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[00:00:00] Sorry, I just tapped the table. And who tapped the table? It's a new game! A Mindless Wittering Production Running Up and Action All I knew was I wanted to try and understand the way the world works, the natural world. We explore because we are human.
[00:00:32] Science is the storytelling of our time. So me storytelling has always been the way to leave sorrow. Cut! Hello and welcome to Who Moved the Tortoise, a podcast about science and wildlife filmmaking. I'm Alex Hemingway. And I'm Kate Dooley.
[00:00:51] And as usual we're joined by someone from the world of science or wildlife television to talk about the film or TV show or other stuff that inspired them. This time we're talking to Peter Leonard, head of science and natural history at the National Film and Television School.
[00:01:06] After completing a chemistry degree from Kingston University in London, he started out at the BBC as a videotape operator working on pretty much every TV genre there is. He moved into directing and producing, working on a huge range of the BBC's best known programs
[00:01:21] from Crime Watch and The Sky at Night to Horizon. He headed up the BBC Science Development Unit and series produced before making the jump into education. But it wasn't his first aerial trial.
[00:01:32] He dropped a dead pig 30 metres off a crane into a pop-up swimming pool to see if a belly flop can kill you. Turns out it can. And he's interviewed a cosmologist flying his glider from a helicopter. Peter's choice for the film or TV show that inspired him
[00:01:46] is an episode of Channel 4 science series Equinox titled Prisoner of Consciousness. Oh, darling. Oh, really? Yes, I'm not interested in that. Can you tell me what this hell's wrong with me?
[00:02:23] I'm looking at a doctor who's never heard a word, never drunk anything, tasted anything, smelled something, anything at all. It's like being dead. I know. I've been blind the whole bloody time. I'm deaf. I know. What do you want to know about it? What's wrong?
[00:02:34] Exactly. Which part of the brain and how did it... It's called heropatica and kefalitis. It was a virus which nobody put there. It just got there and went to the brain. We don't know where it came from. How long has it been? It's been there about a year.
[00:02:49] Before we sort of get into the meat of the whole thing, first of all, thanks for inviting us here to interview you. Do you want to tell us a little bit about where we are and what your role is here?
[00:02:59] We're at the National Film and Television School, which is in Buckinghamshire in a town called Beckinsfield. It is a higher education facility. We do lots of diplomas and things, but we also do MA courses. The film school is probably best known for its work in the film industry.
[00:03:19] Most of the British film industry, cinematographers, directors, producers, editors have all been through this place. We also do 17 MA courses now, of which one is the directing and producing science and natural history. That's the course I lead here.
[00:03:38] So, we'd like to ask everyone first up, how difficult was it to choose something as your inspiration to talk about? Well, it was almost impossible.
[00:03:46] In fact, I didn't think that I would be able to find anything that's inspired me because I don't think that anything did inspire me to want to make science programming or TV at all, actually.
[00:04:00] I, in common with some of the other people that have been on this podcast, I sort of fell into it. I hadn't had an intention to go and make TV programs.
[00:04:11] And in fact, when I started working at the BBC, the first thing they did was to send you on a 10-week residential course. And there was, I don't know, 10 or 15 of us. It was a technical operations course.
[00:04:23] And all of these people had applied kind of five or six times and wanted to do it since they were nine years old. And if they hadn't given me the job, I wouldn't have reapplied.
[00:04:34] Having said that, when I arrived, it was like, you know, cheesy moment coming up, like coming home. You know, it was, I knew that this was absolutely what I wanted to do. So, back to your question.
[00:04:47] Was it hard? Yes, it was because I didn't, there wasn't a science film. There wasn't anything that made me think, right, I'm going to do telly. But the film that I've chosen, Prisoner of Consciousness, was probably, I think, the first sort of serious documentary that I remember watching.
[00:05:03] And I remember being kind of blown away by the content and the, what I would now call, access. And the fact that the people were, I thought, so eloquent about talking about something which really strikes at the core of who we are as people.
[00:05:20] We always give a kind of a date context to these things. And I have been struggling to find a definitive TX date for this, because there's a couple of... Well, I, being a professional, I looked as well. And I got August 1986.
[00:05:34] Do you want to paint a picture for us of who you were at that time when you watched it? Well, I think I was 20, so I would have been halfway through my slightly pointless chemistry degree.
[00:05:47] I was probably, like most people of that age, trying to work out who I was, what I was. I had a pretty unique religious upbringing. And I was kind of, had been for many years by that stage, sort of rejecting that.
