Interview with Darrol Blake by Dave Welsh on Tuesday the 21st of September 2010

Dave Welsh: Okay, this is an interview with Darrol Blake on Tuesday the 21st of September 2010, for the Britain at Work Project, West London, West Middlesex. Darrol, I wonder if you'd mind starting by saying how you got into this whole business.

Darrol Blake: Well, I'd always wanted to be the man who made the shows, be it for theatre or film or whatever, and this I decided about the age of eleven or twelve I suppose, and at that time I happened to win a scholarship to grammar school, in West London, in Hanwell, and formed my own company within the school, I was in school plays and all that sort of thing, so my life revolved around putting on shows. Nobody in my family had ever been to university, so I assumed that when I got to sixteen I was going out to work. I didn't even assume I would go into the sixth form or anything. So when I did get to sixteen I wrote around to all the various places that I thought might employ me. Ealing Studios were going strong at that time, Harrow Coliseum had a rep. The theatre at home in Hayes closed on me. I applied for a job at Windsor Rep, and quite by the way applied to the BBC, and the only people who replied were the BBC, and they said we have vacancies for postroom boys, office messengers, and Radio Times clerks. So I thought, 'how dare they!' and was out of work for three weeks after I left school.

DW: And this was roughly?...

DB: Oh 1953 we're talking about. 1953. And so eventually I answered the BBC thing and went up to a building near Broadcasting House, and was interviewed, and got a job as it happened in Lime Grove Studios, which had been taken over by the BBC at that time. Well, taken over in 1950. This is autumn of '53, and for a few months I was what turned out to be a messenger at reception, so you would receive... a bell would ring in your little room and you'd leap out of there and take someone like Adrienne Corri or whoever up to see a director. It was the most extraordinary building because it had been a film studio. It had... what's the word... gradually grown, so it was a complete mess as a building, but those few months gave me the knowledge of that warren and I knew the building like the back of my hand which was very useful later. And then what had happened was that the first bit of Television Centre had been built, what was known and still is known as the Scenery Block. The rest of the site was just the ruins of the White City Exhibition. There was nothing there at all, and the design department had moved out of Lime Grove and into the Scenery Block as had quite a few others, but it was basically the design department. And I'd always built model theatres and sets and things like that, so there was an interest, and because they were setting up anew in Television Centre, they bought a machine that printed all the studio plans and drawings for the workshops and things, and they wanted someone to work it. So I applied for that and got it, and I did that officially from the beginning of January '54 until my national service fell due which was the end of '55. But for the last three months of that time, my replacement had appeared already, so I was free to attach myself to a working designer, and worked on Quatermass 2...

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DW: Nigel Neale's...

