The hour-long documentary ‘Strangers in a Strange Land’ which was screened last month was one result. Another was the series of 13 programmes, each 15-minutes long, entitled ‘Farson in Australia’ which are now being televised. A third result is these two articles – the first by Rollo Gamble and the second by Dan Farson.

Every time I go round the world I find it larger and larger. I do not believe in all this nonsense about it getting smaller. And time, what has time got to do with it? It is only confusing. It is metabolism. People assured us: ‘It’s a stone’s throw’ to Australia, you’ll be there in a few hours’. But we were grounded for the night in Rome, missed our connection for Perth in Singapore and were re-routed from Singapore to Perth via Sydney, a diversion costing us a mere 5,000 miles extra flying … when I got there I felt I had been rocketed to the other side of the Moon.

It was frightfully hot, we were sweating copiously, our shirts and slacks soaking. I remember David’s shirt, a sort of poison bottle green with great black patches of his sweat. My own state was hardly more attractive and Dan, I think, had gone into some sort of mystic trance induced by heat and boredom.

Down below, crossing Australia from Darwin to Sydney, lay a parched landscape, a pattern of dark grey, brown and ash, with a network spread over like capillary veins, where water had once flowed millions of years ago. I looked for hours in search of some sign of man … not even a road or track … none was apparent. One got very thirsty looking at this. We longed for a taste of the famed Australian beer at Sydney airport, a shower, a shave and all the other things necessary to freshen us for the 2,500 miles on to Perth.

But not to be. Three dishevelled 200 pounders were seized by a pack of journalists, their bags thrown at the customs man who was given hardly time to make his chalk mark, and ushered up some stairs to a private room with a trestle table loaded with drink. Thank God, in a way – but no wash and shave.

Thank God, they were only interested in Dan who, already at the point of exhaustion, was interviewed, photographed and filmed until he was almost fit for the undertaker. David and I were able to recover partially via the refreshment table.

After about an hour of this I became quite light-headed and we were shovelled on to our plane for Perth not caring. I remember Dan outstretched on the floor of the lounge trying to get some sleep and David and I playing a couple of Australian business men in a hilarious game of two-up, joined eventually by the two air hostesses, while Sir Matthew Slattery, the chairman of BOAC, slept, we hoped, in the seat ahead of us.

In the first few days, perhaps because I was unhinged by flight, the people looked strange and consequently so well worth filming … the hard-glazed eyes and the crocodile-skinned necks of the middle-aged … the rangy, slender limbs of the young people, and their brows seemed to join in one bar across their foreheads … the beautiful unself-conscious gaze of the young girls and the sudden effect of summer dresses. Boys swinging dangerously from the girders of an iron bridge and dropping into what I supposed to be a shark-infested river, young men playing cricket in a riverside park shaded by huge magnolia trees with such abandon as to make the game seem almost exciting. And in the river were black swans.

That shining city, Perth, with its curving Swan River and its miles of surf-pounding beaches. Once Dan and I only ten yards from shore, could not get back. We looked at each other swimming frantically and pretended we were not in difficulties. When we made it eventually, we both confessed to having been scared stiff. I have bathed in many parts of the world, but do not remember such a powerful swell and undertow. The Australians understand these waters and do not try to fight them … one sees even three-, four- and five-year-olds washed up like shoals of fish in squealing piles on the beach, their parents a few yards away oiling themselves – unmoved.

The first few days I staggered down to breakfast, my head bulging with impressions, and ordered (trying to get into the swing of Australia) a T-bone steak and a bottle of Swan beer, ice-cold and very fizzy. This is a hangover from sheep station days perhaps, when men were out at dawn and back to a huge breakfast about nine. One read porridge, bacon and eggs and choice of steak, chops and mixed grills on the menu. Soon I began to burst all seams and quickly reverted to my tea, toast and fruit-juice regime.

First impressions are so strong and never recaptured … alas we had no camera to film with in those days.

We were on a whirlwind reconnaissance to try to find 13 stories geographically distributed between the six states. Our brief was to eschew the outback … too much had been done about that hitherto, and we were to show urban life and sophistication. The Australians are terrified of being taken as uncultured, rough and rustic … their terror amounts to an inferiority complex; on the other hand they pride themselves on their toughness.

