Yvette Vanson
Interview with Yvette Vanson by Katie Megan on the 22nd of June 2007 for the BECTU History Project.
KM Yvette, over the past 20 years you’ve been working as a maker of challenging documentary films for television. Your work has been described by critics as television of a high order, well crafted, and aimed unerringly to engage both intellect and emotions, and you recently donated the Vanson award and Vanson production collections to the BFI, and your work constitutes a invaluable film resource charting some of the major political events throughout the 1980s and early ‘90s. Let’s start this interview by talking about maybe your family background, where you were born.
YV I'm a Surrey girl. I was born in Walton-on-Thames. I have an elder sister who actually was at the BBC as a designer, and then has had a very successful prop company at Shepperton Studios for 30 years. My father worked at Cartier, the jewellers. He’s still alive. He’s 92, and was a good socialist all his life. A bit of a contradiction working at Cartier and being a Labour counsellor.
He is half French, hence my name, Yvette, and my mother was from cockney Jewish stock and she worked for Stolls Agency in the entertainment business when she met my father, but then gave it up to be a mum. She died about three years ago. So, sort of a small nuclear family in suburbia.
KM You attended the Kingston Polytechnic, if I'm right?
YV That’s right. It’s the University of Kingston now.
KM Right, in the late ‘70s where you gained a first class honour in social science. So, am I right in assuming that a future career in social documentary filmmaking was seeded at quite an early age, because I know you moved into acting quite early on as well?
YV I was an actress. I went to the Welsh College of Music and Drama, which is now the Royal College of Music and Drama, and I did some work in television and then theatre, and I was in the West End with David Warner in I, Claudius and things like that. So I had seven years quite successful career as an actress.
But then I got frustrated with that and went to Kingston to read social science, and one day I was in a lift and two blokes got in the lift. They started chatting me up basically, and they said ‘what are you doing?’ and I told them, and I said ‘what do you do?’ and they said ‘we run a studio’. There was a little studio at Kingston Poly and nobody had told anybody about it and nobody used it and they were in danger of losing their jobs.
Funnily enough, one of them went on to be at Channel Four and is very active in BECTU. Anyway, the upshot of that was that I made a programme with them as part of my degree and I was one of the early students to do it.
KM What was that about?
YV That was called Objectivity in the News – Fact or Fallacy. And actually, now that I think back on it, it was great. I got to talk to people like Stewart Hood, David Elstein, Brian Winston, I mean, all sorts of people. I did case studies on the Ford workers, we documented the news and looked at it and tried to analyse it. Anyway, it was quite a project really. It was editing by pressing buttons.
But it got me a job at the BBC straight after my university degree. Or rather it didn’t, because in 1979 I got a job at the community programme unit at the BBC with Mike Fentiman, he took me on, and then I was blacklisted.
KM Right, because you were a member of the Worker’s Revolutionary Party at one point, weren’t you?
YV I was. I printed off the article about blacklisting in room 105 at the BBC, and I was in very good company. Roland Joffe was blacklisted, Isabelle ? - there were loads of people and probably hundreds of people don’t even know about it. But there was an article written in ’85 sort of outing what was going on and we all put our name to it thinking this is only going to make things worse, but in fact it was good. I think it was a good thing to do because it was iniquitous.
KM So you were taken on?
YV So I was taken on and I kept waiting for my contract to arrive, and my contract didn’t arrive and I rang Mike Fentiman sort of two or three weeks before I was due to start. I said ‘where’s my contract?’ and he said ‘oh, there’s been a bit of a glitch. I've been told to employ somebody internally’. And I went, ‘verbal contract, I want to come. It’s a great unit’.
I said ‘I don’t believe this Mike. I think there’s more to this. Go away and investigate’. He did and he went away and I think he spoke to Stewart Hood when he was still there. I can’t remember, but basically they admitted to him that it was because of my past political activity. But I hadn’t been in the WRP for years, and it was just ridiculous.
Anyway, I didn’t get the job. I got £500 compensation, and it potentially changed the whole of my career, where might I have ended if I'd been at the BBC? It could have been for the worst; it could have been for the better, who knows?
KM So of course it’s common knowledge now that this secret vetting system by the MI5 had been going on for decades.
YV At the time it was really shocking actually, and it did, it made a huge difference to my career. I had to start reapplying for jobs. You can imagine, I got my first class degree, got a job at the BBC and then I didn’t, and I had nothing but this little film I'd made. But I wanted to do television anyway, and I ended up in Ruskin. I made some tape slide productions for the Ruskin College education arm of the trade union group there. We did stuff on the Brandt Report and multinational corporations and then we made some videos of workers. I was there for about a year and a half.