[00:06:03] I think I watched it with my parents. So I would have been at home in the summer, holidays. And so the film kind of strikes at all of those things. It defines who we are. It demonstrates very clearly that there's nothing mystical about us as people.
[00:06:23] We are, to some extent, machines. If you break part of the machine, it's not going to work properly. And so humming around in the background, all of those things are interested me. And when I eventually got into television, what I wanted to do was to make documentaries.
[00:06:42] It wasn't that I wanted to make science documentaries, I wanted to make documentaries. So I suppose I've always been quite interested in what you might loftily call the human condition. In March 1985, the previously inactive virus of herpes simplex suddenly began to multiply inside his nervous system.
[00:07:02] It attacked and irreversibly damaged certain parts of his brain. The right temporal lobe, the frontal lobe, and in particular the left temporal lobe. All these areas became scarred and the holes filled up with fluid.
[00:07:21] After this almost fatal illness, physical health returned to normal, except for occasional seizures which take the form of belching. But clive is left with a dense and almost impenetrable amnesia. You're watching this where you come into the end of the second year of your degree.
[00:07:41] Is it a light bulb moment sitting and watching something like this, or is it just something that you watched and appreciated and enjoyed and is then percolating in your brain for a while? I think it's something that if I could have known what was going to happen,
[00:07:55] it would have been the kind of film that I would have wanted to have made. You mentioned briefly that I worked in development for a while in the Science Unit.
[00:08:03] I was tried for the whole of that time to try and get a series off the ground about being human. There was a BBC3 series, a drama about ghosts sharing a flat called Being Human. The working title for my What Makes Us Human series was Being Human.
[00:08:19] Maybe that was self-defeating. But so I suppose I've always been interested in who we are, what makes us work. So that was immediately fascinating. I was like many kind of precocious young people. I was convinced I was going to have a glittering career in medicine
[00:08:34] before I crashed and burned at A level stage and ended up doing chemistry. So I suppose I was also my sister as a psychiatrist. So maybe I was interested in that kind of thing anyway. It is a fascinating film.
[00:08:48] It's about somebody whose brain has an illness which destroys parts of his brain and leaves him in this kind of bubble of the present. So no memories, no real appreciation of anything other than what's happening right at that moment, give or take. And that is a kind of...
[00:09:06] If anybody's ever read Oliver Sack's book, The Man Who Stuck His Wife For A Hat, that is about all the kinds of things that can go wrong with the brain and their impact on us as people. And that is kind of fascinating.
[00:09:20] Another show I tried to get off the ground when I was at the BBC. There's a rehabilitation centre in Ely in Cambridge here, or at least there was, where people with brain trauma are rehabilitated.
[00:09:33] And I just wanted to make a doc series about the people and their experiences there. So it was always there knocking around. But it certainly wasn't the kind of, oh I know, I'll go and work in telly.
[00:09:47] The reason I ended up working in TV was because I was so bad at chemistry that I thought in my phone that I must get a job before people realise what a fraud I am. And I was always into photography and videoing bands at the Student Union
[00:10:03] and that kind of thing and writing. I saw a poster actually. Recruitment does work people. On the BBC it said, if you're graduating give auntie a call. So that was the BBC recruitment poster and I thought, yeah, that sounds cool. I'll do that. The arrogance of youth.
[00:10:19] And I went to the careers place and looked up all the jobs that they had on offer because they used to recruit annually back in those days. And I found this one which was called being a trainee recording operator
[00:10:32] which was working with videotape and editing it and doing all of that stuff. And I thought, well I'm over qualified for that and it sounds quite interesting. And anyway, I'll get in and then start making documentaries. It'll be a piece of cake.
[00:10:45] And I happened to bump into somebody I hadn't seen for a while and she said, what are you doing? And I said, I'm applying for this job at the BBC. And she said, oh I've got a friend who does that.
[00:10:56] And she said go and see her. I did. She said, read these books and they'll ask you these questions and you'll say that and they'll let you in. And it all happened. And I couldn't have been more surprised.
[00:11:08] But yeah, it was the best thing that I did but it was a complete fluke. And then immediately I bought a book published by BBC Training and it was the book of the trainee assistant producer course which used to run largely recruiting people from Oxbridge
[00:11:24] to be the next generation of geniuses. They had a book and it said in the back of the book they said, if you are serious about doing editorial work in broadcasting on no account take a technical job. And I thought, oh I've missed my opportunity.
[00:11:41] And I did for about 10 years. So I worked in post-production. I became a video tape editor and then I learned of it and did some actual editing. But no, I sort of, it's all been a bit of a shambles really. I'd imagine that learning editing
[00:11:55] and sort of developing that craft is hugely useful to what comes next for you though. Yeah it is. I mean, I felt extremely exposed when I started making content because I could make the pictures work and the films looked okay, which is probably half the battle, right?
