BEST OF BRITISH
ADVENTURES IN FILM HISTORY

by

Ashley Sidaway & Robert Sidaway

In 1985, we made a television documentary on the history of the Pathé and Movietone newsreels, which for more than 50 years provided British cinemagoers with seven-minute windows on world events. It featured a conversation between the two famous voices of hundreds of these newsreels, Bob Danvers Walker and Leslie Mitchell, and highlighted the rivalry of the companies in chasing scoops, illustrated with numerous clips, much of it rare footage.

At the same time, it provided personal memories of the two men with snapshots of historic, poignant, and often humorous world events.

Inelegantly titled Around The World In Seven Minutes And Four Times On Saturday, it was in essence a clip show which depended on several months of research, both visual and written. The actual interviews were recorded in our post-production facility’s control room, with Leslie battling against illness and often requiring assistance from an oxygen cylinder just out of shot. There was a genuine sense of adversarial camaraderie between the two distinctive commentators, whose lives were a fascinating view into the changing face of British journalism and news in the twentieth century. When the documentary first premiered on New Year’s Eve, it was also a tribute to Leslie who had died a month earlier.

The program was a pre-buy for the BBC, cash-flowed by Charisma Films, who we were working with at the time. Head Of Acquisition at the BBC was Barry Brown, and we established a good relationship with him, so he was open to further proposals. Based on using archive material to make further shows, we came up with the idea of making a documentary on classic British films.

The pitch turned into a proposal for a TV series. Barry agreed and wanted 10 half-hours. And the secret to get this made was going to be obtaining the use of a film library and coping with legal clearances.

The natural company to approach was Rank Film Distributors, who at the time were in the last throes of making films. The company was the child of a Quaker businessman, J. Arthur Rank who bankrolled so many of the most ambitious films of the 1940s and 50s, and whose opening logo of the man banging the gong became synonymous with the British film industry. More than just film production, it was a distribution company and exhibitor, making it such a powerful outfit.

The Rank directors we met were still working in the dusty Wardour Street offices that you could imagine had barely changed since the days of David Lean, Carol Reed, and Anthony Asquith. Indeed, the chief accountant we met had worked with them all and demonstrated an active dislike for the financial waste of filmmakers – he was particularly scathing of Powell & Pressburger, whose string of classics he claimed all lost money!

In any case, our proposal to celebrate their films was accepted and the resolution to expensive actor residuals (and indeed permissions) were cleared by a standard clause in all performer contracts, which allowed reuse of material for promotional purposes. A clause which stayed in place until the late-eighties.

From the beginning, our concept was to make a series for a broad audience, an entertainment rather than dry historical overview. No talking heads or technical commentary, instead allowing the films to speak for themselves. The idea was to both capture viewers who remembered the films and to interest a new audience. Together with our co-creators Maurice Sellar and Lou Jones, we decided on a thematic approach, taking a genre or general subject for each episode and then grouping films under each heading.

Most of the themes for the episodes were immediately obvious. “English Roses” and “Heroes”, for notable actresses and actors. Spy films, horror, war, comedy, musicals, all easy choices. And as we joyfully researched the Rank library titles, we were also pleased to create some more distinctive episodes – “Power And Prejudice” took a look at films addressing social issues, and the rather floridly titled “Fine And Dandy” featured the visually striking and highly melodramatic Gainsborough Studios costume films.

Having agreed the concepts for the 10 episodes with Barry, we went into production during the summer of 1986. And in truth that was all we expected to make.

Dividing up the shows with Maurice and Lou, the process involved viewing a vast array of films to whittle them down to around seven or eight per episode, and then select the clips to illustrate the topic. That meant trips to the Rank archive to operate rickety Steenbecks surrounded by towers of film reels as well as wading through stacks of worn U-matic and VHS copies. It was an inexact process to time out sequences, before mastering them from the best sources we could find. In the early days we would collect the numerous cans of films from Rank despatch in Wardour Street, piling them into shopping trolleys and pushing them to the facility to transfer film to tape. It even included dealing with the whirring beasts that were 2” tape, where locating a sequence was just as much intuition as calculation. All this so we could then go into an edit suite to put the selected clips together for each episode.

If the Rank gong was so well imprinted in the British cinemagoer’s psyche, we were lucky enough to get another indelible symbol of cinema with our chosen narrator Sir John Mills. Since he featured in many of the films, it was a genuine thrill that he agreed to join us. Approaching the first recording session, we were apprehensive of how he would regard our approach to the films, never mind the narration we had written!