So our itinerary took us to the cities … Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Hobart, Sydney, Brisbane, Cairns … a most exhausting six weeks, watching the wonderful summer weather change to autumn, anxious not to encounter winter and rain on our return, seeing wonderful opportunities which we were unable to film because of planning.

One cannot dispute the necessity for planning … without it economy is impossible; but I wonder if a day will come when apparatus can be carried in a small suitcase, set up in 20 seconds and those marvellous fleeting instances of life caught for ever for the television screen … a dream? By the time I got to Cairns in the north-east corner of the continent I was in a frustrated dither. The film unit arrived from Sydney and we started filming just after Easter.

Somehow small aeroplanes were at our disposal and we were able to fly over the startling beauty of the coast at Cairns. I remember flying to Green Island at dawn, the sea oyster coloured, a brilliant sheen penetrating a curtain of mist disintegrating into minute spheres chasing each other across our windscreen.

Pointing our camera wc dived at this island, hoping for a perfect zoom … a story-book tropical island looped by a coral reef visible just beneath the surface, chalk green and indigo … in fact part of the Great Barrier Reef. But the morning sun caused erratic currents of air, the pilot could not hold our ’plane steady and our shots were spoilt.

Then, flying down that narrow valley through the mountains rising hundreds of feet on each side of our Cessna, thick green forest below, very tropical, the pilot pulled back the stick to climb over a saddle and all at once revealed those powerful headlands, golden beaches, belts of sugar cane for miles along the coast, and a cobalt sea merging without horizon into the sky.

I was allowed to fly the aircraft for about 10 minutes, I mean hold one of the dual controls. We seemed to be climbing vertically … am I wrong or were we for a moment flying on our backs backwards? The pilot next to me was dead pan, but Dan on the seat behind looked sick. He said as we revived him later that at that moment he was convinced we were going into a spin and the tour would end in scattered wreckage and bones in the gum tree forest.

Australian film units do not belong to a union but owing to their overtime regulations our unit were earning far more money than we were. Of course this may have influenced them, but I was impressed by their stoicism.

When we were in Wairuna, one of the smaller cattle stations (some 400 square miles, whereas a good-sized station can be from 4,000 to 12,000 square miles) they slept in a garage on hospital beds with hot-water bottles provided by our remarkable unit manager and treasurer, Bob Walthy.

Bob not only saved us hundreds of pounds by brilliant transport arrangements throughout the tour, but looked after our comfort so solicitously we were very soon unable to take a step without him. We called him ‘Mother’ and sent him a lace-edged card for Mother’s Day.

The Atkinson family who kept, ate, talked and thought cattle, were truly part of the heart of Australia. Rising with the sun, they champed about the homestead longing for their breakfast, while we, slower to drag ourselves awake, kept them waiting. Steak and kidney stew, bacon and eggs, tea I imagine, or was it coffee (both rather indistinguishable and bad throughout Australia) but the weather was sparkling and spirits were soaring.

Bob Atkinson, the younger son, had killed a taipan on the verandah two days before we arrived. The taipan is one of the most deadly snakes in the world. If bitten I am told you have 10 seconds to live, unless of course you happen to be carrying a hypodermic and the right serum with you. We stepped warily, especially at night. But I never saw a snake in Australia except bottled in a museum and a dead one run over in the road.

The Atkinsons look after 10,000 head of cattle and create a wonderful western atmosphere … they wear broad brimmed hats and high-heeled stockmen’s boots. They spend days in the saddle, sleeping in bivouacs scattered over their vast territory, often away from the homestead for weeks at a time.

I had always supposed crocodiles lived in fresh water … I mean in muddy rivers and swamps, but not salt water.

Apparently there are salt water crocs which are harmful and fresh water crocs which are not. We had a marvellous swim in Archer’s Creek inhabited by the latter. The crocs kept to themselves and we wallowed in water of a perfect temperature enjoying a setting which reminded me of Huckleberry Finn.

I do so envy the Australians their natural amenities. I am speaking, of course, of the coastal fringe and those areas east of the Great Dividing Range. Frequently, one comes across rustic tables put up in some perfect place to camp or picnic, and these, such is the country’s vastness, one can nearly always have to oneself.