[00:12:13] I felt terribly exposed on the editorial. I'd never been a researcher. I went in as an AP from nothing. So it's a little bit like in the army where medical students go into the army at the rank of major
[00:12:26] in that scale because I've been knocking around in television so my band was equivalent to AP Straight Producer so I went in as an assistant producer directing films. And it was a bit traumatic really because I didn't really know what I was doing. It's kind of busking.
[00:12:42] But as I say, make the pictures work. Everything else sort of follows. You can go away with a lot. So yeah and then they made me a producer and continued to shamble along in a fairly unplanned way really until I landed up in the science unit
[00:12:57] which was also a happenstance really. But that's where you stayed and that's where maybe you felt more like home again? Well, yeah. Well, I was working on Crime Watch being a reconstruction director which was fascinating and also slightly traumatic
[00:13:13] and I ended up working on a show with Jeremy Clarkson called Inventions That Changed the World. The exec on that was Michael Mosley who I worked with on a number of occasions. This was before he was a presenter. He was a very good exec. So we did that
[00:13:30] and then I did a thing about dinosaurs called The Truth About Killer Dinosaurs which was a little bit fast and loose and then we did a thing about Secrets of the Sexes it was about sexual dimorphism in human beings so what makes a man,
[00:13:47] what makes a woman from a kind of brain perspective? Michael was in that and then as I was finishing that I got a call from someone called Andrew Cohen who said, do you want to come and make a horizon?
[00:13:58] Now, at that time horizon was like the pinnacle of everything as far as I was concerned in the BBC it was the science documentary strand it was amazing so do I want to come and make a horizon? Of course I want to come and make a horizon.
[00:14:11] So I went there I started researching a program about mathematics which thank God fell over about the Riemann Hypothesis which is about how you can predict where primes are going to be so that turned out not to be a go and we made a thing about cosmology
[00:14:27] but Andrew had just got the job as editor of Horizon and he wanted to kind of put his mark on the series and he wanted to have people in to make films who hadn't done that kind of film before so Nicola Cook, myself, Dick Taylor
[00:14:40] were people who kind of started to make these horizons which was kind of a bit of a gentleman's club but not really before that time in a sense there were a lot of people who had made lots of films a bit like I am now
[00:14:54] but I was new then and did things differently and the reason that I enjoyed it and I think the reason that I was quite successful earlier on was because I didn't really understand the science so I kind of made these cosmology films
[00:15:07] and my approach was one of kind of incredulity really you know, you for real because it's largely made up as far as I can see I remember a wonderful contributor who I don't think made the cut and he was saying the thing with cosmology is it's all maths
[00:15:23] imagine this big fairy ball of maths and you kind of push it in one place and that all collapses and it all comes out the other side so you have to write a bit of maths to stick it back in and it's all just made like that
[00:15:35] and nobody knows what's going on really so yeah, that's cosmology for you it's all maths and it doesn't work I heard it here first people and then what prompted the jump here? Oh goodness, well, I saw an advert and I thought that sounds great
[00:16:07] I would love to teach on that course or lead that course and so I applied and they let me in again, you know, I don't know that I probably wouldn't have applied again had they not done it but it's been great I've been here two years
[00:16:20] and I've learned more about myself as a person and as a filmmaker I think than I did for most of the rest of my career really it's an interesting thing because you have to actually explain stuff properly to somebody that doesn't know what you're talking about
[00:16:34] you really have to kind of know what you're talking about because otherwise it's at best useless and at worst damaging if somebody came to me with a script early on and said can you have a look at this, what do you think?
