Crossing the Line…..? No, Tripping Over It. Number 2

In 1979 I made the leap into programme production. Well more of a hesitant stumble really. In any case there I was in the General and Special Interest Department all set to start work as a trainee director. End of Promo.

It did not take long before I was in the thick if it. I hardly had time to get my feet under the desk before I was told to get myself into Wellington for a planning meeting at Downstage Theatre where a charity concert to raise funds for Amnesty International was to be staged. The whole thing would be recorded on camera for future transmission. I was to direct the cameras on the night. Baptism of fire? I think so.

I am of two minds as to how this bit should be reported. Throughout this memory trail I have endeavoured to refrain from overt criticism of events and personalities and it’s not my intention to start now. But there are some things that must be said because they involve matters that are of vital importance to myself and others, hopefully, who generously give their time to read my uncertain prose. I’m talking about bullying, standover tactics, public shaming of people in front of their peers and all that other fucking ‘Linkedin’ philosophy so detested by our good friend David, and his instincts are unerring and always right on target.

I have done my share of telling off when faced with people who have not bothered to be prepared properly before a shoot and consequently put the whole operation in jeopardy because of their slacker approach. But for me it was a tendency, not a way of life.

The people I am referring to above are of a different breed. They thrive on their imagined authority and derive pleasure from behaving like camp guards. You know who I am talking about. You will have come across them on your journey. Well that’s that out of the way.

So, I got to Downstage for the first of several meetings which all turned out ok. I already knew some of the people involved and that’s not surprising since I had been working in the Avalon drama department for some years.

No problems at Downstage but at Avalon just the opposite applied. The person appointed by the department boss to ‘supervise’ me during my preparation was a loud mouthed bully who lost no time in making my life difficult. I put up with it not because I was intimidated but because I was the new chum and I had my own agenda which I was determined to pursue at all costs.

Well, let’s cut to the chase.

We got to Downstage on the night. The show started, the cameras rolled, and I ‘directed’ as best I could with a bully relentlessly talking over me and distracting me at every turn. But we got there eventually and it was a ‘wrap’.

You might wonder why people would want to act as badly as that person did? Here’s part of the answer given to me by a fellow producer some time later. He said that I had been ‘set up’ to fail because I had to be ‘cut down to size’. I had done too well on my director’s course and shown that I had a very good grasp of control room operations and had pulled off a very complicated production without missing a beat. Of course it was just another power play from those types who thrive on confrontation as long as they can get away with it. Classic bullies.

I have an idea that I requested for my name not be used in the on screen credits since the ‘direction’ had been a nonsensical farrago. But honestly, I can’t recall the details so we will have to leave it there.

For some time afterwards I toyed with the idea of packing it in and going back to floor managing but a friend talked me out of it and I have been grateful ever since. Giving in to bullies is a big mistake as it only reinforces their behaviour. So I decided to dig in and prove by example that their is room in the world for a diversity of ‘types’ and judging people on narrow categories such as existed in that department was, in my opinion, a fatal flaw in their management style.

This is probably a good place to explain what ‘Crossing the Line’ means in producer speak.

Quite simply, it asserts that there is a ‘them’ and there is an ‘us’. That distinction was actually uttered to me by a foolish person sometime after I was promoted to ‘glory’. My gob was well and truly smacked. I was well aware that the production ranks had more idiots to the square metre than any other section of Broadcasting but this really brought it home. “You do know” he intoned, “that you have now crossed the line?”

God help us.

If this is all sounding like a confessional, well so be it.

I will say the statutary Our Father, three Hail Marys and three Glory Be to The Fathers at the close of play.

When I was a young child and later as a teenager, I learned to navigate the ‘Blackboard Jungle’ and it’s dangerous undergrowth. Wild creatures were ubiquitous and usually on a hair trigger. One learned to read the signs and quickly establish who was scary and who was just acting tough. A very useful skill which has served me well. Failure to recognise what was ‘going down’ could result in you suffering several serious blows to various parts of your body. It’s like when the barrel of bricks is going up whilst you are coming down. Anyone who has lived within a twenty mile radius of Glasgow, Scotland will testify to the above. Except of course if they were born in the equivalent Remueras, Parnells, and Kandallahs of that place.