DB: Yes, yes indeed, Nigel Neale. Tom Neale as he was known. And also a series of programmes called Music For You which was a sort of design plum in those days, because it had bits of operas, and bits of ballets, bits of this and bits of that. And that happened to be produced by the wife of the head of the design department, so it was a design plum, which the man I attached myself to, Stephen Taylor, designed. So I had this good grounding as it were, in studio work, and then went off to national service in the RAF. Volunteered for Cyprus, Singapore, and Gibraltar and all the trouble spots and got sent to Epping. Well it was North Weald actually, North Weald a fighter base, but I always say Epping because it gets a laugh. But it was at the other end of the Central Line, as you are well aware, so I was back in the studio whenever Stephen Taylor had anything interesting on the floor, and one would have weekends off anyway. What I was doing was, I was a fighter plotter and we were based at North Weald as I say, but our working place was Kelveden Hatch I think I can talk about it now since it has tours around it. It was a secret establishment in a dummy hill. And two hundred of us would disappear into this hill, every watch change, and it was like something out of a Bond film, it really was. It was supposedly the brain centre of the London area in terms of defence. But we did a lot of crosswords, at least I did, and I was back in the studios, as I say, whenever Stephen had anything interesting. It was very boring, but I managed to start another drama group and produced a play and did all the things I would do anyway. And then, one of the advantages of doing national service was that if you were employed before you went into national service, the company that employed you had to take you back afterwards, which was very fortunate, and so I came back into the BBC design department at the beginning of 1958, and was instantly working as an assistant designer for one or two people . And then, I can't remember how soon it was, but quite soon, I was put in a little group called SDU which was the studio design unit. And the four of us were responsible for all the chores of tv. Which were in those days, women's programmes, talk shows, 'What's My Line?' 'Panorama', all the things that had the same set every week, with some variations, and they were all over the place. I mean some days I was doing three shows a day in Riverside, in Lime Grove, in the Television Theatre, which is better known perhaps as The Shepherds Bush Empire. Because the Television Centre as a studio didn't operate until 1960, although all our offices were there of course. And the women who produced the women's programmes in the afternoon knew that I wanted to be a director, so they let me direct some little films and some live shows, bless them, and that gave me a start, but I was still officially a designer for quite some years. And then I worked with a man called Ned Sherrin who was extraordinary and a talent spotter, and what he really wanted to do was big musicals, but he got stuck with 'Tonight' and sort of talk shows and things like that, and because he was so successful with That Was the Week That Was, they let him do the odd musical, and that's how we met because I was designing those, doing the sets. And, to backtrack a bit, I did fill in for my flatmate Ridley Scott on 'That Was the Week...' once or twice, and I did the whole of 'Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life,' which we did on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, as a designer. And we were walking down the road one day Ned and I, and he said, 'Well, I've asked for you for the autumn again.' So I said, 'Oh, not as designer. If I don't make the jump into being a director I'm going to be a dustman or something! I'm very old, I'm 27!' And he said, 'Oh yes, mmmm, okay.' And a piece of paper

2 went up very high in the BBC, landed on the head of design's desk, and it said you will loan Darrol Blake to Ned Sherrin for six months. And suddenly I was directing the pilot of BBC3 which was the third attempt at the satire bit, you know. We're now in '65. And I directed that every week for six months, live on a Saturday night. And after that, you can do anything, and we had unrehearsed chats, sketches, musical numbers.

DW: When you say do anything, can you say a little bit about the nature of that. The demands at that time.

DB: Well, being live in front of anywhere between five and ten million people concentrates the mind wonderfully. And so we would go on the air, obviously with a rehearsed show, but parts of it were unrehearsed deliberately, and you never really knew what was going to happen, but one learned to cope. That's really what I mean in that you've done all the things you do with any show, talked to the designer, the choreographer, whatever, and put the show together, and rehearse it on camera during the day. But then you go on the air and I think my third or fourth week, Ken Tynan said that word on a live show, and we had about five and a half million audience I think at that point. The following week we had ten million, because people expected rude words. They didn't get them of course.

DW: So that's the way to get your audiences up!

DB: And then, what happened after that? Because of doing that, as I say I had the reputation of being able to cope with anything in a live studio, and Ned went off to the movies, to make movies, wrongly as it turned out. The BBC hierarchy decided to go round again with the Saturday evening satire bit without Ned, and we had a producer who'd never done anything like that before, and I was the director again and anyway it was a very, very sad series called The Late Show, which ran its course but was put into the ground by the press. And after that I did one or two one-offs as a director. One of them was... this is leaping ahead a bit... something called Our World. An extraordinary man called Aubrey Singer who was Head of Science Features in the BBC decided he was going to do the first ever live global television programme hosted by the BBC, and he went up to the controller of channel 1 and said who's your best director? That was Michael Peacock, and he said to me, 'Frankly Darrol, I hadn't got a clue. I didn't know what name to say, then I thought: who's used to chaos? Oh yes, Darrol.' So I found myself preparing for the first ever, live global television programme. He had spent eighteen months on it, I came on for the last three, and the man who'd been my boss in the design department volunteered himself as the designer, and the Beatles wrote All You Need Is Love for it and did it live from Abbey Road. The Vienna Boys Choir sang the opening number with the Vienna Philharmonic accompanying them, composed by George Delerue, the wonderful French film music guy, and it was like that. And it was organised to happen live all round the world, I mean babies were born on cue in Mexico and Denmark and things like that. It was the most extraordinary programme. We were going to have four to five days in the studio to prepare for it. We'd just got in to the studio and the chap who was