KM So sort of training.
YV Training and educational campaigning. And then I got the job at East Sussex Social Services, which was completely incredible actually. For a social services department to allocate funds for staff training using video, and to invest in cameras and people, me, was incredible. It was a very innovative director of social services, and he took me on.
I mean, I had no experience really, but he saw something, and it was a fantastic learning curve actually because I made 30 films. We had a small unit, we had our own gear they bought, we did training workshops for social services staff, and we developed all these training tools, which were very, very innovative.
So now people think of John Cleese and stuff, but we were doing similar things, like on mental health. We did small cameos and I used actors. I thought ‘this is great, I'll do drama’. So I got some very experienced actors, people like Jimmy Marcus who had been in The Clockwork Orange, Vicky Williams, I got a little team of people and they came down because they were my friends really. I think that’s when Tony started writing some of the stuff in East Sussex, Tony Wardle, and we did lots and lots of this stuff. It was used for years. It was sold internationally, but it was very funny at times working with social workers.
I used to walk in and I used to kiss people hello, and they’d go ‘oh’, and they’d use this terminology, and I'd put my hand up in the meetings and say ‘excuse me, could you just speak English?’ So I was a bit of a character. But it worked and I was very proud of the fact we did stuff for home helps and people like that.
KM Yes, there was Too Late for Jimmy, primarily a sort of training film for social workers but seen through the eyes of a 12 year old boy.
YV That was my naivety as a filmmaker because I thought, how can we get social workers to get inside the mind of a child? So, [I decided], we’ll do the film with the camera as the child. Well, I mean, anyone now would know it’s the hardest thing in the world to do, to do everything from that point of view... where the camera is the point of view of somebody. But in naivety you do these things, and we pulled it off. It really gave a sort of immediacy to it. So everyone he encountered was either looking straight at camera or ignoring the camera, as [if it were] a child, it was very powerful.
KM There seemed to be a lot of energy and humour, you know, given some of the projects might have been – in a way – quite dry subject matter.
YV Oh yes, we came at it in a completely different way, because obviously some of it was very heavy. I was still a member of Equity, so I presented a whole thing on the Mental Health Act when it came out. We developed these training packs, and that was really quite important because we used video links, written word, we worked with trainers and social services and so on. So we did one on handling aggression, very important things for social workers who are dealing with very, very difficult teenagers for example, or for senile dementia.
Now a lot of these things are currently in documentaries, in the press, in the media, but at the time it was challenging stuff and new stuff. I really enjoyed it and I worked with some good people.
KM You worked very closely with Tony Wardle for about 16 years?
YV Yes, 16, 17 years.
KM You mentioned he was writing some of these, but when did you first work with him?
YV We first got together as friends and lovers, I have to say. So it was an emotional getting together, and without going into too much detail, I think he was driving lorries at the time on the continent, and I'd just finished Kingston University, or maybe I'd finished at Ruskin. Anyway, the job came up in Sussex and it was a question by then of if he was going to come with me. He had been a journalist, he is a wonderful journalist, and he’d just had a glitch in his life. He’d done a lot of writing, particularly for women’s magazines, some very strong articles.
So it was a really good team actually, although the emotional relationship didn’t last, the team carried on for a lot longer. He was a very good interviewer, very strong. He’s a very empathetic, very nice guy, very intelligent and extremely good at research, digging things out. Of course in those days you have to remember there was no Googling. There was nothing. There was no Internet. We had to literally go places and we had to phone people up, knock on doors and root people out.
I really worry that we’re losing that research element of work. It’s hard work, but it pays off because you meet really good people. You meet them, you don’t just read about them on a screen. So he would do a lot of the preparatory research and stuff, and I would hold the business together and pull it together and do the directing.
KM When did you actually set up Vanson Wardle?
YV Gosh, don’t ask me. Cut! [laughs]
KM So you and Tony first started working with East Sussex social services.
YV Yes. I had a parallel career alongside broadcast, and some of it I did on my own initially, and then we started Vanson Wardle later. It was a parallel universe which was us doing a lot of non-broadcast videos for charities mainly, sort of coming out of East Sussex. So we met people from the Spastic Society, it is now called SCOPE, and Leonard Cheshire.