But I specially envy them their beaches with that extraordinary surf. I must say I never entered the sea without the thought of sharks adding a sort of salt to the experience. The Australians love to scare you with shark stories but themselves regard sharks as rather stupid creatures.

There are, as a matter of fact, quite a number of shark scares on the beaches during a season. Someone will spot the triangular fin (sometimes on the grander beaches from a shark tower) the alarm bell is rung and everyone leaves the water rather bored, as we learnt to become during air raids.

A lifesaver will then take out a boat and hits the shark on the nose with an oar. This usually sends the shark away and bathing is resumed. Occasionally someone is taken by a shark, probably two or three in a summer, and it reaches the headlines, but the loss is negligible compared to those killed on the roads.

The toughest period was in Sydney. At one time we were trying to film five stories at once. I must confess at times I was not quite sure which story I was shooting. In the end the material separated itself into different themes.

I thought the expense of Sydney horrifying. On the surface a lively sinful town, I found it on closer inspection a little pious. The night clubs, for instance, seemed to me over publicised, over expensive and tame. There is a vice squad which can pick a man out of his car in a main street for kissing his girl goodnight. One senses a cleaning up process and that the puritans have the upper hand. But I must add the Australians I met were far from puritanical.

How we longed to explore the outback.

I think the series really got going in Cooma … a wonderful, jumped-up village boom town as a result of the great Snowy Mountain irrigation and hydro-electric scheme, truly a symbol of the spirit of New Australia. They are conserving water in vast quantities, changing the course of rivers from east to west, and generating huge electric supplies. The majority of the workmen are New Australians, a term meaning immigrants from Europe and Russia.

Curiously, owing to the White Australia policy, there were very few coloured workmen, I am told three or four Indians. The village has three nightclubs, innumerable continental restaurants and, of course, pubs every three yards down the main street. It was difficult to find a location to film which was not a pub. There is gambling and all sorts of pleasures concentrated in a small area … ‘My word’, as the Aussies say.

It is time I said a word about the Australian crew … a humorous and eccentric lot. Butch, the cameraman, had been six years with the BBC and was filled with their professional expertise … everything was so filtered at first as we watched rushes, it seemed to be moonlight … particularly Dan’s links … so much so that we were thinking of trying to clear ‘Moonlight becomes you’ as a signature tune.

However, on our own projectors here in England the stuff seems to be daylight … something dim about the Australian equipment. Geoff Daniels, a Welshman, in love with the most fascinating air hostess, an ex-Pinewood sound man, gave us the most wonderful service in appalling conditions. I mean conditions always are appalling for sound men on this kind of job. His relations with the camera crew got no worse than they ever do.

Ray Alchin, the boom swinger, who had never swung a boom in his life before and who had never been out of New South Wales, let alone Australia, was rather forward in many unexpected directions.

Then there was that Anglo-Indian charmer Bill Steller, a very talented artist wasting his time loading the magazines when he should undoubtedly be a cameraman in his own right. We were well and truly satisfied and, above all, constantly entertained.

I have not said anything about our own party from England … we are still speaking … I cannot imagine a more perfect combination … I would certainly do it again but I cannot tell you a half of what went on… what a pity!

ROLLO GAMBLE

The biter bit

As far as I was concerned, one of the surprises of the Australian tour was that I found myself being interviewed. The first taste of this was in Sydney, where our plane was diverted due to fog and a succession of missed connections. We stepped off the plane, unsuspecting, sleepless and brandy-ised by BOAC, to be met by the sort of press reception one sees in films like La Dolce Vita. Not expecting to meet anyone at all, we were, in fact, confronted by newsreel cameras, a dozen or so flash-light photographers, television cameras and rows of smart, tough journalists.

Questions came fast and furious. ‘Did I enjoy making people feel uncomfortable?’ ‘Did I think my job worthwhile?’ ‘How much money did I make?’ One journalist took me aside and congratulated me on ‘my exposé of “The Wedding”,’ in the ‘Keeping In Step’ series. ‘Exposé!’ I exclaimed, ‘but I thought the people were wonderful.’ ‘A most clever attack on the middle-classes,’ he persisted.