3 in charge of all the technical bit of it, which was enormous, went into Aubrey Singer and said, 'I can't get anything beyond Prague'. And Aubrey said, 'What do you mean?' So he said, 'I don't know what I mean, but I can't get anything beyond Prague.' It turned out of course, that the six day war had happened, and the Russians had decided that the BBC was pro-Israel rather than Egypt, as they were, and pulled out. So just as we were going into the studio we had a gap. We resisted the temptation to call it our half-world or our demi-monde, or whatever. And so there was Aubrey on the phone to Mexico or wherever saying, 'You have another thirty seconds!' So the whole thing was stretched to cover the gap. But anyway, we went on live, and it was a two hour programme and it was wonderfully exciting. And about three months later we all gathered and watched the recording. It was very boring! I mean the audience probably didn't realise that babies being born on cue in Denmark and Mexico and dancers in streets in Spain, and people fishing off the coast of Spain, it was all live, it was all happening on cue from me in London. You know, it was quite quite bizarre, the whole thing. Nowadays of course, it's ‘so what?’ But at that time it had never been done.

DW: It was a big milestone in...

DB: ...television history, absolutely, yeah. And then, having spent all my life up until that point in a television studio, I wanted to make films, so somebody I had known earlier, was by then head of music and arts, Humphrey Burton, and I saw an advertisement on the board for a producer's job in music and arts. And I happened to see Humphrey in the corridor, and he said, 'Oh! Yes, great idea. It's closed, but put it in anyway.' And I got a job as a producer in music and arts without even having to sit a board which was quite extraordinary.

DW: What was the normal procedure then?

DB: Oh you would be interviewed by four or five people for a designer's job, for any job at the BBC.

DW: Quite tough interviews?

DB: They could be, yes. Especially if you were aiming rather higher than they expected. Yes, there'd be someone from Personnel, there'd be the head of department perhaps, and the producer of the various programmes. But of course in those days those were staff jobs, and once you were in you were there. But at this point - sorry, I'm leaping about rather - at this point I was under contract, under three year contract as a designer, and so... I think it was about to run out... anyway, I was given a job as a producer, and taught myself to make films for this magazine programme that went out on a Saturday edited by a woman called Lorna Pegram who had been one of the women who gave me unofficial jobs as a director back in

4 women's programmes years before. And there were a whole bunch of us really who made films for this magazine programme that went out on Saturdays which was supposed to be a topical arts magazine, in other words if there was a big film opening then you did an interview with the director or you know... big art exhibitions, a whole big piece about the painter or whatever, architects, all sorts. An arts magazine. But the thing about that was that it was the first weekly programme in colour, because we were on BBC2 and BBC2, as you know, was the first channel in colour. So we had lovely problems with the film labs, because they had never been required to put out colour in three days notice, or a week's notice. Technicolour for instance, you expect a first print from Technicolour after three months work or something, you know, I mean not next week! So that was a real learning curve for them, and for us of course. It was quite odd actually, going into colour, because people had to be specially made up for the cameras, you know, and the cameras had to be lined up for a whole hour before you recorded or went on air or whatever. They were all very sort of reverential for these wretched things you know (laughs). And so if you were doing an interview programme, you'd have the people in front of the camera, and they'd decide how to paint them or not paint them, and you'd have a voice test in the normal way. Then you'd have to take them away and go and have a drink for an hour, and of course, very often people's faces had changed colour by the time they came back to the studio to actually do the show! But after a while it all calmed down and it was just like any other television show. It was quite difficult to... if you were doing a drama or a drama extract as we quite often were, making anything look dirty or decrepit was very difficult in colour, because whenever you put it on the screen it looked glamorous, after being in black-and-white forever. So that was quite difficult. Then, I did that for three years, virtually running round the world really, making films - Mexico just before the games, and doing interviews with architects, and writers and actors and that sort of thing. And various other places doing little films. Because it was a magazine programme very often you'd just have two items in it, perhaps, twenty minute films, but it was magazine fodder really, not one-offs. And then I decided... it must have been at the end of the '60s, to get into drama. Wrote to somebody I'd worked with as a designer, and he wrote back to my amazement, saying, 'I've been watching your career with interest. Nothing for you at the moment, but keep in touch.' I happened to see him about a fortnight later in the bar and he said, 'Ah, there you are. I've got something for you.' And suddenly I was doing a Doomwatch which was the hit of the year as it were, this was the second series, the first series was a great success. And words like 'pollution' and 'environment' and things came into the language, which people had never heard before, you know. Do I need to explain what Doomwatch was?