And so it was in that production department where I was ensconced. There were no scary people just mean spirited fools who were easily handled.

The dapartment mostly worked on the dubious principle of ‘creative conflict’. Pop psychology was all the rage at that time and people who gleaned their information from dubious paperback sources would airily proclaim such utter tosh as “Their are two personality types in the world. The A type and the B type.” Without any training in psychology or any other social disciplines they would consign everyone to these ridiculous categories and proceed on that basis. I thought it was a complete load of bollocks and said so often and very directly. It’s a bit like saying “ A word can only have one meaning”. There are people amongst us who actually believe that.

At this point maybe you will be thinking that I was an awkward bugger. Hard to please, complaining etc. But I believed that I was standing up for principles which underpinned NZ society up to that point. Mainly, a Fair Go for all, fairness and equity and decency in our dealings with each other. The ‘Toxic’ workplace was not a thing at that time at least not in the sense of that term as we know it today. But the early signs were there. In today’s work environment toxicity seems to be a commonplace. The ‘price of freedom’ injuction has been almost completely forgotten. Look at the structure of most management systems. Control presses down from the top. The CEO-The Leadership Group(who obey the boss without question)-The Group Managers similarily beholden to those above-The ‘Teams’ with their managers all marching in step-the ‘hoi polloi’ at the bottom tied up in meetings-personal assessments-‘goals’ and all the other management speak with which control is excercised. It all bears a remarkable resemblance to the political structures of Nazism. Our present political carrying on especially from National and ACT does nothing to reassure us that things will get better any time soon. The ‘one percent’ are firmly in charge and we seem to have lost the will to fight back.

Here’s a quote from my old pal Dr. Franz Kafka when he was working in the claims department of ‘The Worker’s Insurance Institute’ a huge bureaucracy at the heart of The Austrian Empire.

“How modest these people are. They come to us and plead. Instead of storming this institution and beating it down with their fists, they come to us and plead.”

If it’s good enough for Franz it’s bloody ok by me.

“So there”, as a six year old child might say whilst stamping their foot and scowling.

But rest assured dear readers (as our Victorian scribes were wont to say), it was not all puncturing pomposity and winding up management. I was hard at work directing various bits and pieces, church services(live television whatever the subject matter is a glorious thing and greatly to be enjoyed), studio interviews where I sometimes worked with Geoff Robinson whom I knew well from studio days, and The Gardening Programme which I really enjoyed. It involved travelling around the country North and South and filming some glorious gardens and their creators. You may remember the programme it was called ‘Dig This’ a title which I think was bestowed by it’s original director Clive Cockburn a musician of some renown. (Clive Cockburn and The Avengers). We were still living in the 70’s drifting over into the eighties so Dig This was a Zeitgist title and gave the show a feeling of lightness.

Also we had a fully developed garden at Avalon at the rear of the studio block and we also used that to record many programmes so we could ‘stockpile’ for emergencies.The Outside Broadcast Unit was used for those recordings. It was an easy gig and the only people who panicked whilst recording it were some of the ‘A’ types (you know, those psychologically superior types who ‘earned’ their ratings by talking loud and declaring about everything ad nauseam).

“What fools these mortals be”.

When I first used the Avalon garden I was presented with an opportunity to play a little joke on the stuffed shirts in the department.

We started recording at 9am and were expected to have five programmes in the can by 5pm. Programmes were 30 minutes each in duration.

And off we went. I can’t stress too much how easy it was. An experienced crew, all friends from my operational days, and myself took to it with a vengeance. By 2pm we had five shows in the can and the OB Unit packed up and garaged at it’s base just around the corner. Even my rather right wing National Party type director’s assistant was moved to say to me. “You do know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

When the delegation arrived from the department about 2.30 pm to check on our progress they were more than non-plussed to find an empty site and no sign of crew.

Eventually they caught up with me in the cafeteria having a ciggie and a paper cup of the less than delicious instant coffee on offer. Having a yarn with the crew who were in on the joke. To their stuttering enquiries I could only reply in my best ‘B’ type manner. “Oh, it was a good day and we got lucky” or something approximating those words.

I never heard too much after that about psychological types.