[00:16:47] and I said oh well, the script needs tightening up and they said what do you mean? and I thought oh no, what do I mean actually and the truth was if they had left the script with me for a couple of hours I would have sorted it out
[00:17:00] but that's not what teaching is you know, you have to get people to learn and do it themselves so quite a lot of self reflection That's wonderful Are you here and you want to make films still? Well, I mean doing this job is a little bit like being
[00:17:16] being a serious producer or an exec What's wonderful from my perspective about this place is that there's always stuff going on very often television you're waiting for a commission but there's always new ideas we always have 20 films in production which are my students films
[00:17:32] they're only 10 minute films or 20 minute films but you're always working on stuff and it's always new and it's always different and so you're working although it's not in industry and it's not being broadcast you're still working on these films and these projects which is just amazing it's wonderful
[00:17:48] I'd rather be doing this than hanging around waiting for a big idea to kind of get the nod from Jack Bootle or someone similar I mean you very kindly gave us a tour just before we started recording and my overriding impression is what an exciting place to be
[00:18:15] and what a wonderfully inspirational place to learn your craft Yeah, it's great I mean it's amazing you should come everybody come I'm actually really tempted there's not much else going on at the moment No, that's the other side of the coin isn't it? No, it's a wonderful place
[00:18:32] because when you're doing your job you don't really have an opportunity to think about what you're doing When we were at the BBC I went to a... there was a series of lunchtime sessions where people would come and talk about stuff they'd made or whatever
[00:18:48] and someone turned up I can't remember his name I really wish I could I owe him everything I think in my career and he gave a talk about what he called vision systems which is the kind of the internal logic of the film
[00:19:02] the grammar that you decide to set for it He talked about a film he made where everybody he interviewed he interviewed them in a garden okay, so that's kind of one thing there was some presenter wandering around in a classic car
[00:19:17] It all sounds fairly standard stuff to us but at the time I hadn't thought about doing that with a film How do you make a film look as though it means it as though the person, the storyteller actually knows what they're doing and it's that
[00:19:31] if you've got interviews do them all in the same way if you're going to horizons and you're going to a series of American cities start each chapter with a city skyline for example light your interviews in a certain way use graphics in a way that has a coherence
[00:19:48] I made yet another film about cosmology we went to the perimeter institute in Canada and it's all slayed inside and it's slate because they write with chalk all these people with brains the size of planets they do their maths on the wall if they're thinking about it
[00:20:05] so I did all the graphics with chalk so it's that kind of thing and again, maybe being a little bit on the back foot when it comes to editorial at least I can make my films coherent and that's, that totally changed my attitude to making films
[00:20:21] just that happened to go I might not have gone sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't but that was it suddenly the penny drops oh okay and for making films like Horizon where you had pretty much free reign to make them in whichever way you want
[00:20:33] that was an absolute gift and then later when you're doing series producing you're setting the style for a series those are the kind of things you have to worry about and should think about when did you actually start this diary procedure
[00:20:46] was it his idea or was it yours? well I had noticed he started writing on bits of paper by the bed and it wasn't until about October last year that he began to use the diary and note down the time of day all the time
[00:21:04] it's a chronology of the day simply because he's in a constant state of thinking he's just woken up and won't acknowledge that he's been awake before even if he sees it in his own handwriting let's pull it back to the film now
[00:21:17] it's a film that is very shy of voice over in fact I don't think there's any so I think it would be helpful for us to give it some context I wonder if an interesting place to start actually given where we are and who we're talking to
[00:21:29] if you were presenting this film to your students how would you set the context for what they're about to watch? okay so this is a film that was made in 1986 and it's about a man called Clive Waring who was a renowned conductor and musicologist
[00:21:46] he was also a radio producer for Radio 3 and he specialised in early music and then one day in the mid 80s he became ill and he became severely amnesic couldn't remember what was going on and what had happened was that a virus, a cultural virus actually
[00:22:09] I hope he's simplex had crossed into his brain infected his brain and caused inflammation and parts of his brain to die and so eventually when he was saved from death he came back to being him and he couldn't remember
[00:22:28] anything really and seemed to live in this sort of five minute bubble and the film is looking at him trying to make sense of his condition and with big, big contributions from his wife it was a second relationship and they had been married for 18 months
[00:22:48] when he became ill so really it's her talking to him and also slightly weirdly to Jonathan Miller who turns up vaguely unannounced so it's really trying to work out what has happened to him and to demonstrate what's happened to him I suppose I want to ask you
[00:23:09] I think what might seem an awkward question and if it seems impudent or painful you must tell me at once so much of our personal identity is related to what we can remember and who we are in some sense is the sum of what we think we are