DW: Yes

DB: Oh right. It was a drama series in fifty minute episodes, and it was a fictional group of scientists who were investigating occurrences that were threatening Britain. It was a bug that ate plastic, the rats were getting bigger and more prolific, and things like that. Each story had a different subject, but this crack team of scientists rushed in and solved it of course... in fifty minutes flat. That was my beginning, and I did about five, actually six of those I suppose, and then once there I didn't stop for two years. I mean I was doing Onedin Line and Paul Temple, Shadow of the Tower.

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DW: Can I ask why you wanted to go into drama, what it was attracting you about that, was it because it was growing as a new...?

DB: Well no, all the other bits and pieces had been a stepping stone towards drama, because don't forget my formative years were in the late '40s, early '50s, and that's when everybody went to the movies. And a little ironic touch which I'd forgotten was that the films that I remember particularly were made in Lime Grove. The Margaret Lockwood 'Wicked Lady' and all that sort of stuff, you know the Gainsborough shockers, melodramas were all made in Lime Grove. So the fact that I went to work in Lime Grove at age 16 was an extraordinary thing to me, and it still is. And so, I was always working towards the drama. Do you want to know something about the buildings?

DW: Yes

DB: Well, as I think I said earlier, the Television Centre gradually grew around me, because when I first encountered it it was just the little scenery block, which most of the television service was in at that time, except the news division, that was still up at Alexandra Palace. And everybody was in the centre, and then gradually they built the rest, and TC3 was the first studio to be opened in 1960, and gradually the others appeared, came on-line, and...

DW: 'Cos it was kind of a building site wasn't it, for most of the time...

DB: It was, it was, it was. When we were first in there, as I think I said, the rest of the site was the remains of the White City Exhibition. I'm not quite sure when it was actually, was it '04 or '24, 1904 or 1924?

DW: '04

DB: I thought it was, yes. Well, for instance, there was a vast iron tank in the middle of the grounds, that was a lake. And it was rusting and old and empty sort of thing, and dotted about there were extraordinary facades of pavilions, which had been the Mexican Pavilion, the Indian Pavilion or whatever. Incredible, all rotting and falling apart of course, and quite a few people used them as locations for BBC drama to film in, you know. And you could have bonfires out there, you could set light to them, you could do whatever, because it was all our back garden, you know. But Lime Grove went on, then Riverside went on, churning out programmes. I think the big change came in 1964 when the BBC started BBC2. That's when

6 it began to change and everybody went onto 24 hour manning, and so as a designer you never saw the same prop man twice. Because he was on the night shift, or he was on the day shift or whatever, and you never met again. You'd select the props for a particular programme and then somebody else would bring them into the studio, because of the shift pattern. And in order to service the two channels the BBC took on another two dozen designers for instance. Most of them had some sort of experience in the theatre or art school or whatever, and they were brought together under the tutelage of a man called Stephen Bundy who was a wonderful old television designer. And they were called Bundy's Babes, and they came on-line after that, I don't know how long it was, whether it was 3 months or 4 months or whatever this course, but I remember they were over in what was the canteen block, and it was sort of the upper floor of the canteen block which at that stage wasn't a canteen. And they gradually fed into the system. I enjoyed working at Riverside Studios for instance, in Hammersmith, because it was just two studios, a canteen, dressing rooms and a few offices, but it was away from the hierarchy, it was away from the front office, as they say. And you could sit out on the river side at lunchtime, and we did a lot of happy shows there. I was only ever in 2 because the stuff that I did was sort of modest, but all the big stuff was in Studio 1, so you'd have a big light entertainment show going on in there, or Maigret, or a big drama. The Age of Kings, which was a series of Shakespeare plays which Peter Dewes directed, so there were men in armour coming into the canteen, and I remember Sean Connery sitting in chain-mail in the canteen. He was Hotspur I think in Henry lV. And it was a very happy place, as was Lime Grove of course, although a most bizarre building as I said before. And gradually these places were let go. The television theatre eventually was a rock venue or whatever. And I went freelance in, when was it, 1970 I suppose, oh yes, that's right, I had to go freelance to get from the arts features where I was making things to get into drama. So I gave up my contract, and went freelance as an “anybody's” type director. As I say, the first two years were in drama series at the BBC, then I was out of work for a bit. I'd married an actress, so she knew a bit about being out of work. That wasn't a great shock to her. And then I went to Thames, at short notice on a kids' thing, and stayed there for two years doing a lot of drama and Rainbow and various other things.