That battle was won but the war dribbled on.

For the rest of that year (1980) I worked on Dig This alternating with Church services and studio interviews for People Like Us a religious magazine type programme for God botherers. Some cynic in the dept had dubbed it People LIKE Us. A fitting piece of black humour for a humourless half hour of do gooding TV. I do have to say though that my views on that matter have softened over the years and I am not so quick to judge people and their motives. “Thanks be to God?” Well, I wouldn’t go that far.

It was a busy year for me. I suppose I must have clocked up 50 or 60 gardening programmes plus church services etc. A solid grounding in film and TV direction which gave me increased confidence in my own abilities.

Two Dig This productions stand out.

The first was at the Wairarapa home of Paddy Borthwick and his wife whose name unfortunately escapes me after all this time. They had retired to Gladstone in the 1940’s, I think, and had built there a lovely two storey stone house and over the years had created a ten acre garden and walled fruit orchard which included avocado trees. Of course being not short of a few bob they had the services of a full time gardener who had his own cottage on the property. ‘Paddy’ had inherited the Borthwick Meatworks Empire from his father in 1922 so I guess he was well shod. But they were lovely people to deal with. We spent a week there and shot about 60 Rolls of film. There was lots to see and shoot. Richard Williams from Hawkes Bay was our cameraman and his then partner Barbara Free did the sound. Richard was a ‘stringer’ cameraman who worked out of Hawkes Bay and covered the east coast under contract to TV1. Just the other night I saw his name on a Country Calendar episode so he is obviously still in harness. A lovely photographer and a great bloke to work with. His partner Barbara was also a real trooper and knew her stuff.

Richard was also a good negotiator and on his way down to Avalon to pick up some film stock he had spotted a small airfield wth some choppers amongst the fixed wing planes. So we dropped in there on the way up to Gladstone and he made a deal with a chopper pilot to drop in to Borthwick’s front lawn at 3pm that day and lift us all up to do some aerial footage. Pure gold for a film editor. The pilot said be ready at 3pm and he could give us 15 minutes. It cost 35 dollars and Richatd signed a cheque. Can’t imagine that happening in our current user pays Rogergnome society. Great footage which made the programme look very sexy. It may have been partly responsible for the production winning an award for best speciality programme later in the year. The one and only time it won in it’s screen history.

Oh! Those ‘B’ type personalities, they are not playing the game properly.

When we returned to Avalon I told the producer we had hired a helicopter for the shoot and I hoped that was alright. I swear he turned s slightly green colour and I waited a few seconds, so I could relish his reaction, before I let him off the hook. I think he had visions for a moment of being hauled before the Obergrüppenfuhrer and suffering a Hitlerian dressing down.

When I say ‘Producer’ I mean it in the loosest sense. The production was organised between the Presenter and director. The Producer had virtually no involvement but the requirements of the corporation were that a producer’s credit must be on the end of the programme.

The presenter Eion Scarrow was well known in gardening circles and had contacts across the country. He would contact the gardeners he wanted to feature and arrange a day for us to turn up. It was that simple.

Another gardening mini epic that I enjoyed very much was filming at the Pukeiti Rhododendron Trust Gardens in New Plymouth and also at the home of the Mathews family who were the co-founders of the trust in the 1930’s. They had a wonderful 10 acre garden also where we filmed for three days. A director and cameraman’s delight. In post production we used some great music to highlight marvellous landscaping and gorgeous flora. Pink Floyd, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Mozart and Schubert featured. The Cameraman was Peter Hudson AKA Rocky and sound by John Hagen. I remember we laughed a lot (I wonder why?) and had a wonderful time. Glory Days.

We were spoiled people I suppose.

Here’s a little story featuring Eion Scarrow.

One morning in New Plymouth we were loading the cameravan for the day’s shoot. It was December 8 and the year was 1980. Suddenly Eion rushed out of the motel and called out “Ringo Starr has been shot in New York. I just heard it on the radio.”

Talk about fake news!

Next time I will be writing about 1981 and the ‘Producer’ training course in Christchurch I was ‘coerced’ into attending. And a surprising phone call from Avalon during the course.

Bless everyone in the North and East of New Zealand who are having a time of heartbreak and despair.