For years we did loads and loads and loads of these training films, some PR films for charities, mainly in the sort of social area. Tony was rumbling along doing that when I went off to the BBC. I finally got into the BBC after my blacklisting. Mike Fentiman, the same man, stuck his neck out for me in ’84 and took me on at the community programme unit. I only was ever at the BBC on a contract for six months. I think they extended it by two months, but that was it.
The first thing we did at the BBC was Advocacy, which was a four part series which we did in the studio. Peter Lee Wright was one of the directors, and I produced a couple of them. We were looking for a presenter and we interviewed various people to present. We interviewed people like Patricia Scotland, who was a QC, and we interviewed a lawyer called Michael Mansfield and he presented it... and I fell in love with him. He is now my husband, 23 years later.
We did this series and it was incredible. At one point we had 70 striking health workers, women who were outside [picketing] one of the hospitals. They were cleaners or something and they [the health authority] were trying to privatise the services. So we had them all in and we had this great debate going on, which Michael sort of mediated, between the employers and the people who were on strike, or whatever, some experts and so on. It was good and we did about four of them. We should have done some more really.
KM And then you made Taking Liberties.
YV Taking Liberties was very important actually. We went to Yorkshire during the miner’s strike. I'd lived a bit in my life, and I liked to think I knew what was going on in the world, and I was a political woman, but I was really shocked when I went to Yorkshire and saw the extent of the police state really we were living under.
One of the important things about Taking Liberties I think is [the sequence when] we were in a van. We tried to take a couple of miners, they were going picketing, in a van, across the border to Nottingham from Yorkshire, and we were stopped by the police and we captured it on camera. It was just absolutely devastating that we were turned back. There was no freedom of speech and there was no freedom of association.
We got footage, but we also reconstructed incredibly, the police chasing through people’s houses in Yorkshire, the washing coming off the line, which of course was in Billy Elliot. I had lunch with the director and he took some of the images that we used in Taking Liberties, for Billy Elliot, [of] the miner’s strike.
The point about Taking Liberties as well was they [the BBC hierarchy] threatened Mike Fentiman and Tony Bligh, who were the editor and the assistant editor, with closure of the whole unit, over that film. They did not like it. It was very political, it was very damaging to the police, and they said you can’t put this out. They [Mike & Tony] fought, but I wasn’t allowed to be there.
Often, as a producer, the frustrating thing is that you are not allowed in on the discussion with the commissioning editors or the head of the BBC or wherever it’s going, and you cannot fight to defend your film. So you are totally reliant on your commissioning editors, or the head of your department, in this case Mike Fentiman, to fight your corner. Well, they did fight. They were fantastic.
I remember Tony Bligh coming back nearly in tears saying ‘we’ve lost it, you’re going to have to cut this Yvette, you’re going to have to take this out; you have to change it. We can’t say that’. We said ‘no, we have to fight this’. It’s a lesson. You have to really fight for what you believe in. It was important.
There’s another story about Taking Liberties which is there was an organisation started called Women in Film and Television or something, a number of years back. It’s a very interesting organisation because it was supposed to be for women because it’s hard…it was then hard for women. I mean, I've never particularly played – I am a feminist, I'm a socialist – but I've never particularly played the feminist card or that. But it was tough and there were some very good women around.
Anyway, they decided to form this organisation and everybody joined, and I did, and we had to [write] a little biog. So I put my biog in and it said that I did Taking Liberties, and I got this very, very churlish letter from Elizabeth Clough, who I think is the wife of Jeremy Paxman, who was at the BBC saying ‘how dare you assume that you produced Taking Liberties. That was my series. I did the series of Taking Liberties. Please take it off your CV’.
I wrote back and said ‘excuse me, but I think somebody on your series pinched our title. We did it in 1984. They then did a spin off series at the BBC called Taking Liberties with David Jessell and it was very successful and it was very good. Arrogance!
KM So then you kind of stuck with the whole issue of the sort of government’s assault on the mining industry.
YV Somewhere along the line I worked for Channel Four for a company, I can’t remember the name,[Skyline] but it was a thing called Years Ahead, and I did a few months there. The only reason I mention that is because I worked there freelance after the BBC, I suppose. This guy called Steve Clarke Hall who is now a very well known film producer, a very successful one, we made little inserts for an elderly magazine programme. It was Years Ahead, for Channel Four.
I decided I wanted to make a thing on the hunger marches and I got this amazing footage. I did these wonderful interviews with people who had been on the hunger marches, on the strikes and on the marches in the ‘30s. I got these great characters who had been on them, women and stuff, and then I got this extraordinary footage, which nobody had seen, of how the police were beating up the hunger marchers when they arrived in Hyde Park.