DW: Where was that based?

DB: Teddington. Thames Television was split in two in those days. It had studios in Euston Road which were where they did the Thames news, and the sort of actuality, the news type programmes, interview programmes, things like that. And then they had sort of two and a half studios at Teddington, where they'd do all the drama and big light entertainment and stuff like that, and Rainbow. And I did three plays, yes, three plays for Joan Kemp-Welch who was producing Armchair Theatre and Armchair Thirty, and various kids' things, drama and, as I say, Rainbow. And that lasted for about two years, with the odd gap. And, where are we now, '75 say.

DW: Could you tell us the difference between a producer and a director? The basic distinction between the two.

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DB: Yeah, right okay. A producer is somebody who is commissioned by the broadcaster to make a programme. It may be his idea, it may be somebody elses idea. It may be a writer's idea, or it might be a series which is already running but the producer... the buck stops there. He hires the director, the writer, the blah blahblahblahblah, and he is responsible for funding it and balancing the books and stuff like that. And the director is responsible for casting it, if you're talking about drama, with consultation with the producer, and directing the rehearsals and directing the thing in the studio or on location. I mean the director actually puts it on the screen. So you get a duff director and perhaps you get a duff delivery, you know. A director cannot save a bad script. But a director can improve a good script...

DW: Deliver

DB: With the producer looking over his shoulder all the time, which is sometimes, mostly a happy experience for me anyway, but on occasions it's not.

DW: So producers can be quite dictatorial?

DB: Well, yes, yes, but it depends on if you've had proper discussions before. Very often one is hired at the last minute and the script is a fait accompli, but if the producer is doing his job properly then he's had a number of meetings with the writer and perhaps there's been one or two or three drafts of the script before the director arrives. Sometimes you are there in time to have some input into the script. Some detail or other. But usually, as I say, you are hired rather late in the day, and it's a sort of fait accompli. You have to start casting and talking to the designer and the lighting man and so forth and preparing for the production, either in the studio or out on location. You have a support team of course, there's a first assistant, location manager, and he has an assistant which in the theatre is called an ASM. In the theatre ASM is just a stage manager, in television it's called a floor manager, assistant floor manager.. And of course there's a call boy, or call person which marshals everybody. But it varies, I mean sometimes you do a play which has four people in it, and sometimes you have forty or four hundred. The team, for quite a long time in the '70s the BBC didn't increase the size of the team, so you knew there were four of you. The PA was the continuity girl, my assistant, plus the floor manager, his or her assistant, coping with an enormous daily schedule, on location.. And gradually they realised that people were having nervous breakdowns, jumping off buildings and things, and gradually increased the number of people who were put together to produce these things.

DW: So this was a time of... from the time you entered the BBC... this was a time of great innovation and creativity.