Next I was interviewed for television news by one character who glared at me coldly while I tried to answer the questions. The photographers shouted at us, ‘Have a drink’, the flash-lights exploded and finally, with evident relief, the publicity department of ABC hustled us back on the plane to Perth.

As the interviews continued, I began to learn some of the hazards of the game. Above all, never make a joke to a journalist; what might seem funny at the time, looks chilly in cold print. ‘Are you here to shock us? asked one journalist. ‘Oh, no, I said, ‘we simply wish to record some impressions of Australia’. I then added, with a smile, very feebly I must admit, that maybe we’d be able to produce ‘one or two tiny shocks’. The headline the next morning was, ‘Farson here to shock us’.

It was also difficult to know how much time to devote to this particular game. In Adelaide, for example, Rollo Gamble and I had a lengthy conference, but it was with difficulty that we found two lines of print on the back page the next day. Conversely, a fleeting remark to a journalist at an airport could somehow produce columns of quotes.

Inevitably, the questions were much the same, usually led by ‘How do you like Australia?’ As I trotted out the same old answers, I sounded like a scratched gramophone record. At the very end when nerves were frayed, I began to tell the truth – ‘There is not enough wrong in Australia,’ – this did not go down at all well. I should have realised that criticism is the last thing anyone expects or wants.

In Melbourne I had my first grilling from a television panel in one programme. As my two interrogators were sharp, wide-awake journalists, I was a bit apprehensive, but the moment the programme began they were transformed into wax-work figures – which proved even worse. I made my first radio talk in a programme called ‘Guest of Honour’, and one morning in Melbourne three separate radio stations sent people to interview me in my hotel bedroom. I found this experience entertaining, though the effect of the last broadcast was slightly marred by the fact that the tape recorder had been on playback throughout and not a single word was recorded.

In Sydney I had a live radio interview with a remarkable personality known as ‘Andrea’, a sort of Australian Louella Parsons. ‘Hello, Mums,’ she gushed, ‘guess who I have seated right here beside me! Someone with a hair-cut just like Prince Charles. I have always wondered what went on in that head underneath.’ I was about to ask if the last remark referred to myself or Prince Charles, when we were interrupted by heavenly chimes and a tooth-paste commercial was relayed from the booth next door.

On another occasion a journalist asked me if there was any type of person I really disliked. ‘Yes,’ I exclaimed, the English deb set, the officer type with the “la-dee-da” Oxford accent’.

‘But that is exactly how you strike us!’

The last interview I had was the only one in which I actually lost my temper. After a gruelling week we arrived in Perth late at night and I asked the hotel to let me sleep on late. I was woken at 6.30 a.m. to be told that a woman journalist was waiting downstairs. I asked, sleepily, if she could return later. The next thing I knew was that she had forced her way into my hotel bedroom. ‘Would you say a few words?’ she asked. ‘My God! I would,’ I exclaimed. ‘Wait a moment until I put on a dressing gown’.

We exchanged words in the corridor and her column that afternoon began, ‘He looks such a nice pleasant man on television … But my first impressions of British television personality, Dan Farson, today were neither pleasant nor nice’.

However, I must admit that my heart eventually melted and she did continue… But after 20 minutes I had changed my mind. Dan Farson is a nice pleasant man.’ This, I should add, was after two or three cups of black coffee, when I had recovered.

If my accounts of all this publicity appear swollen-headed, I should point out an aspect that is rather disconcerting. In Australia it seems to be the understudy, not the star, that is beloved. I gather that Shirley Bassey was not too successful on her tour and Vivien Leigh has attacked her luke-warm reception in Melbourne. The big name in Australian television at the moment is Digby Wolfe, who was never top of the bill over here.

The star of ‘Suzie Wong’ in Sydney was Jackie Chan, the understudy here. Completely unfamiliar with Michelmore, only slightly acquainted with Dimbleby and Freeman, it was Dan Farson, who found himself a star in Melbourne.

DAN FARSON

The post Bottled snakes and docile crocs appeared first on THIS IS REDIFFUSION from Transdiffusion.

