Tag Archives: access

Sue Bourne on The Age of Loneliness

Interview, previews, , , ,

The single documentary The Age of Loneliness looks at the “epidemic” of loneliness in Britain, telling the stories of 14 very different contributors. It’s a profoundly moving exploration of an often taboo subject – and one that resonates with most of us, whether we’re currently lonely, have been in the past, or worry about the future when we might be. Docs on Screens spoke to veteran director Sue Bourne about the film, which airs 7 January on BBC One.

Carol Nahra: You were very careful to get a good range of people. How did you go about finding your contributors?

Sue Bourne: Four months research. It just took us forever (laughs). I said ‘I’m not doing a film just about lonely old people – that’s boring and it’s obvious and that isn’t the problem.  It’s an epidemic, and it’s about all ages and there’s something happening’. It was very much for me about a societal change and what was going on. But then I’m not doing a Panorama so I just wanted to give a voice to all those different people. So I said I want a voice from every decade, from every age group. So I drew up my list and then we just hit it for four months. We were in touch with 500 odd people to narrow it down to the 14 who appeared. Charities, blogs, internet, just everything. The thing about lonely people is they’re not out there shouting about it from the rooftop. And so that’s hard. And a lot of the people we met were just too vulnerable to go on telly.

Programme Name: The Age of Loneliness - TX: 07/01/2016 - Episode: The Age of Loneliness (No. n/a) - Picture Shows: Isabel, 19 – Lonely at university - (C) Daniel Dewsbury - Photographer: Daniel Dewsbury
Isabel, 19                (C) Daniel Dewsbury

CN: The ones featured are also vulnerable. You have very emotional scenes where it seems to me they are often articulating their loneliness for the first time, which I found quite painful. How did you find interviewing them?

SB: Well, basically I think they were wonderful, all of them. I think they were brave. Because no one wants to admit to being lonely because in the back of your mind you’re thinking ‘well, why am I lonely? Is it because I am horrible? Why am I Johnny no mates? What’s happened?’ Some of them they have lost their partner so it was obvious why they were lonely. But other people were lonely and wondering if it was their fault, are they to blame. There was certainly one person I thought would be very good for the part because they epitomised a very large group. And I phoned them up and said ‘I want you to be in the film but you have to be honest. And I think your default position is to put on a brave face. And frankly you’re going to have to take that off. And bare your soul. Because if you put the brave face on you’re not telling the truth and the one thing I want this film to be is truthful’. So I was asking a lot….but I think it’s one of the most moving interviews in the film.

CN: Which interview was it?

SB: It was Jaye, the single girl. Because she wants to be a jolly person. But I thought the interview she gave was so honest. It was extraordinary She was really brave to be so honest. But I knew what her default position was – she was battling through life being jolly saying ‘I can cope with it. I can cope with it’. But inside it was tough.

CN: Are you a lonely person?

SB: No. I think I’m alone. My daughter’s dad, my ex partner, is dead. All my parents are dead. I have no brothers and sisters and really no family to talk to. So really it’s just me and my kid and she’s in her twenties and I don’t want to be a needy mother. So I’m acutely aware of the life ahead of me. That it will involve aloneness. So I better get used to it. So I try to train myself to be a bit more positive about it (laughs).

CN: Is that what brought you to the topic?

SB: I think so…In Fashionistas (which profiled six extraordinary older women) I wanted to find role models for the next 30 odd years, who were going to be upbeat and enjoying life and squeezing the pips out of it. Because that’s what I wanted to do. And then again a lot of them were on their own, so what I got from that is you need a particular spirit if you can find it to carry you through life because it ain’t easy and you might well be on your own.

age of loneliness sue bourne
Sue Bourne

CN: Did you ever think of matching people up? Cause it seems like there’s some people who would benefit from each other’s company in The Age of Loneliness.

SB: Well in a way sometimes you look at these films that we do and it’s like – I feel like a social worker. Because what I’m doing is I’m opening them out. I’m giving them a voice. Then I want other people to talk. I want people to look and think ‘why is nothing being done to help them?’. I now want to do Contact the Elderly tea parties because I think that it’s just wonderful. It transforms their lives for one afternoon a month and that’s all it takes…We have to be kinder. That is the wettest things a filmmaker can say – “I just want people to be kinder” – but I do!