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DB: It was, I was so lucky, yes. And of course when I first went in in 1953, there was only one channel. There was only the BBC. Television was BBC. Nothing happened other than that. And of course there were times when it wasn't on the air, I think it shut down for an hour at 6 o'clock or something, you know. And then of course ITV started at the end of '55, and one sixth of BBC staff disappeared off to start up the various companies, all of which has now disappeared of course, because ITV is now one company. I mean Granada, Yorkshire, London Weekend, have all disappeared. So that's now one company, but at that time it meant that the way was clear for the youngsters to climb the ladder, because various people above us had gone off to start the other production companies. So yes, the mid-'50s, I was, as I say, just so lucky to go in at that time, because a) it was all new what was being done, and b) there was a ladder available. The BBC had what was known as a Staff Association which one had to join and contributed to. I don't remember it resembling any kind of union, but that was what it was. It was the staff union as it were, you know. Then I suppose in the '60s I wanted to spread my wings a bit, so my flatmate was doing commercials before breakfast, and so he'd joined the ACTT, and quite a lot of us in the design department joined the ACTT because you had to be a member to work in ITV and to do...

DW: A closed shop...

D1B: Yeah, and to do commercials and work in film studios and things. So that was all very protected, I didn't moonlight on commercials or anything, but did go freelance, as I say, in 1970. The first thing I did was a new half-hour film for London Weekend, and by then of course, I was a member in good standing, and remained a member although I didn't... I occasionally would attend a union meeting when I was in Yorkshire or Granada in Manchester or whatever. I don't remember attending very many in London, but there was a producer/director's section which I went to a few meetings of, but that was so different from the rest of the union. I mean you'd have a meeting say, in Yorkshire Television, and most of the people in the meeting were ready to strike or whatever. And then somebody at the back, usually a director or producer, would say, 'Yes, but if you do that, this, this, this, and this,' and they'd all go, 'Ohhh yes,' Being a producer or director is a very strange position anyway, because you're management in a way, you know. You're not hiring people that are actually in the building obviously, but you're hiring others, and bringing them in and so forth. Very often you're using freelance technicians. So in a sense you are an employer and the only thing you want to do is get the show on anyway. And also, almost exclusively, we're passing traffic. If you're a freelance director then you're there to do a specific contract, and move on to somewhere else.

DW: The trade unions had become quite important within the BBC

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DB: Very powerful, particularly at Yorkshire Television, I shall never forget, I had two strikes in one day! I was doing an Emmerdale, and the electricians had become very powerful, the ETU. In fact they were running the studio, I mean it was pathetic. They whipped up everybody, all the technicians, to a combative degree. It's a bit complicated, but for technical reasons, what was supposed to be a location shoot was actually being done in the building, while another episode was actually in the studio. I was shooting hospital scenes in a corridor in the studio. Got in in the morning, and my first assistant said, 'They're all in the canteen!' So I said, 'What do you mean?' he said, 'I don't know what I mean, but they're all in the canteen!' And they were on strike. They'd discovered that they weren't going to get mileage. That was the camera crew. So I had nothing to do except wait for somebody else... so the producer went in and sorted it out with the management and then they came back to work. Then there was some contretemps in the afternoon between the chief cameraman and the chap who was pushing his dolly. And then they were all out again. So we were sitting in the canteen at four o'clock. This was a Friday, and you just had to finish by 5.30 on a Friday, all those episodes. So we got back, shooting these hospital scenes at about 5.15 I think. And I did about four shots in fifteen minutes. That's it, that's a wrap. But as I say, the electricians whipping up everybody else, had got very powerful at that time. The management spoke to the ETU headquarters, and said, 'This has become impossible, what can we do?' And the ETU headquarters said, 'Sack 'em!' They actually said, 'Sack 'em!' so they did, and it all calmed down and the gas was taken out of the balloon, but it was very nasty for quite a long time. They put themselves in charge of safety on the set. I'd never heard the phrase until recently, ‘health and safety’, it's become a joke now. It wasn't until near the end, which was '02 for me professionally, I was up doing Brookside, and we finished the day’s shoot and went back into the office, and my first assistant was there and surrounded by paper, and I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'I'm doing a risk assessment for tomorrow,' so I said, 'Well, we're in one of the houses tomorrow,' he said, 'Yes, but you've got pots bubbling on the stove,' he says, 'health and safety, health and safety.' and that was the sort of beginning of it, that was ten years ago now, but I'd never heard the phrase until then.