The following article has been written by ROLLO GAMBLE and is about some of the incidents which hare brightened his days as a director.

I remember making a film for the Army in India called ‘Hold Your Fire’ (until you see the whites of their eyes) – this entailed among other elaborate details, a platoon of Gurkhas dressed up in Japanese uniforms (their resemblance to the Japanese is remarkable), crossing a river and being ambushed. The river I chose was only about three feet deep and 25 yards wide in the jungle near Dehra Dun. The Gurkhas were most co-operative, for when the sun started sinking below the fringe of the trees and our cameraman shouted for lights, a Gurkha would shin up and remove the obscuring branches with his kookri [more usually spelt ‘kukri’ in English, a curved knife – Ed]. Their technique filled us with admiration – they would sit on the end of the branch and hack it at a point nearer the trunk – we would shout warnings, but these were never heeded. Sometimes they were 200 feet from the ground then, with a wonderful sense of timing as the branch cracked, they would grab part of the main tree and remain aloft hanging by an arm, roaring with laughter. We siting a rope across the river and lined the bottom with small explosives to be electrically operated by the sappers. At the word ‘action’ the Gurkha ‘Japs’ emerged from the jungle and started crossing the river holding the rope and squatting to make the water seem deeper.

Then on cue orders were given for the Indian Army ambush to go into action and the explosives were detonated in the river. To avoid the explosions the actors had been told to keep strictly to the rope. However, a few decided to act the part of dying more realistically. They flung themselves away from the rope and were carried down by the stream. It was too late to stop the explosives. At the end I had half a dozen casualties, one of whom, sadly, died – a piece of metal from a detonator easing had penetrated his anus. Every reasonable precaution had been taken and the film showed exactly what had happened, so we were all exonerated at the Court of Enquiry – however, I vowed I would never have anything to do with filming again.

Of course I did.

One of the most frightening experiences was making a film on mountain climbing at Banff Springs in the Rockies. The commentary and dialogue was in French since the television film was intended for the French-Canadian population. I had two Swiss guides to assist me, Bruno Engler and Walter Lippman (not of course, the doyen of American political commentators).

The pay-off was the successful arrival on the pinnacle of the tyro, a young French Canadian called Gil La Roche. We chose one of the minor peaks and were duly roped together by the Swiss guides. The cameraman had an auricon [16mm sound-on-film motion picture camera] in a rucksack strapped to his back. In another a clueless electrician carried the battery — upside down, so that the acid ran out and ruined a suede jacket lent him by Bruno Engler. We also carried with us a large, round, empty biscuit tin.

When reaching a well-climbed summit, it is the custom among mountaineers to sign a book which is kept inside a tin ensconced in a cairn of stones, thus proving that they have been there. Though this peak was steep enough, it was not considered by genuine mountaineers to be worthy of a cairn of its own — so we provided the tin and book and were prepared to build a cairn.

I was fat and extremely out of condition in those days — so I had more or less to be dragged to the top by the guides and the rest of the crew. On the way we filmed Gil La Roche suspended over various vertiginous chasms. One was particularly terrifying. There were two pillars bending towards each other. The gap between their tops could not have been more than 3 ft. 6 in. but the drop between was at least 2,000 feet, a mere step but what a step and a step we all had to take to reach the top.

All preparations were made for the pay-off scene when Bruno had to come in on cue with the book. But Bruno, brilliantly agile mountaineer and splendid ad lib. actor, was no good at coming in on a cue. After 17 takes tempers were frayed. Exasperated beyond endurance he shouted ‘Merde’ and punted the biscuit tin high into the air. In dismay we watched it bump down the rocky slope, plunge over the precipice, to hear it no more as it dropped thousands of feet into the valley.

French-Canadians are volatile — there are plenty of Gallic elements left in their genes. This could have started a fight, which in that precarious situation could have been dangerous. Since I was the only Englishman there, and everything is blamed upon the director anyway, it could have been especially dangerous for me. If I had not exercised tact I would no doubt have been forced to follow the biscuit tin. Luckily someone saw the funny side and all ended in laughter. Our dilemma was solved by rewriting the script. To everyone’s astonishment we won a certificate from the Canadian Government – for the best television film in French Canadian made on top of a mountain by a foreign director over 45.