CN: I can imagine that a doc about loneliness might not make for like the most filmic pitch.

SB: It took a bit of time and eventually I got in front of Charlotte (Moore) and said ‘Please, just give me this commission’. And she said ‘Okay, it’s yours, go.’

CN: It’s beautifully shot. It looks lovely.

SB: I had (producer) Daniel (Dewsbury) at my side from February. We did all the research together; we talked constantly about what we were trying to achieve, four months of that. And then I decided not to use a cameraman but to use him, and gave him a beautiful camera, nice lenses, and three months to shoot it. And we were this tiny little team. And it paid off. And then we got the drones (used for aerial shots throughout the film). I don’t like gimmicks. I always thought I only want to shoot it if it’s relevant to loneliness. But for me the drones were critical because I wanted to say “It’s everywhere in Britain – anywhere you look you’re going to find loneliness”.

The Age of Loneliness is on BBC One at 10.35 pm, Thursday, 7 January.

 

BBC Exec Fergus O’Brien on the Making of The Met

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In September 2013, veteran doc maker Fergus O’Brien took up a new post as Executive Producer at the BBC, working with head of documentaries Ayesha Rafaele. On his first day, he was handed a very big project: “Literally I was walking in the door and I bumped into Ayesha and she said ‘Do you fancy exec-ing the Met?’ I’m not sure I knew exactly what that would mean but I said yes.”

O’Brien soon found himself immersed in steering one of the biggest access-driven documentary series in the BBC’s recent history. Airing on BBC One, The Met: Policing London is the first time a broadcaster has been given comprehensive access to London’s police force.

fergus head shot
Fergus O’Brien

For O’Brien, it has been rather a bumpy ride: “Inevitably with stuff that’s dealing with the law and criminality and so on, the phone never stopped. You’re often managing people’s worries, and people’s concerns, and keeping an eye on the legalities of things and keeping a steady line of contact open with our editorial policy team and our legal team.”

Initially a six part series, the team had to drop one of the episodes, when legal restrictions prevented them from airing a major storyline about domestic abuse: “That was very difficult – it’s hard to say goodbye,” says O’Brien. “It would have been a really strong story and often those stories, where the victim is willing to be on camera, aren’t told. Unfortunately through the peculiarities of the legal system we couldn’t show it.”

As director of such films as Channel 4’s Seven Days and the acclaimed, and very funny, The Armstrongs (BBC One) O’Brien is used to following a variety of strong characters across numerous settings. But helping the four shooting teams negotiate their way through the labyrinthine Met was a job like no other: “Each of the teams was assigned to a response team in a different borough of London, and a cross-section of boroughs which would reflect the diversity of the city,” he says. “And each team also took on one or two specialist units, whether it was homicide or Trident. The idea being that the bigger units would hopefully provide us with a spine for each film and something we could come back to, and then we could pepper it with a mixture of different response stories to flesh things out and give a sense of variety in each programme.”

Whilst access had been given from the top, it continued to have to be negotiated throughout: “We had to get consent from everyone, even if they were in the background,” says O’Brien. “It’s the usual thing, from our point of view: unless people want to do it there isn’t a point. If they feel they are being forced into it, it just isn’t that great.”

The production ended up with 2,000 hours of footage, shot over the year, and edited over many months. Even now, as the series is airing, O’Brien is still putting out fires: “It’s not the same as covering a story and when it is done and dusted in the courts you put it out. It is just ongoing; it’s daily. Every day now we have to check every single case across the series to make sure people haven’t re-offended and we’re not in contempt of court. It’s a huge part of it.”

The Met: Policing London is airing on Mondays on BBC One at 9pm until early July. Read about a very different way to film police docs here.

How did Vanessa Engle Get Inside Harley Street?

