Read Online This New Noise by Charlotte Higgins - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Charlotte Higgins
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it mixed archive footage with testimony from survivors, and was the first of the great blockbuster history series on television – the progenitor of Jeremy Isaacs’s classic series for Thames, The World at War. The idea for it came from producers Antony Jay and Alasdair Milne, the buccaneering youngsters who had been making a splash with Tonight , the early-evening current affairs show. At first the notion was simply to find a way of showing archive footage held by the Imperial War Museum. But the young guns decided to treat The Great War as if they were putting together Tonight – ‘approaching the world today with a popular voice’, in the words of historian and producer Taylor Downing.
And so the importance of The Great War was that it gave voice to the everyday veterans of the conflict. An advert in the Radio Times, asking for contributors, resulted in about 30,000 responses. The researcher, Julia Cave, ‘returned from her holiday barely able to get in through the door of her office’, said Downing. General Montgomery (in the First World War a junior officer) wrote to the Daily Telegraph offering to be interviewed, but the producers were not interested in the man who later commanded the Eighth Army. This was not to be a parade of famous names. Despite its shortcomings (it had little time for women and the manner in which it failed to distinguish archive footage from feature film sequences would be deemed unacceptable today), it was intensely true to the possibilities of television as a form. It gave voice toordinary people, captured evanescent human experience. It was ahead of academia, which had yet to embrace oral history. It showed that television could act as a nation’s generous and reflective memory bank, drawing in the breath of lived lives and projecting them back into ordinary homes. Its title sequence might have come from a Bergman film: a cross is bleakly silhouetted against a grey sky; then the camera pans down to the base of a trench, where a corpse lies, horribly contorted. This against an intense score by Wilfred Josephs. The ambition was both epic and deeply humane.
That’s Life! mixed campaigning journalism with lighter items. (From left) Michael Groth, Bill Buckly, Esther Rantzen, Gavin Campbell (top), Doc Cox (bottom), Joanna Monro.
At its best, the important thing about the BBC has always been its cultural heterogeneity; the fact that it is a cheerful gallimaufry of the high and the low, the serious and the silly. Television has been the perfect medium for reflecting what BBC documentary-maker Adam Curtis called, when we met at New Broadcasting House, ‘the libertarian revolution that’s happened in this country: the breaking down of cultural barriers, the breaking down of social barriers. The mixture that the BBC invented – trash shows, and posh, clever, high-end shows – has been appropriate to its time.’
As a young man, he was a researcher on the popular consumer programme That’s Life! under Esther Rantzen, which mixed campaigning investigative journalism with joke items on talking dogs and curiously shaped vegetables. Now he is known for highly wrought political documentaries, such as Pandora’s Box (1992) and The Power of Nightmares (2004) – which he said he made cheaply by ‘swimming between the cracks’: improvising, borrowing and making do within the ‘chaotic’ structures of the BBC. But he uses what he learned from Rantzen: she taught him, he said somewhat self-deprecatingly, the ‘tricks of trash journalism. I took them and bolted them on to high-end meta-tosh.’
His fellow researcher was the youthful Peter Bazalgette, who ended up as chair of the UK arm of Endemol Productions, and who made 1990s lifestyle shows such as Changing Rooms and Ground Force . He also used Rantzen’s tricks.‘There is an alchemy’, said Bazalgette, ‘whereby you take factual information, which has some connection, umbilical or tangential, to public service, and you make it
And so the importance of The Great War was that it gave voice to the everyday veterans of the conflict. An advert in the Radio Times, asking for contributors, resulted in about 30,000 responses. The researcher, Julia Cave, ‘returned from her holiday barely able to get in through the door of her office’, said Downing. General Montgomery (in the First World War a junior officer) wrote to the Daily Telegraph offering to be interviewed, but the producers were not interested in the man who later commanded the Eighth Army. This was not to be a parade of famous names. Despite its shortcomings (it had little time for women and the manner in which it failed to distinguish archive footage from feature film sequences would be deemed unacceptable today), it was intensely true to the possibilities of television as a form. It gave voice toordinary people, captured evanescent human experience. It was ahead of academia, which had yet to embrace oral history. It showed that television could act as a nation’s generous and reflective memory bank, drawing in the breath of lived lives and projecting them back into ordinary homes. Its title sequence might have come from a Bergman film: a cross is bleakly silhouetted against a grey sky; then the camera pans down to the base of a trench, where a corpse lies, horribly contorted. This against an intense score by Wilfred Josephs. The ambition was both epic and deeply humane.
That’s Life! mixed campaigning journalism with lighter items. (From left) Michael Groth, Bill Buckly, Esther Rantzen, Gavin Campbell (top), Doc Cox (bottom), Joanna Monro.
At its best, the important thing about the BBC has always been its cultural heterogeneity; the fact that it is a cheerful gallimaufry of the high and the low, the serious and the silly. Television has been the perfect medium for reflecting what BBC documentary-maker Adam Curtis called, when we met at New Broadcasting House, ‘the libertarian revolution that’s happened in this country: the breaking down of cultural barriers, the breaking down of social barriers. The mixture that the BBC invented – trash shows, and posh, clever, high-end shows – has been appropriate to its time.’
As a young man, he was a researcher on the popular consumer programme That’s Life! under Esther Rantzen, which mixed campaigning investigative journalism with joke items on talking dogs and curiously shaped vegetables. Now he is known for highly wrought political documentaries, such as Pandora’s Box (1992) and The Power of Nightmares (2004) – which he said he made cheaply by ‘swimming between the cracks’: improvising, borrowing and making do within the ‘chaotic’ structures of the BBC. But he uses what he learned from Rantzen: she taught him, he said somewhat self-deprecatingly, the ‘tricks of trash journalism. I took them and bolted them on to high-end meta-tosh.’
His fellow researcher was the youthful Peter Bazalgette, who ended up as chair of the UK arm of Endemol Productions, and who made 1990s lifestyle shows such as Changing Rooms and Ground Force . He also used Rantzen’s tricks.‘There is an alchemy’, said Bazalgette, ‘whereby you take factual information, which has some connection, umbilical or tangential, to public service, and you make it
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