We needn’t have worried; he was a generous collaborator and was genuinely delighted to celebrate British cinema. He respected the scripts, while at the same time making judicious re-writes.

Little did we know that we’d be working with John for the next four years!

We ended up recording fifty-seven episodes with John, and sharing with him stories of family, healthy living, and his latest diet at the time. And lots of his acting memories. Being the consummate pro, he would always remind us to think of him for any future films we might make. After all he was a working actor, always insecure in not knowing where the next job was going to come from.

For the first season of episodes, we edited off-line at Compass Productions while the on-line and sound work was completed at Paul Miller Post in Lexington Street. For all the seasons that followed, our base was in Camden Town; AirTV for visuals and Videosonics for audio recording and mixing. The only season when John wasn’t available to us was when we were mining films from Sir Lew Grade’s ITC library. Instead, we managed to hire Sir Anthony Quayle, which was ideal since he featured in several of the included films. This time round it was Tony who claimed he was apprehensive – since he was taking over from his friend John, who had now been established as the voice of Best Of British.

Most of the VO recordings were booked into small booths, since we didn’t record to picture. But for Tony, we were bumped to a dubbing theatre, so he was seated in a larger space facing a huge blank screen. Not even the fact that some X-rated scripts from a previous film recording session were left on the desk would throw him off track!

In fact, both of our narrators proved themselves keenly prepared and relished keeping to schedule. It helped that the scripts were kept to a minimum, mainly acting to setup a given film and give it context within an episode’s theme. Both of our stars were such an important part of the series’ success.

Delivery to the BBC was a relatively painless exercise, with approvals of content, both technical and artistic, and usually a formality. Two aspects, however, stood out from the first season. The first was the prohibitive standards the BBC set for colour standards. In particular, we noticed how the vivid Technicolor of 1940s films was neutered, brilliant hues flattened to conform with other shows on the channel. Specifically, we complained about the treatment of the marvellous Powell and Pressburger films, which demonstrated such a mastery of light and shade. At the time there was nothing we could do. For a show on BBC 1, those were the rules.

The other contentious issue arose concerning the completed horror episode, “Things That Go Bump In The Night”. ‘Horror’ being a somewhat exaggerated description for the ghost stories and eerie comedies made in the mid-20th century. Nevertheless, we were invited to Barry’s office in the business building opposite the BBC’s White City HQ, and informed that they had to make a few cuts in order to conform with the scheduled primetime timeslot. Apparently, it was just too intense and scary for mid-evening viewing. Our jaws dropped when we found that almost ten minutes had been savaged.

Nevertheless, it did teach us a specific edict from Barry that’s stayed with us ever since: no matter how precious you believe a sequence, scene or even a single moment might be in your creation, the viewer will only ever see the final version – ‘what an audience doesn’t see, the audience doesn’t miss’.

It's a quote we’ve often repeated to ourselves and collaborators on film and TV productions.

The BBC decided to schedule our series Wednesday evenings on BBC1 – which was good. The timeslot was 7:30pm, opposite the ITV soap juggernaut Coronation Street – was very bad! However, the viewing figures surprised everyone, especially us. We regularly achieved 5.5 million households, and even peaked at 7.2 million. A second season was a natural.

This time it was another 16 episodes, further mining the riches of the Rank library and covering a myriad of different topics. It was still through the BBC acquisition department, which meant money remained tight, but this added quantity meant we could establish our own company – and the grandly titled Best Of British Films & Television was born. Our small team was occasionally augmented over the years with assistants, yet in essence it remained the four of us. Indeed, season one was the only time we used an outside editor for the off-line creation of the episodes. The company purchased what we thought was high-tech equipment at the time– a VHS editing suite – on which we put the linear edits together and then laboriously had to handwrite timecode numbers to use in the on-line suite when the final program was mastered.

The whole process was extraordinarily time intensive, not just the physical process of viewing, editing, transferring, and mastering, but also in terms of mentally knitting together the eventual theme. Yet it was also highly rewarding, especially for us as lovers of film. It was also a learning experience from watching the skills of so many writers, directors, and skilled technicians over the years. Which is not trying to pretend that every movie was a classic, just that there were so many unexpected gems.

The comparative success of the series also led to an unexpected pleasure when an associate of ours, John Thompson, arranged a record deal with RCA for the theme music. We’d originally worked with an aspiring young composer Rob Waugh, on the newsreel documentary. For Best Of British, he came up with some electronic atmosphere pieces and music cues that could help bridge scenes. He also composed a strong title theme that even when constructed on synths had a powerful, filmic quality.