[00:23:25] and what we've been how hard is it to have a relationship with someone and retain a sense that it is him when he himself has got such an inadequate sense of his own extension backwards in time it sounds ludicrous to say so but as a person
[00:23:44] soul, whatever you want to call it his soul is unchanged his person is unchanged he's the same man, he's still my husband so it's an old fashioned film it's probably too long you kind of get what's going on quite quickly
[00:24:04] and they sort of demonstrate that in lots of different ways which ultimately I think ends up feeling quite intrusive but it's a fantastic example of you know, an observational documentary I think What do you feel worked really well knowing what you know now
[00:24:23] and what do you feel you would have done differently Well, I think what worked well were the observational parts so he's taken to various places he was a scholar at Cambridge and they go back there he's introduced to one of the choirs he used to conduct
[00:24:41] so what happens to poor old Clive is that he lives in the moment he doesn't remember what's going on he's in this constant nightmarish cycle of believing he's just woken up from this terrible kind of what he calls death and he keeps saying
[00:24:57] you're the first people I've seen you're the first human beings I've seen Although Clive had seen his wife earlier that morning he greeted her as if it was the first time in years It was like dying and being dead Not dead though But it feels like it
[00:25:19] I've never seen anything like that What's it like? What's it like when you're dead, you know? I haven't tried it, sweetie No, no, no It's like I've just woken up I've just tasted for the first time I've just seen for the first time And he writes this diary
[00:25:35] which is just heartbreaking and in its times it's 1025 woken up really woken up and then that's crossed off 1028 I've really woken up for the first time now and his diary is a series of these five minute entries about having really woken up and now I'm really
[00:25:51] and he keeps saying you're the first human beings I've seen the first human beings I've seen And when he sees his wife every time he sees his wife he's heartbreaking He seems to remember his wife Every time he sees her he thinks he's been separated from her
[00:26:02] for this kind of eternity of his lack of consciousness Funnily enough he can living in the moment for him means that he also has all his musical skills They take him to the hospital chapel where they've assembled his choir and there's an organ there
[00:26:19] and either his wife or someone else to act as says can you play the organ and obviously he was a scholar he's a music scholar of course he can play the organ and he says oh no, no I don't think so and then he says well maybe
[00:26:33] but certainly not the pedals or something he says that on one occasion So then of course he starts playing this Baroque music and it's kind of astonishing Have a go Go And he's almost surprised that he can do it and then he conducts the choir
[00:27:05] and I think for me that's probably the scene in the film that is astonishing jaw dropping and heartbreaking at the same time because he is completely back as Clive conducting this choir and they're complicated music and you can see it in his face he's kind of directing this
[00:27:28] you know you come in here then this happens and he's singing the piece himself and then it finishes and he turns around and sees his wife who's been there the whole time and bursts into tears and embraces her because he believes that he's never
[00:27:44] hasn't seen her for however long he's been out of action so you know those things I think work really really well I think the things that don't work very well from my lofty position as someone in the industry and you know 40 years later or whatever it is
[00:28:04] is the is Jonathan Miller Why? Why do you think the musical memory is there is something different about music it's very hard to say what it is people often refer to music as if it was a language well it's a communication for sure it's something that
[00:28:24] one person does for another and it brings about an effect but it's not like a language in certain very important ways for example when you speak of language it's possible to paraphrase it Jonathan Miller is everybody's favourite intellectual at least in the 80s
[00:28:44] he was part of the beyond the fringe people with a piece of cook and foot lights at Cambridge and he became a doctor and then he was sort of renaissance man he became a theatre and opera director and he seemed to be the person
[00:28:58] that you would wheel out to do kind of philosophy, stroke science and he just turns up and is from a modern perspective monumentally patronising throughout and what I would have done was actually what Jane Trees did 20 years later when she did a
[00:29:16] reboot of this which was to really do it from his wife's perspective because she was incredibly eloquent and really seemed to understand what was going on so I think it could have been something maybe with a little bit of commentary and maybe then just with
[00:29:32] his wife because it didn't need this kind of slightly paternalistic the musings of Jonathan Miller sprinkled throughout he does wear his intelligence sort of very heavily on his sleeve doesn't he we have to remember that this film is approaching 40 years old now so it was a different time
[00:29:52] but yeah I agree and actually I thought that the strangest moments of the interview between him and Deborah were where Deborah is actually asking questions of him, kind of seeking medical opinion from him which he seems to very happily go along with but it made me rather uncomfortable
[00:30:08] actually yeah me too I mean I also bear in mind I hadn't seen this film for a long time and so it was interesting for me to watch it because it wasn't you know human memory it wasn't quite as I remembered it
[00:30:20] it was a little bit more creaky I'm just bloody bored with the whole belly way it's been treated, it's been dead I never have any food, never have any drinks never have any taste, never have any food never have any connection with anything bloody terrible