It was just like the miners, men on horseback, batons, battering them over the head. It was censored. They wouldn’t put it out. I left the job, and I was great friends with Steve Clarke Hall but he didn’t fight for it, or he wouldn’t put it out. I don’t actually know what happened.
I was really disappointed about that. Somewhere in the BFI you have a little take of that. It’s eight minutes long or something. So that was one of the early censorships that went on. But you are right; I carried on the whole miner’s thing into Orgreave, because by that time I'd met my husband, Michael Mansfield. He was defending miners who were charged with riot after Orgreave, which was a coking plant in Yorkshire. There had been terrible scenes there and a lot of contretemps between the police and miners.
I decided to make a film [The Battle for Orgreave] about the trial that he was conducting. The trial was 48 days and I did something which again then was very, very unusual. I mean, somebody will tell you that of course it happened in the ‘30s, but at that point, most documentaries were fairly dry, sitting on sofas like this and talking heads and other footage of course.
There are some wonderful ones, I'm not saying that [there aren’t]. But I did something [unusual]. I thought, we had to get the immediacy again of what had happened at Orgreave, and we also had to prove or disprove the whole of the mass media that had said that miners were vicious, they had used violence, and we knew full well that [it wasn’t so]; in Taking Liberties we’d turned up at a little pit village and there had been 300 cops in one tiny village policing the picket lines.
So what I asked the miners to do, I think there were 12 of them, 12 on the jury and 12 in the dock, and they were all Yorkshiremen actually. We asked them to go back to Orgreave, and they hadn’t been back because it was about a year and a half later they were on trial for riot. It was very, very serious for these guys. They could have got life. Riot carried life, and so this trial was very important. Anyway, we took them back to the site and got them to recreate what had happened to them.
So we literally started [as if it was] the early morning on the day that it all really erupted, [June 18 1984] and got people to run up the field and show where they had been hit and how they’d been hit. We cut it absolutely precisely with the same documentary footage we’d got, or with stills. We got Leslie Boulton, who is in the famous image in Orgreave, - the woman being struck, like this, by the policeman on horseback - and we took her to the place and she said she was struck like this, and then we’d cut to the image.
It was because we felt nobody would believe it. Everybody had been told and believed that miners were the culprits, and we had to try and turn it around and say well actually, sometimes they are culprits, but mostly they were victims.
What was wonderful about it though was I had a fantastic team. 95 pickets were arrested at Orgreave on the 18th of June 1984, and we made a film, as I said, about the trial. Taking these guys back, it was very delicate because it had been extremely traumatic because most of them had been injured. The famous one was Russell Broomhead who was beaten over the head and he had a stammer and epilepsy as a result. He wasn’t in that particular film, but he was in another film. I did a follow up.
It was very traumatic for these guys, and some of them are not alive, they’ve died since. It really, really had an effect on them. Anyway, one of the most important interviews of my life was one of the miners sitting on the step [of the police holding centre], and he recounts how he was arrested. He was beaten up and he was arrested and how his wife – it makes me cry – his wife came to see him in prison. He’s a very proud, honest, lovely guy, and he ends up being criminalised. For what? Trying to save his job, and he describes how emotional it was and how his wife came and how he wanted his kids to know what it meant to him and why he’d done it and that he wasn’t a criminal.
It was just an incredible interview. At one point he talks about his wife was crying so much that her nose was running. We had this terrible argument... Chris Cox was the photographer on the film, and his brother, Pete Cox edited it. We had ten weeks editing this film. Can you imagine? We had weeks to research it, we had at least ten days shoot on an hour long documentary, and we had ten weeks to cut it on film. Never before or since! It was those fantastic resources Channel Four gave you.
Pete and I had this huge row. On the whole we didn’t, but we had this huge row. He said ‘you can’t have this man describing this. It’s humiliating’; and he was crying and he was breaking down, this miner. He said ‘you’ve got to cut it before [this]’, and I said ‘no. We’re not. He gave the interview, he agreed to it, he wants his children to know what he went through; he wants the world to know what he went through’. Of course, I mean, I was right about that, people agree, I'm sure. It was incredibly strong. People remember it.
But what I try to do as well as doing the emotional stuff - and that’s what I've tried to do in all my films - because if you don’t have the human story... everybody talks about the narrative and the human story, but you have to have people's firsthand experiences. But if you then just leave it at that, for me, that’s not enough in documentary making. You have to have an analysis of it. [But] not by some voiceover. I never did voiceovers in the early days. We never had that.