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If you haven’t yet tuned into it, get thee to the BBC I-Player to watch the first part of veteran director Vanessa Engle’s series Inside Harley Street. I’ve watched every minute, fascinated, and think it’s an exemplary portrait of a unique community – something very tricky to do. What Engle does so successfully is weave a rich tapestry of the human condition, through the many storylines we bear witness to over the three hours. Engle’s approach is very direct: conducting interviews, on site, as people undertake, or administer the myriad of medical, cosmetic and complementary treatments on offer in the Harley Street neighborhood. She also speaks to the community that keeps it humming, from the florists to the cleaners, to the rather fantastically powerful behind the scenes uber-landlord, who treats the neighbourhood like a Monopoly board (and indeed gleefully shows Engle his own custom made board replete with his properties).

Despite the simplicity of its construct, it’s clear that Inside Harley Street must have been a monster to put together. I spoke to Engle on the telephone to ask her just how she got inside the exclusive neighborhood:

Can you explain a little about the research and development process which went into making this series?

It was immense. I had this fantastic assistant producer called Liz Kempton. We started with all the conventional medical doctors, which is what Harley Street is best known for. And she just contacted enormous numbers of them…The levels of complication in putting this particular jigsaw together were beyond anything I’ve ever attempted, and I’ve done some pretty complicated ones. It’s not unusual for me to do a series where I have between 80 and 100 contributors. But for each contributor you had to get the doctor to go with the patient, you also had to get permission from the clinic. If they go for a scan in another hospital, you have to get permission from that hospital…the permissions proliferated. I’d never come across anything as complex as this.  And they’re not only places where medical confidentiality is an issue but they are all private businesses who are extremely protective of their clientele and their reputation. So you can imagine the difficulty. But the starting point was Liz contacting literally hundreds of doctors as an initial approach. She met quite a lot of them. If she thought there was something there then I would meet them as well.

Vanessa Moscow
Vanessa Engle

I know often when you go about getting access, people tend to club together one way or another. Did things get easier or harder for you?

My experience in any community is once you’ve got some really impressive names that have said yes, then it does get easier, it gets significantly easier.

And that happened with you?

Yes. With some of the doctors in the film, they hold a lot of sway – their reputations go before them – so once they say yes then others will follow.

Did you use any of your films as a calling card?

I do do that – I absolutely do that. And quite a lot of people in a lot of the clinics, they have hefty marketing and PR departments, and some of them asked to see my films and others checked me out online.

Maryam's leech therapy
Maryam’s leech therapy

There have been quite a few series which are location based on British television lately, like Inside Claridges and Welcome to Mayfair. How did you plan your approach for this series – did these influence you at all?

That’s a very good question.  There has been a spate of commissioning around luxury brands. I’m sure it is possible that Harley Street was also commissioned in that spirit – that there appears to be an audience for films about luxury. For me, right from the outset and in the original treatment I wrote, I always knew the series wouldn’t be about that. To make 180 minutes of television – as long as two feature films – on a premise that would just be ‘here are some rich people, and here they are paying for stuff the rest of us can’t afford’, for me as a filmmaker that doesn’t take me anywhere. There is nowhere to go with that proposition. And it’s certainly not going to keep me going for three hours. Not if you are a genuinely curious documentary maker and trying to find stuff out about humanity at a slightly deeper level. Rich people buying expensive shit isn’t of enough interest to me personally and I always knew that. It was clear from the outset that there would be huge issues thrown up about aging, about illness, about how we feel about our appearance, about why women are altering their appearance frequently, about why people are choosing treatments and therapies that are anti-scientific when we live in a scientific era. It was obvious to me that there was something meaty there that was never just going to be about rich people.

I’m very proud of the access that we did achieve. Because it’s one thing to make a film where you say to someone ‘oh you can afford a ruby necklace, or you can afford an expensive hotel room’. But to say to a very rich person, who is paying a lot of money for privacy and discretion, ‘can we film you butt naked having your prostate gland removed?’ is access of a different order really.

By the way, I love the soundtrack…

I’m glad you asked me about that. That’s what I mean about this series: I just worked so hard. All films are hard to make, but some films are really a lot harder to make than others. For this I listened to over 1,800 tracks to get the music for these films!

Episode 2 of Inside Harley Street screens Monday, 20 April, 9pm on BBC Two.