[00:30:34] I know darling, I'm a consciously awake for the first bloody time I think it's like to be madman you're not though they are, they're behaving stupid people have been treating me, I haven't seen a damn thing the whole bloody time I know keep calm dad keep calm
[00:30:54] I've never seen anything like it in my life I know like being dead I've never had a little hang on cameras and the same bloody way, at the same time stupid, ridiculous bloody nonsense the first time I've seen anything I'm making a bloody camera
[00:31:10] and then there's a really awful part where they've gone to Cambridge and Clive Waring is getting you know slightly freaking out and he's saying why are all these people filming cameras and why are they here it's disgusting and you think oh should they have done that
[00:31:28] and they're making a point that he doesn't know what he should know but he doesn't but we know by then that he doesn't know and won't know I don't know at this stage how to see the next 30 years stretching ahead of us what will it be
[00:31:42] 24 hours after 24 hours of perseverating and agony for him and how do you see his future given that he still has the capacity to be a huge human being and through his music and through loving me but he can't do that all the time
[00:32:02] and there's quite a lot of time when he's alone and he's trapped in what he calls his hell on earth I don't know how to plan his future how to help him to make his life worth living making that film how do you end it
[00:32:20] because there is no ending for him or his wife and while the story is about him actually really it's his wife's story because she's the only one that gets any kind of ending from this she's just as much a prisoner as he is
[00:32:36] and the only way I think maybe they saw to end the film was her speaking with Jonathan Miller and posing a question which no one can answer which is well what do I do now Jane Tree's celebrated documentary filmmaker actually made a follow up to this
[00:32:52] in 2005 I think so 20 years later and tells the story of what did happen next and for Clive pretty much the same thing happened for the next 20 years and I think he's still alive so I'm assuming that he's continuing to live in this bubble his wife divorced him
[00:33:10] and went to live in America and tried to kind of rebuild her life she said that she'd call him from time to time and he was always very pleased to hear from her but she said you're going to come and see me soon but that was about it
[00:33:24] so eventually she said that she had a series of relationships which didn't work and she always felt she was looking for Clive and never found him and so she came back and they remarried he lives in the kind of permanent residential place which looks very nice
[00:33:40] he seems very happy and she sees him from time to time halfway through that film she's going to take him home and he's going to take her for a visit to her house and he's still saying human beings for the first time seems to be his mantra
[00:34:00] Deborah is saying to him do you know where I live and he's saying no no no no no no idea no idea and do you know where home is and he said home is yesterday which I think where there is one that's it his life is over
[00:34:20] was over in the mid 80s and he in some way recognises that I believe also that is there not a moment in that second film the more recent film where they ask him what his name is and he says his name is Clive Deborah Waring
[00:34:38] which is again very very moving and kind of quite indicative of how he sees his relationship with his wife they are one and the same he's not separable but I love how his wife says he's still Clive it's the Cliveness of Clive he's very much himself
[00:34:58] and it looks like he's quite a unique person anyway but that even removing his memories his personality is still there he's still Clive and that makes it more heart breaking doesn't it yeah and she was saying I think in the second film as well
[00:35:10] that he seems to know about things about marriage and our marriage but he has no recollection of the wedding he knows that he worked at the BBC but he doesn't seem to know what he did so again but it is human beings as machines if you like
[00:35:28] we're biological machines the reason we feel that we're so interesting is because we have this huge frontal lobe system which has enabled us to kind of navel gaze to some extent or what I once called consciousnessness so this idea of being able to look down on ourselves
[00:35:46] from above which is possibly the main difference there are no differences between us and other animals except we do everything much better than most of the others what I would also tell my students is that it's a science film but it doesn't have to be science E
[00:36:06] you can make science films about so many different things this would be one of them another thing I say to my students is go and have a look at the films that the doc students are making so we have a documentary course which is separate to ours
[00:36:18] saying why didn't you make that one or why didn't you make this one because it's a science topic you know there was a wonderful film that one of the doc students made about a woman who was having a baby and had been diagnosed as being schizophrenic
[00:36:34] and it was her it was called a letter to Ellie and it was her writing a letter to her unborn child and talking about the experience of hallucinations and what was going on in her mind and her hopes and fears for the future
[00:36:48] and the struggle as to whether she should keep taking her medication or not anyway, it's a wonderful film and you know we should have made it because that's science and that's one of the things that I'm very interested in in trying to persuade people
[00:37:02] is that science is so powerful all it is is a way of trying to understand things and so everything is science you know it's not a year 10 chemistry lesson it's the whole world and beyond do you think that's a common thread with science filmmakers is that we're curious
