My first documentary for television was The Quiet Mutiny, made in 1970
for Granada. It was an unusual film, laced with irony and farce, rather
like a factual Catch-22, and shot in a gentle, almost lyrical style by
George Jesse Turner. The story was something of a scoop: America’s huge
army in Vietnam was disintegrating as angry conscripts brought their
rebellion at home to the battlefields of Vietnam. The film’s evidence of
soldiers shooting their officers and refusing to fight caused a furore
among the guardians of official truth. The American ambassador to
Britain, Walter Annenberg, a crony of President Richard Nixon, phoned
Sir Robert Fraser, director of the Independent Television Authority
(ITA). Although he had not seen the film, Sir Robert was apoplectic.
Summoning Granada executives, he banged his desk and described me as “a
bloody dangerous subversive” who was “anti-American”. This puzzled Lord
Bernstein, Granada’s liber tarian founder, who protested that The Quiet
Mutiny had received high praise from the public and, far from being
anti-American, had shown only sympathy for the despair of young GIs
caught up in a hopeless war. When I flew to New York and showed it to
Mike Wallace, the star reporter of CBS’s 60 Minutes, he agreed. “Real
shame we can’t show it here,” he said.
This fear and loathing came as a surprise to me. I was a newspaper
journalist naive in the ways of television, especially the lengths to
which established power went to control it. The long list of banned,
censored and delayed programmes on Ireland is testament to this, as are
the de classified files on the real reason why The War Game, Peter
Watkins’s brilliant construction of a nuclear attack on Britain in 1965,
was banned. (At the time, the BBC had lied that the “faint-hearted”
would not be able to bear watching The War Game. In fact, the BBC had
secretly surrendered editorial control to the government, with a note
from Lord Normanbrook, chairman of the board of governors, explaining
that although the film was “based on careful research into official
material . . . and produced with considerable restraint”, its broadcast
“might have a significant effect on public attitudes towards the policy
of the nuclear deterrent”.)
Almost all of the more than 50 films I made for ITV (and a series for
Channel 4) have had to navigate a system that rarely declares its in
tention to create and shape public opinion. The BBC exemplifies this,
with its specious neutrality, mythically balancing contending extremes
while turning out a flow of official assumptions and deceptions as
“news”. In its youth, British commercial television was different.
Unlike its equivalents anywhere in the world, it retained a nucleus of
people who, like Lord Bernstein, would defend those who challenged the
received wisdom. Certainly, my collaborators have included some of the
best and boldest, not least the three young BBC renegades who first
suggested television to me at a Soho restaurant in 1969. The directors
Paul Watson, Charles Denton and Richard Marquand were the products of
the brief, enlightened Hugh Greene years at the BBC. Brought together by
the distinguished actor David Swift, our aim, in Watson’s words, was
“to take documentaries beyond the limits laid down for BBC staff and to
get on television subjects unpalatable to hierarchies”. We believed that
journalism informed by no opinion, no irony, no humour, no compassion
and no commitment lacked a very serious dimension. Our inspirations were
James Cameron’s One Pair of Eyes and Edward R Murrow’s See It Now.
The idea was picked up by World in Action, the Granada documentary
strand that pioneered so much powerful journalism. I was one of the
first World in Action reporters to appear in front of the camera,
encouraged by Charles Denton not to speak in “BBC code” and to say
clearly “what you yourself have found out”. From an American fire-base
near the Cambodian border, we set out on patrol with a platoon of
“grunts” (drafted men), in what they called “Indian country” (Indian =
Vietcong). We did not see any Vietcong. What we did see was a chicken,
which the sergeant presumed to be a Vietcong chicken and therefore
worthy of mention in his log as an “enemy sighted”. When I wrote this
into my commentary, a Granada executive wanted to know the source of my
statement that the chicken had communist affiliations. After some
enjoyable conversation along these lines it dawned on me he was serious.
“The ITA need to know these things,” he said. “They won’t be happy
unless we reassure them.” I proposed that the chicken remain in the film
as a fellow-traveller, if not an all-out card carrier, and this was
accepted.
Sir Robert and Lord Normanbrook were right: the political documentary
is indeed dangerous, because it can circumvent the club that unites and
dominates establishment politics and journalism. Moreover, the
documentary as a television “event” can send ripples far and wide. Year
Zero: the silent death of Cambodia, which I made with David Munro in
1979, did that. Year Zero not only revealed the horror of the Pol Pot
years, it showed how Nixon’s and Kissinger’s “secret” bombing of that
country had provided a critical catalyst for the rise of the Khmer
Rouge. It also exposed how the west, led by the United States and
Britain, was imposing an embargo, like a medieval siege, on the most
stricken country on earth. This was a reaction to the fact that
Cambodia’s liberator was Vietnam – a country that had come from the
wrong side of the cold war and that had recently defeated the US.
Cambodia’s suffering was a wilful revenge. Britain and the US even
backed Pol Pot’s demand that his man continue to occupy Cambodia’s seat
at the UN, while Margaret Thatcher stopped children’s milk going to the
survivors of his nightmare regime. Little of this was reported.
Had Year Zero simply described the monster that Pol Pot was, it would
have been quickly forgotten. By reporting the collusion of “our”
governments, it told a wider truth about how the world was run. Until
George W Bush and Tony Blair pushed their luck in Iraq and Lebanon, this
remained a taboo.
“A solidarity and compassion surged across our nation,” wrote Brian
Walker, director of Oxfam. Within two days of Year Zero going to air, 40
sacks of post arrived at ATV (later Central Television) in Birmingham –
26,000 first-class letters in the first post alone. The station quickly
amassed £1m, almost all of it in small amounts. “This is for Cambodia,”
wrote a Bristol bus driver, enclosing his week’s wage. Entire pensions
were sent, along with entire savings. Petitions arrived at Downing
Street, one after the other, for weeks. MPs received hundreds of
thousands of letters, demanding that British policy change (which it
did, eventually). And none of it was asked for.
For me, the public response to Year Zero gave the lie to clichés
about “compassion fatigue”, an excuse that some broadcasters and
television executives use to justify the current descent into the
cynicism and passivity of Big Brotherland. Above all, I learned that a
documentary could reclaim shared historical and political memories, and
present their hidden truths. The reward then was a compassionate and an
informed public; and it still is.