Talking about prizes, I remember an extremely active year, sometime ago now, when I had collaborated with Daniel Farson. We were sent letters telling us we had been short-listed for a prize at the Television Ball. In fact several people told us (on the ‘very highest authority’) that we had a very good chance and we were advised to attend. Dan and I both loathe functions of that sort. However, for my part, vanity prevailed, I got quite excited and went off to Moss Bros for the necessary clothes. Somehow, at enormous cost, we got two returned tickets at the last minute and turned up at the Ball.

We were shown to a table already occupied by rather a sinister group of middle-aged and were received, as we introduced ourselves and sat down, extremely coldly.

Opposite me sat a stout man with an ill-fitting wig, which he adjusted from time to time. Next to him a pretty, but stern woman of 45 or so smoked from a long cigarette holder. She gave me not the flicker of a smile of welcome and I quickly realised that one of her eyes, which did not move, was glass. To add to my embarrassment, I remember, something very hard kept grating me. I began to suspect that the lady sitting next to me was rubbing my shin with a metal brace attached to her leg. There were also curious squeaks coming from under the table. I was forced to drop my napkin only to discover it was the leg of the table I hail been trying to avoid and the squeaks were coming from a sort of metal fastener the lady wore on her brogues. As I rose again to my seat, she looked at me severely and said she had been ‘observing my work of late’. Whether this was intended as praise or blame it was impossible to tell. I can never forget the unfriendly stare of those eyes around that table; if there was a relenting gleam it was in only one and that was the glass eye.

Eventually the silence was broken, a few names were dropped – a very tall, very thin man, with a finely pencilled moustache winked at me evilly — the word ‘corporation’ figured from time to time – and then, sickeningly, it dawned on me that we had blundered into the case-hardened cadre of the BBC.

Alas. They have all seceded now, some to rest forever, some to retirement with the O.B.E. and others to commercial television – for the young have taken over.

Very soon the speeches began and it became apparent we had not won a prize. The lady with the brogues bent over and whispered: ‘Better luck next time – I like your shows – jolly good live.’ ‘Not live – filmed’, I hissed. With that she turned her back and I slunk away. Dan had of course made his escape long before and I joined him at the bar, horribly disappointed. So much for prizes.

If I suffer from folie de grandeur it is only in my dreams.

I am John Huston and I am getting a long shot composed of Canyons, Kraals and 40,000 cattle. My assistants are my PA, the clapper boy (a part often doubled by me) and two or three Africans who don’t speak a word of English. We are all shouting and beating reflectors to get the cattle to stampede in the right direction. The Indians on horseback (my dream is very mixed up) who are supposed to do this only create chaos. Eventually it happens, the cattle stampede – straight at the camera and we are all immolated under pounding hooves. I then wake up with a pounding heart to meagre reality – sweating and disgruntled.

One sometimes has moments of vicarious grandeur – when one visits the houses of the great to obtain interviews. Usually, of course, one is admitted by appointment through the tradesman’s entrance. The butler who lets one in, invariably expects a large tip – and who should blame him, for the disruption of the household regime will be appalling.

There is the preliminary discussion with the VIP involved. He or she will always ask: ‘How much time does it take, how much machinery will you bring and will it make a mess, etc.’

If one has any sense, one always asks for twice as much time, describes the machinery as gigantic and dangerous and the mess disgusting. Luckily for TV most people are so vain they will put up with anything, for a chance to appear – and if one can get out fairly cleanly, it is gratifying to hear one’s victim say: ‘That wasn’t so bad after all’.

An exception to this was our visit to Barbara Cartland’s country mansion. I had been received graciously in her boudoir where she was putting the final touches to her make-up. When she asked the usual questions I exaggerated everything according to plan and told her it was unlikely we could be finished before lunch time. ‘Then we’ll all have a jolly lunch together afterwards’, she added with her immense charm.