DW: ???????

DB: Well, in a sense that's the end of the story getting into drama, 'cos I then did one-shot plays and drama series and things, and then felt the urge to do some writing and wrote a play which was done on stage, and I didn't earn any money for nearly a year. And my ex- agent rang up and said, 'I've put you up for Crossroads' and I said, 'How dare you?' put the phone down, walked away, and thought, 'I haven't earned any money, this is October, I haven't earned any money since January. My children were on free school meals and things, and so I picked up the phone and said, 'Oh, okay, okay', and before I could say Jack Robinson I was in front of Jack Barton at ATV, and I did a patch on Crossroads for about three months, and I could do that sort of thing standing on my head, so they asked me back and back, as always happens, but as soon as my name appeared on that, all the others rang up: Doctor Who which was a sort of cheap little show in those days, and Coronation Street and Emmerdale, and all the soaps, and that's really the end of the story for twenty years, I mean I just ran around the country doing those, and things that you won't have heard of which were soaps at the time. A very nice one called The Cedar Tree up at ATV, Elstree,

10 which was sort of posh finite serial, it did about two or three seasons I think, you know, in the afternoon. I did Take the High Road in Glasgow, which was quite nice, but you know, run-of- the-mill television I did. And the last three visits to Brookside, which was '02, it just got uncomfortable. When I first went up there Phil Redmond was the producer, and very sparky, bright, and talented, and there was a cast, and a script editor and a writer and you got out and did it. By the time I finished there were assistant producers, and associate producers, producers, a whole script department, all telling the director how to do it. I'd been a director for forty years by then. I thought, 'I don't need this!' and so I rang my agent and said, 'No more soap.' The phone didn't ring for a year, and half-way through the year I thought, 'I've retired!' (laughs). And I was sixty-five, and I'd arranged for money to fall on my head when I was sixty-five, there were various endowments and investments, savings and things. So we got through the first year and the second year, and so it's gone on. My wife still works occasionally thank goodness, so we're surviving.

DW: Would you say then that a characteristic of television now is all these additional layers of people involved? Is that what's changed?

DB: Oh yes, yes. When I were a lad... and certainly when I was first a director, the director was king. The producer or director was king, and whatever department you were working for had given you that script or had given you that show, and you got on and did it! And of course if you were doing drama, it was all recorded anyway, and edited, then you'd show it to the head of department. You know, you might have your wrist slapped for something or other, but it was only minor stuff. But that rarely. And it gradually changed, a) the producer became the king, and that is understandable if you're doing a soap, because the directors are sort of passing traffic anyway, you know, there might be six of you working in sequence. The producer is the one who carries the continuity of it all, so he has the final credit. And then of course, the explosion in the soaps has been such that it becomes an impossible job for one man, there might be one man there as a sort of figurehead, but I mean there are script editors, assistant editors, assistant producers, associate producers, you know, one of them takes over the money, one of them takes over the design, another one takes over editing the scripts, you know, because it's now so vast, the soaps, that there is an executive producer, or a top producer as it were, but it's much more about , you know a sort of committee game now than it ever was before.

DW: And would this apply to news programming?

DB: I would imagine so, though I've never ventured into that area. I mean I've done documentaries, but not worked in news divisions, so I wouldn't know, but in that instance you have to have an editor, you have to have somebody where the buck stops, and somebody who makes an editorial decision about what goes in and what doesn't, and which order they are, that sort of thing, so there must be a series of them, obviously there isn't the same man every day.

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DW: Well I suppose, the inevitable question, just reflecting on the BBC then and now.

DB: Well, I wouldn't recognise it now. I've not been there, I've not actually worked for the BBC since 1990, when I did eight months on Eastenders, but I've visited once or twice for various reasons, and from what people say it's just frighteningly different in that nobody will make a decision and it's all... decisions that are made are sort of hedged about. I don't know, I really shouldn't say anything because I've really not been there. It's second or third hand, so I don't know.

DW: Okay, thank you very much.

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