[00:37:20] and did you have a curiosity that was always there even as a child yeah I was curious as to how things worked I electrocuted myself several times by taking radios apart and things like that I wouldn't say that I was like a young Attenborough going out
[00:37:34] and classifying birds or whatever it is he did you know it wasn't that kind of curiosity well not everyone would take radios apart also with the fear of electrocuting themselves I wasn't bothered about that again having done it once no, I had
[00:37:48] I was friends with a boy who was very keen on that kind of thing as well so maybe some of that rubbed off there seemed to be a lot of ex-service telephones knocking around if you hooked up these telephones with a long piece of wire and battery
[00:38:02] you could have your own telephone system and that I thought was incredibly cool I think to be honest I was more interested in art and photography and writing and that kind of thing and science was something that I did because I had to at school and I thought
[00:38:18] I was going to be great at but I mean to be honest I'm much more interested in science now than I ever have been at any point during my life not in the terms of wanting to do it as a tool to explain who we are
[00:38:30] and what's going on I feel like it's a recurring thing with the podcast that we perhaps learned from our guests that maybe one of the issues is that science isn't necessarily taught in the right way and that's not a comment on science teachers
[00:38:42] but maybe the curriculum as a whole that it isn't grabbing people at that very impressionable age that you want it to grab people yeah and I think that then science becomes the realm of people who get it and are good at it
[00:38:58] so one of the things I did when I was working in the science unit at the BBC was to make two films about material science and how understanding of materials has caused us to end up in this kind of ludicrously pampered amazing world
[00:39:16] that we've created for ourselves at home and the other was to kind of because of material sciences we've been able to pursue things like cosmology and how we came from and how it all worked so lenses, just lenses good quality glass that can make lenses
[00:39:30] took us out into space and also down into the kind of minutiae of well to expand our world and I had a presenter the wonderful Mark Mirdovnik and I had him sitting on a bank with three pictures one was Galileo's moons one was Earthrise
[00:39:48] and the other was the Hubble Deep Field and he was talking about how Galileo saw the moon in detail through his telescope and suddenly the moon wasn't some kind of mystical thing it was just like a planet like ours or something like that but dead
[00:40:04] and then you have the Earthrise the iconic picture that was taken through the Borosilicate glass of the window in the thing, they didn't want to put one in NASA didn't want to put one in but the guys who were flying it were all pilots
[00:40:18] and they said no we need visual to take this Hasselblad camera up with him took this picture suddenly we see the Earth in high quality from space and it tells us something about the fragility of our experience and then of course
[00:40:32] you have glass in the form of silicon and you know the Hubble Deep Field all of a sudden wow you know we're a very very very small part of all of this so anyway I thought it was quite a good sequence and the exact producer came
[00:40:46] in and said I don't think we need this he said I'm just I'm more keen to know how glass works and I thought oh no I couldn't give a monkeys how glass works but I am interested in what it's done for us as people yeah you know
[00:41:06] and it's exactly the same thing happened because we did concrete and concrete I think is interesting because or reinforced concrete because it's given us totally different buildings and it's it's a little corbusier and all those people who wanted to kind of smash the bounds of convention in architecture
[00:41:22] and to have windows where you want them and so on it was all a theoretical because you had bricks really and building with bricks you have to build in a certain way but no reinforced concrete all of a sudden you could have enormous spans of floors
[00:41:38] and windows floors to ceiling so it was a technology that enabled a kind of architectural movement and actually give us what they're always intended to in the first place so anyway we had a sequence with that
[00:41:50] and again it was kind of I want to know how concrete works you don't want to know how concrete works really there's nothing to it it just forms a matrix and it's got reinforcing rods but look at what it can do you know
[00:42:02] we had all the bit with Mark jumping up and down on a concrete thing and breaking it and then reinforced and it didn't break maybe it's metascience I'm talking about I don't know well it's just we like stories we're human we like stories about people exactly
[00:42:18] a star, a middle and an ending and jeopardy and we want all that like in your titles where someone says science is the new storytelling it's all about story ask my students our students here are sick to death with being told it's all about story
[00:42:32] but it is you know when we commission films sounds very grand when we give the students the sign off all I tell them is they have a beginning and middle and an end not necessarily in that order but it has to be there
[00:42:46] so it has to be a story it has to be arguably something to do with science and or natural history and it has to engage me emotionally and if it does those three things then we can talk about perhaps making the film
[00:42:58] but if any of those are missing no I think it's as simple as that I really do I know that people you know commissioners and people that pay for these things make you run through endless hoops but I think ultimately that's really what makes a good film
[00:43:16] you can read books about it but the story is a process of change in our case science and natural history that can be almost anything and it's the emotional thing film and television is an emotional medium if you want to know how glass works