I did not reckon with the wiring of Camfield Place. During a shot there was an appalling flash, all the lights went out and we were told the cooking stove had fused. Miss Cartland, though she must have cursed us, seemed unruffled – imperiously she summoned a man from the electricity board. We lunched off cold cuts and vitamin pills and got home shattered, exhausted and filled with admiration long past midnight. That was an ill-fated story – the programme was transmitted out of sync on its first showing and it has taken me about three years to explain to Barbara Cartland what happened.

Another occasion nearly ended in a far more sinister tragedy.

With enormous difficulty we had got permission to film an actual wedding. It wasn’t so much the church service we were interested in as the wedding breakfast, which was to take place, at lunchtime, in the Dog and Fox in Wimbledon. We had two crews, one to handle the orange blossom, confetti and all that in the morning, and the other to set up in the D. & F. for the breakfast.

The breakfast, I may say, consisted of champagne, soup, turkey, gaufrettes trifle and wedding cake. I suppose there must have been places laid for 250. At any rate it was a vast area to light and we had to hire a special generator. The crew spent the whole morning trying to start the infernal thing without success. We had our camera set, the toastmaster in his special and stentorian voice was already announcing the guests – the bride, groom, mothers and fathers were all lined up to receive – but there were no illuminations and it was useless to ‘Roll’. We were all in despair, the electrician was going mad. In a paroxysm of temper he seized a hammer and clouted the generator, intending to smash it.

It started.

The lights went up and we filmed, surf-riding on a wave of elation. But sudden transitions from despair to relief in circumstances of that sort can be dangerous. The electrician was so pleased with himself that he drained all available glasses (there were hundreds) and was seen staggering about among the lights. The baby of the bride’s sister was crawling on the carpet and was just saved from instant death as someone caught a falling 2-K inches from its head. This had the effect of sobering everybody up.

But I digress – I was talking about celebrities. I once asked the Duke of Marlborough if I could film at Blenheim. He told me of a BBC crew which had been there (with Dimbleby I think) when the sound assistant pushed his fish-pole through the face of a Holbein portrait. The Duke had the canvas sewn up by a picture restorer and apparently there is nothing to be seen of the damage – accidents happen in the best regulated societies.

With this by way of warning he gave us permission to film – I’ve always regretted that we never did. The project was cancelled.

I am reminded of a great house in Smith Square, its reception rooms walled with impressionist paintings – part of the valuable Courtauld collection – and the home of the then Home Secretary.

Mr [Rab] Butler received us with his famous sophisticated charm. We had admired the pictures and punctually were all set to go. ‘Cut, I’m sorry’, called the sound engineer. There was a strange buzzing in his cans, some electronic fault we supposed. The delay was appalling, for Mr Butler is one of those politicians who is genuinely very busy. I left the engineer, his screwdriver poking about in the entrails of the tape recorder, to make my apologies. A half-hour had gone by attempting small talk, when I noticed clustered over the microphone a swarm of flies. It was obviously the fly mating season and this was the cause of the noise. We shook the mike and fanned it, but it must have been very sticky because the flies returned every time – the only answer was to get a flit gun [a hand-pumped insecticide sprayer]. After searching the house, Mr Butler produced a very rusty flit gun from his basement. I was photographed applying the flit and this photograph made the national dailies with the caption, ‘The Home Secretary gets a flitting’. I expected to be clapped into gaol, as was the Good Soldier Schweik, who remarked in a pub in Prague as he observed a portrait of his Excellency, that flies had settled on the Archduke Ferdinand.

Now from the homes of the famous to the homeless.

Without warning I was flying towards Latin America, my mission to film the 150th anniversary of the Argentine’s liberation from Spain. Large sums of money were concealed about my person – I had to find and finance cameras, crews, film and the rest. Our contact was an American beachcomber, called Rossiter. He met me in Buenos Aires, sweating with moral disintegration – no cameras were available, only a Kodak, designed for amateurs with an automatic light meter – automatic in that it was unnecessary to set the stop. The cameraman, Pepe le Moko, only had to point, focus and squirt. We were doing this at a vast, ominous, military parade, when the news of the Chilean earthquake broke. Two hundred miles of coast had dropped three metres, a great fissure in the Pacific sea-bed had collapsed causing a tidal wave and destruction never before experienced.

Michael Ingrams and I were again in the air, our Lufthansa plane soaring over the Andes and circling endlessly the aerodrome at Santiago de Chile.