It was proper documentary making in which you’d invite the solicitor for example, Gareth Pierce, who was there representing so many of these miners. She would put her sort of – if you like – the next layer of analysis of what had happened. So we’d have the personal and then we’d have the solicitor and then we had Michael Mansfield talking much more globally, if you like, about the whole situation, the political situation and the bigger context. And then we’d put it in the economic context and the historical context. We talked to really old miners in that film about the ‘20s and their struggles to save their jobs.
This film [The Battle for Orgreave] is a well known film and it’s used – and I'm very pleased because it only got one showing – it’s been used throughout colleges and so on because it was a landmark film. I am very, very proud of it. The other thing I am proud of, which is very, very rare, is that seven years later, or five years later, we did a follow up, and you are never normally allowed to do that in the media. We went back; and the reason I was able to do it is because the miners trusted me.
I had not done what so many people – I'm afraid – in the media did at that time, which is lie to them and say ‘we’ll represent your point of view’ and then didn’t. We didn’t muck about, we showed it how it was, and they remembered us of course. I still get Christmas cards from those miners 20 years later, and they are friends. They have been [important] people in my life.
We were able to do a sequel, a follow up, and show what had happened to people's lives, and it was quite depressing. The coalfields have been devastated. Whatever one thinks about Arthur Scargill, he was right. They closed hundreds of pits, hundreds of thousands of jobs [went], we don’t have a coal industry; we have a bit of open cast mining, and those guys were right to fight. It’s a big lesson.
KM It shows quite a lot of political events round the time as well, like the North Staffs Miners Wives Action Group.
YV Yes, I went and spoke when they showed it [there] and at Cambridge University recently because it was the 25th anniversary of the strike. That [new] film has been spun off [it]. [The Battle of Orgreave] There is a young artist who has won the Turner Prize, called Jeremy Deller, who saw my film. He didn’t know anything about it, didn’t know anything about Orgreave, never heard about it, saw it at an event in Wales and rang me up and said he would like to recreate what happened at Orgreave as an art event for a big company called Art Angel.
At least he did approach me, and I went to meet this company, Art Angel, who invested a lot in art, and they got money from Channel Four to make a film. They got Mike Figgis to direct it, and they would not pay me or my miner friend, Terry Dunn, who had helped me on the original film, to go back [and help research].
The idea was that we would go back with Jeremy and we’d introduce him to miners and do it properly - and they wouldn’t pay us. Well, they’d pay us peanuts, and we knew they had this huge budget for this thing, and we just refused. Oh, trade unionists, you see! And we just said ‘no, we’re not going to do it’. It was very frustrating.
I have to say the final product, have you heard of it? In the end what they did is they asked miners to dress up as policemen and policemen to dress up as miners and tried to recreate it to show how it felt to be on the other side. Liberalism gone mad. Sorry. Anyway. That is a little aside. We didn’t only do miner’s strike things though. We did loads and loads of other things.
KM So you took on the whole issue of the government’s white paper proposing the implementation of a sort of American style private healthcare. You did a few films about that, but in the meantime you were continuing with this groundbreaking charity film, which won many awards.
YV We did a very important film actually called Stand up the Real Glynn Vernon. That won a Golden Reel [ITVA] or something. But it was important because it was the first time we actually put a disabled person at the centre of the film. He couldn’t speak because he had cerebral palsy. Well, he could speak, but it was very, very difficult to understand him. So we had Dave Hill, a wonderful actor, who was doing his voice, and we just followed him [Glynn] around.
It was very simple. We had no money, it was a very small budget thing, but we just followed him around. We sort of scripted it for him. In other words, Tony Wardle again, wonderful interviews, he just spent a long time with Glynn, built up trust, really liked the guy, and got him to open up about his life and what it was like to be stuck in a wheelchair and stuck in this body.
There was a very funny opening to the film, which revolutionised the approach to disability. [He says] ‘What have I not got enough of in life? I ain’t got enough money, and I don’t get enough sex.’ That’s how it started. So you’re expecting this guy to say: I can’t have access to my bathroom, or whatever, - [but no, he’s] just like all the rest of us!
Anyway, it did open things up, because he actually became the President of SCOPE, Glynn, and went on to be very instrumental in changing policy and opening up the issues about disability. Unfortunately he died a few years ago. So that was an important one.