[00:43:30] there are any number of books and things on the internet that will tell you about silicon dark side and the type of chemical bonds it employs and that it's not a proper solid it's a fluid and la la la but frankly who cares
[00:43:44] you can see the moon through it up close that's cool isn't it absolutely with your course leader hat on was prisoner of consciousness a good film it's an old fashioned film probably good at the time I would say that it's extraordinary actually
[00:44:00] if you look at the follow up that Jane Trees did a highly different film and you would recognize it as a modern film whereas the one that had Jonathan Miller over it it feels old fashioned is it a good film yes
[00:44:16] it's a good film because it should really have been made it gives you a really kind of extraordinary insight into somebody's life into all of our lives so to that degree it's a good film by modern standards it doesn't really stand up although some of the sequences do
[00:44:34] you know where he conducts music and plays the organ and so on I mean that's just extraordinary and that's just shots that's just quite nice sequences that are put together but absolutely gets to the kind of extraordinary position of this guy who's lost half his brain so
[00:44:52] is it a good film yes would it stand up today absolutely not and what does it mean to you personally that film I think with a good deal of hindsight it probably does mark the start of my journey into trying to make films and I've never
[00:45:10] wanted to make films about science but I think I've always wanted to make films about people and so if you look at the films that I've made yeah some of them are fairly serious science stuff like cosmology and space and astronomy but mainly they're about
[00:45:30] the people that do it and so I think I made about 10 films for Horizon and the one that I most pleased that I made was a film about OCD because it was about people and it was because people don't really know
[00:45:44] what OCD is people think that it's just you know being excessively neat and tidy it's not it's a terrible terrible illness that can kill you ultimately and so to raise awareness in that field was felt like it was pretty important and useful whilst shining the light on people's
[00:46:00] extraordinary lives as well Do you think this film would get commissioned today? Yeah I think it would get commissioned today and it wouldn't surprise me if someone did another follow up at some point because I think I don't know what else you'd learn but
[00:46:16] I think it would get commissioned today yeah I mean it's an extraordinary situation isn't it? You know to see someone who is to all intents and purposes just like you and me and who turns out very quickly absolutely isn't it's fascinating isn't it?
[00:46:33] And it does tell you something about yourself and about humanity and so on so yeah I think it would get commissioned today the problem is that who would it get commissioned by today? So what do you tell your students
[00:46:45] how do you guide them to get their stuff commissioned? Well what I'm trying to do is to bring elements into the course which points out that you need to be more entrepreneurial you know you need to be able to kind of try and finance your
[00:46:57] own stuff you know they come out of the course being perfectly able to make films by themselves there's nothing to stop them going off and making their films how do they distribute them you know how do they monetize them how does YouTube work
[00:47:11] all of these kinds of things that we're starting to look at because I do think that broadcasting is facing an existential crisis it's not what it was and it won't be what it was I don't know really why anyone has a linear channel anymore
[00:47:25] apart from live stuff nobody stays in for nine o'clock on a Thursday to watch Horizon anymore or anything even old people like me don't do that you know everything's recorded everything's on iPlayer so it's a new dawn and I don't think anyone saw it coming really.
[00:47:45] Thank you thanks for inviting us here thanks for introducing this film to us I've seen it before it was a remarkable watch in its own way I was expecting something crushingly bleak and I was surprised that it wasn't I mean
[00:47:59] it is obviously very very sad but there was something about the strength of his personality and his character which really shines through. I mean the epic strength of his wife. And their relationship. Her calmness I just think I would have lost it so many times and she remained
[00:48:15] so calm and so clever so kind. She is just an absolute inspiration. I'm amazed she did it and came back to it. It's extraordinary isn't it? It's as though you're constantly trying you kind of almost reaching to something that's not quite there and you kind
[00:48:31] of think there's going to be a breakthrough and then there isn't There's nothing. There's nothing and it's it's just it's almost like a horror film isn't it in a certain sense. Just watching this poor guy. And I suppose the comfort is that he doesn't quite
[00:48:48] you know he's frustrated in one in one sense but at the same time he doesn't really appreciate what's going on. It's surprising it doesn't chip away at him. Every new moment is a kind of a reset but is a reset to a the same position
[00:49:01] it's amazing to hear that he is still alive and that somehow that experience hasn't kind of chipped away at his existence at all In the second film you get a sense that he is slightly different he's less angry and his diary entries have
[00:49:17] become slightly more chaotic and he seems to know some things. So there was a bit in the second film where they say who's that? And there's a photograph of this guy in graduation gear and he said it's my son so I don't know
[00:49:29] what his name is but he knew that he said and then he said I haven't seen him since he was five or something which of course he has but he doesn't remember it's a great film because it shines a light on
[00:49:45] what it is to be human in a way that any number of kind of discussion of brain chemistry and neuroanatomy can. So to that end it's an amazing piece of work