own company – and the grandly titled Best Of British Films & Television
was born. Our small team was occasionally augmented over the years with
assistants, yet in essence it remained the four of us. Indeed, season one was
the only time we used an outside editor for the off-line creation of the
episodes. The company purchased what we thought was high-tech equipment at the
time– a VHS editing suite – on which we put the linear edits together and then
laboriously had to handwrite timecode numbers to use in the on-line suite when
the final program was mastered.
The whole process was
extraordinarily time intensive, not just the physical process of viewing, editing,
transferring, and mastering, but also in terms of mentally knitting together
the eventual theme. Yet it was also highly rewarding, especially for us as lovers
of film. It was also a learning experience from watching the skills of so many writers,
directors, and skilled technicians over the years. Which is not trying to
pretend that every movie was a classic, just that there were so many unexpected
gems.
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The Belles Of St. Trinian's (1954) |
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Good Morning Boys (1937) |
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Carry On team: Kenneth Connor, Kenneth Williams, Hattie Jacques, Sid James, Joan Sims, Jim Dale, Barbara Windsor |
The comparative success of the
series also led to an unexpected pleasure when an associate of ours, John
Thompson, arranged a record deal with RCA for the theme music. We’d originally
worked with an aspiring young composer Rob Waugh, on the newsreel documentary. For
Best Of British, he came up with some electronic atmosphere pieces and
music cues that could help bridge scenes. He also composed a strong title theme
that even when constructed on synths had a powerful, filmic quality.
The record deal, however,
allowed for an orchestral arrangement. A recording session was arranged at CTS
Studios in Wembley, and it was a major surprise to walk into the vast studio to
see 60 or more musicians from the National Philharmonic Orchestra belting out
the reimagined theme. Conductor and arranger Nic Raine did a gorgeous job in
transforming the electronic basics into a grandly eloquent piece, as well as a
delicate love theme. It’s not an understatement to say it added another
dimension to future episodes.
There were other add-ons alongside
the first season. Sphere Publishing commissioned us to write a book that
expanded on the films contained in the first 10 episodes and allowed us
additional thoughts on the cinematic themes. Midway through the initial run, there
were also two 45-minute specials of the long-running and popular BBC chat show Wogan
which were dedicated to Best Of British. Terry Wogan hosted a number of
stars including John Mills, Stewart Granger, Peter Cushing, Kenneth Williams, Virginia
McKenna, Phyllis Calvert, Norman Wisdom and many others. Filmed at the Shepherd’s
Bush theatre, it was a pleasure to meet some of the actors we had been watching
and appreciating for so many months.
Completing the combined
twenty-six Rank episodes led to further opportunities with other film
libraries. Production-wise, we made 5 episodes from the London Films /
Alexander Korda output, then 10 out of the ITC / Lew Grade productions and
finally 26 from the EMI / ABC library which had collected rights from a variety
of companies and was at the time owned by the Cannon Group. By the time we came
to go into production on the last season, the Golan-Globus era at Cannon was
beginning to flame and burn, leaving chaos in its wake. Luckily, the Weintraub
Group, the American company that had bought the 2,000-film library, wanted to
proceed with the deal we’d previously negotiated with the extravagant Menahem
Golan.
An additional pleasure on the
ITC season was historian and critic Leslie Halliwell joining the team as a
consultant. Leslie was so many years the primary source for film buffs and the
industry with his annually updated tomes Halliwell’s Filmgoers Companion
and Halliwell’s Film Guide. He’d also been instrumental as a film buyer
and programmer for Channel 4. In truth, his involvement with the season was not
great and he could be a contrary collaborator with unflinching opinions, but
for us Leslie was another iconic part of the British film industry, and it was our
own tribute to his lasting influence.
By the time the final episodes
were broadcast in March 1994, we’d produced a total of 67 episodes which encompassed
the vast breadth of the British film industry between the 1930s and 1980s.