I did a great little number – I'm very proud of this one – called Councils for the Defence. It was when all the local councils were being got at [by the Tory government], they capped them. There was a big sit in at Lambeth, and the only film crew that was allowed in to this sit in, in Lambeth Town Hall, where all these workers were occupying the town hall against what they were trying to do, was us. So we made this little film, sort of campaigning film about that. That was quite interesting.
Somewhere along the line I also worked for Bandung File. That was quite gratifying, because Tariq Ali - I'd always known of as a sort of ‘revisionist’, because I was in one party and he was in another party of the left and there were all sorts of conflicts. I'd never really met him, and I must have applied for a job and I rang up or he rang me I think. I think it was one time in my life I was headhunted. He said come in and meet me, and I did, and he was running Bandung File. He said ‘I've seen the Battle for Orgreave, it’s the best documentary ever made’, or something, so immediately flattery won.
Anyway, I went to work for them and it was a great atmosphere. There was one white male working there, all the rest were black employees, white women, black women, it was just a really different atmosphere. The only slight problem was I was pregnant by that time [1987] and I just kept forgetting everything. I just couldn’t remember. Maternal dementia! But I met Darcus [Howe’s] daughter, Tamara who was very young and working in reception or something at the time, but she’s important later on.
You always have to remember to be nice to people in this business because you never know who is going to get to a position of power later on, (and she did, when it came to the Lawrence film). So again [at Bandung] I got my team of actors, I got Jimmy Marcus back, [for the programme Rat Race]. It was quite horrifying [what was going on]... I mean, what was wonderful about that company, they were not afraid to take on or challenge stereotypes about black people. It was very, very good stuff.
What we did was, I went along and I researched and sat in on these ‘racism awareness’ training sessions, and you’d get these facilitators sort of saying to people well, ‘give me names with black in them’. So people would say ‘Blackpool’, [for example] and on this blackboard there were all these names of places and things which had black in it. They were all designated racist! So Blackpool suddenly becomes racist! You know, it was just completely over the top and ridiculous.
So I'm afraid we slightly took the ‘mick’ out of this in this little drama vignette we did, and that caused a bit of a stir, I think, as well at the time. I did a couple of things for them. I did one on the BCCI, which was the bank that was reported for corruption and stuff.
Then we did the health ones. Kentucky Fried Medicine; that was a very important series. That was a three part series we did. I must have been pregnant for a very long time, I don’t know, because I was pregnant then as well, but I was only pregnant once, with my son Freddy! But again, because we had no Internet or anything, we had to find people in America who were going to talk about the healthcare [system], and it wasn’t easy because there were very, very few people who were willing to criticise and risk their jobs.
We found some fantastic people, doctors, - a wonderful doctor in Harlem called Mark Nelson - I'll never forget him, who let us film in this Harlem hospital. It was third world. There you are in the richest country in the world and you are in the third world. They had no equipment, and it was devastating. We did some incredible interviews with people: relatives of a young man who had been left out under a tree because he didn’t have insurance, he was left to die; a family man who had leprosy, which is absolutely treatable, in America, and he’d lost all the digits of his hands because he didn’t have insurance cover.
We were trying to say in these films… it sounds like scaremongering, but it wasn’t. These weren’t isolated cases. This was going on, and still is going on, because Clinton didn’t bring in a health service for America. We were trying to say if you privatise the health service you will get a two or three-tier system, and by stealth, it’s happened. I think one of the things - I was thinking about it today - about Vanson Wardle and Vanson Productions has been that we have been very prophetic. We’ve always been a bit ahead of the game. Were we that smart? I don’t know. We were just on the ball. Were we just politically more aware than other people?
It got very, very frustrating at times because we’d go to commissioning editors and we’d say ‘look, there’s this issue that’s boiling and burning up but it’s not right [at the] front of the agenda, can we make a film about it?’ ‘No, not interested’. Four years later of course, the world explodes and they wanted it, but by that time they used somebody else. An exception to that was Alan Fountain at Channel Four. Working with him…I hadn’t realised my luck until later on, because he was one of the first people I worked with on the Battle for Orgreave. He was just fantastic, and he really was a commissioning editor who fought our corner. He would go in and battle; and he battled.
Every single film I have made, every single documentary I have made for broadcast has been censored, or attempted to be censored. That is not exaggerating. I mean, from every one we would have challenges, not because they weren’t well thought out, not because it was just fly on the wall, let’s throw a camera at it. They were thought out. They were researched. We had backup.