The American hotel block stands in a square opposite a Ruritanian Palace – the manoeuvres of the President’s guard causing us macabre amusement as we watched from our 17th storey suite. In the foyer of the hotel highly organised American aid airmen and WACS [US Women’s Army Corps] swarmed, with a scrum of international journalists at the bar.

Our aim, therefore, was to get to the scene of destruction as early as possible. We found a camera somewhere and a cameraman, Orlando Furioso. At 4 a.m. the next morning we were on an aerodrome in the office of the American commandant asking him to let us fly 1,000 miles south in a Globemaster. The Americans with their wonderful sense of international charity had sent a fleet of these transport planes with cargoes of medical supplies, blankets, etc. There is a wide shelf behind the pilot’s cabin. Here we lay, given cocoa and cigarettes by gum-chewing airmen resembling Hollywood extras. Michael and I were in lounge suits (his Savile Row) and had urban and effeminate footwear. We had left our bowler hats and umbrellas in the Santiago hotel.

The Chileans complain they cannot have an interesting sex life because the country is so long and narrow, they all have to stand in queues. However, it’s a marvellous country to fly down. At dawn the snow-capped peaks of the Andes are rose and the range is dotted with volcanoes in semi-eruption. The lumbering plane throbbed along. Asking Orlando Furioso for pictures of passing mountains, we discovered to our horror he had no idea how to operate the camera, let alone speak English. Having read a few ‘do-it-yourself’ pamphlets on both photography and Spanish, I was able to give him rudimentary instructions. Calculating the exposure, since this camera had no built-in meter, sent the three of us into committee every few minutes.

The plane settled, a fat turkey, at a place called Puerto Mont, or Puerto Meurt – (Port of death?) if it had been called Puerto Merde it would have been more fitting.

Shivering with cold, we trudged across the aerodrome in six inches of mud, our suits and pansy shoes suffering. In the drizzle, Michael, suave and diplomatic, persuaded the Chilean Army to lend us a jeep.

It was as if the fields and woods of Kent had been shattered and rent. Huge slices had been carved out of the road. The railway line had been whipped like a child’s skipping rope and broken up in hummocks. Hillsides had slipped into the valleys, a rich man losing in three minutes his 40,000 acre ranch as it slid cowboys, crops and stock into Lake Rinnehue [sic – Riñihue].

We reached the pathetic, broken town. Resigned figures were picking in the ruins. The boulevard, a dual carriageway along the embankment had sunk into the river, the lamp-posts and trees sticking regularly through the water. Orlando filmed soup kitchens organised by nuns, relief camps, bodies collected from ruined homes, and funerals slowly processing away.

In the hotel, cracked, still standing, but disembowelled, there was a room for us. There was no electric light, no lavatory working, no water, only wine, which somehow had survived in large quantities.

In the back an electric fan, not revolving, swayed from the ceiling. Seeing it, I remarked that it must be very draughty to move such a heavy object – not at all, I was told it was the building which was swaying, for tremors are felt for weeks after a severe earthquake.

To light us to bed we were allowed one candle. Every half-hour or so the building shook and we could hear deep in the earth, a steady thrumming. We wanted to film Michael during an earth tremor in the hotel bedroom, on the site writing his report.

So we used the candle for a key light (about six inches from his nose) and Orlando persuaded the landlady, who reluctantly let us have another candle for a filler. We ran the camera at its lowest speed, wide open. Michael did the action in the slowest of slow motion and lo-and-behold the shot came out and was used in our story on ‘This Week’. The next day I was invited into a crippled house. The old couple, their faces browned like worn ivory, lined with suffering and stoicism, insisted on giving me a glass of their local liqueur. We could not talk. I filmed them in their hopeless and dimly lit kitchen and parted in tears. A rusty old taxi took us to the aerodrome. There the ever kindly Americans squeezed us into a Globemaster, already overloaded with heart-rending refugees, and flew us back to Santiago.

After this the rest of the story filmed in Santiago was as stale as margarine is to butter. The anti-climax was intense and led us to all kinds of extremes of relaxation. However, that is a story for St Peter at the Gates of Heaven.

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