Exploring the libraries was a
joy tinged with sadness. In the days before preservation was more commonly
recognized as being so vital, the most desperate times for us was when we
tracked down film reels in a forgotten warehouse only to discover the celluloid
had disintegrated inside the cans. Where we were lucky and there were already
transfers from films, it meant stacks of green 1” tape containers taken into
the machine room, speeding back and forth through whirring tapes to find the
sequences we needed – all the episodes were made way before modern digital
technology.
In all cases, we worked on
colour-correcting and restoring the clips to as close as we could to their
original state. On films like The Day The Earth Caught Fire, for
example, it meant discovering the original tinted opening and closing
sequences. The pity was of course that BBC standards at the time had to be met,
which meant cropped, pan & scan for movies with a widescreen aspect ratio.
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Stanley Baker in Hell Drivers (1957) |
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Sean Connery, Sid James, Patrick McGoohan and Stanley Baker in Hell Drivers (1957) |
The production process
additionally inspired us over potential remakes. A particular memory was
acquiring the rights from Rank’s Pinewood Studios offshoot to the now iconic
1957 Cy Endfield – Stanley Baker actioner Hell Drivers and showing the
original to a group of associates in the Rank screening room. It was a pristine
VistaVision print with crystal mono sound and marvellously atmospheric Geoffrey
Unsworth photography.
Down in the smoky basement, it
felt as if we had flipped back in time and were watching just as folk had in
cinemas three decades previously.
With production of Best Of
British finished (even though it would continue to be shown on the BBC for
a further four years), we finally got our hands on a library that was beyond
the realm of our family slot. Hammer Films came to us and wanted a series. In
May 1990, we were making a further 13 episodes, utilizing the same thematic
format, which were eventually shown after the watershed on UK’s Channel 4.
We managed to get Oliver Reed
as narrator for The World Of Hammer and once again he was a pleasure to
work with. The scripts had been sent in advance and he told us he’d been
practising them in the bath at his Guernsey home – trying to perfect them, especially since he suffered
from dyslexia. His rich tones added immeasurably to the episodes, whilst our
friends at EMI Music Publishing suggested Brian Bennett as composer for the
title music. He’d already enjoyed success as part of The Shadows, who came to fame
with Cliff Richard, and a remixed track of his provided just the identity we
wanted for the series.
It was a tough day with Oliver
to get all the scripts completed and he told us he’s been tee-total for months
in the run up to the recordings. The following day we heard he’d been somewhat
exuberant in the recording studio’s local pub. We always hoped it wasn’t the
pressures of the work that day had caused it.
Across the combined 80
episodes, the purest joy was viewing so many hundreds of British films – the reappraisals
and discoveries, the diversity of talent and storytelling, the visual tapestry
that afforded a view on social history as well as the dreams of successive
generations.
Another special happening through
the series was at the end of 1988, when the Museum Of Moving Image opened on
the South Bank in London. As part of the permanent exhibits, we were asked to
put a compilation together highlighting some of the films featured in our
series. Since we had completed the Rank and Korda episodes by then and were
already in production with the ITC season, it provided quite an extensive
opportunity.
Using both the orchestral
version of the Main Theme as well as the Love Theme adaptation, we put together
a seven-and-a-half-minute montage. It was rewarding to see visitors passing
through the entrance to the museum via a re-created old cinema and sit to enjoy
the flickering fragments of the past. Since it was on repeat play, visitors often
stayed to watch the piece more than once. It was a shame when MOMI closed ten years
later. But during that time, Best Of British provided a purest glimpse
of cinematic history.
Our hope is that the overall
series communicated some of this excitement for film and perhaps even encouraged
people to search out some of those hidden gems. We certainly didn’t make an
academic study or pretended that it was critically comprehensive, yet even if just
a few people found something rewarding, entertaining or even an appreciation of
film history, then perhaps we were partly successful.
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Googie Withers during The Lady Vanishes (1938) |
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The Red Shoes (1948) |
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It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) |
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