The record deal, however, allowed for an orchestral arrangement. A recording session was arranged at CTS Studios in Wembley, and it was a major surprise to walk into the vast studio to see 60 or more musicians from the National Philharmonic Orchestra belting out the reimagined theme. Conductor and arranger Nic Raine did a gorgeous job in transforming the electronic basics into a grandly eloquent piece, as well as a delicate love theme. It’s not an understatement to say it added another dimension to future episodes.

There were other add-ons alongside the first season. Sphere Publishing commissioned us to write a book that expanded on the films contained in the first 10 episodes and allowed us additional thoughts on the cinematic themes. Midway through the initial run, there were also two 45-minute specials of the long-running and popular BBC chat show Wogan which were dedicated to Best Of British. Terry Wogan hosted a number of stars including John Mills, Stewart Granger, Peter Cushing, Kenneth Williams, Virginia McKenna, Phyllis Calvert, Norman Wisdom and many others. Filmed at the Shepherd’s Bush theatre, it was a pleasure to meet some of the actors we had been watching and appreciating for so many months.

Completing the combined twenty-six Rank episodes led to further opportunities with other film libraries. Production-wise, we made 5 episodes from the London Films / Alexander Korda output, then 10 out of the ITC / Lew Grade productions and finally 26 from the EMI / ABC library which had collected rights from a variety of companies and was at the time owned by the Cannon Group. By the time we came to go into production on the last season, the Golan-Globus era at Cannon was beginning to flame and burn, leaving chaos in its wake. Luckily, the Weintraub Group, the American company that had bought the 2,000-film library, wanted to proceed with the deal we’d previously negotiated with the extravagant Menahem Golan.

An additional pleasure on the ITC season was historian and critic Leslie Halliwell joining the team as a consultant. Leslie was so many years the primary source for film buffs and the industry with his annually updated tomes Halliwell’s Filmgoers Companion and Halliwell’s Film Guide. He’d also been instrumental as a film buyer and programmer for Channel 4. In truth, his involvement with the season was not great and he could be a contrary collaborator with unflinching opinions, but for us Leslie was another iconic part of the British film industry, and it was our own tribute to his lasting influence.

By the time the final episodes were broadcast in March 1994, we’d produced a total of 67 episodes which encompassed the vast breadth of the British film industry between the 1930s and 1980s.

Exploring the libraries was a joy tinged with sadness. In the days before preservation was more commonly recognized as being so vital, the most desperate times for us was when we tracked down film reels in a forgotten warehouse only to discover the celluloid had disintegrated inside the cans. Where we were lucky and there were already transfers from films, it meant stacks of green 1” tape containers taken into the machine room, speeding back and forth through whirring tapes to find the sequences we needed – all the episodes were made way before modern digital technology.

In all cases, we worked on colour-correcting and restoring the clips to as close as we could to their original state. On films like The Day The Earth Caught Fire, for example, it meant discovering the original tinted opening and closing sequences. The pity was of course that BBC standards at the time had to be met, which meant cropped, pan & scan for movies with a widescreen aspect ratio.

The production process additionally inspired us over potential remakes. A particular memory was acquiring the rights from Rank’s Pinewood Studios offshoot to the now iconic 1957 Cy Endfield – Stanley Baker actioner Hell Drivers and showing the original to a group of associates in the Rank screening room. It was a pristine VistaVision print with crystal mono sound and marvellously atmospheric Geoffrey Unsworth photography.

Down in the smoky basement, it felt as if we had flipped back in time and were watching just as folk had in cinemas three decades previously.

With production of Best Of British finished (even though it would continue to be shown on the BBC for a further four years), we finally got our hands on a library that was beyond the realm of our family slot. Hammer Films came to us and wanted a series. In May 1990, we were making a further 13 episodes, utilizing the same thematic format, which were eventually shown after the watershed on UK’s Channel 4.

We managed to get Oliver Reed as narrator for The World Of Hammer and once again he was a pleasure to work with. The scripts had been sent in advance and he told us he’d been practising them in the bath at his Guernsey home – trying to perfect them, especially since he suffered from dyslexia. His rich tones added immeasurably to the episodes, whilst our friends at EMI Music Publishing suggested Brian Bennett as composer for the title music. He’d already enjoyed success as part of The Shadows, who came to fame with Cliff Richard, and a remixed track of his provided just the identity we wanted for the series.

It was a tough day with Oliver to get all the scripts completed and he told us he’s been tee-total for months in the run up to the recordings. The following day we heard he’d been somewhat exuberant in the recording studio’s local pub. We always hoped it wasn’t the pressures of the work that day had caused it.

Across the combined 80 episodes, the purest joy was viewing so many hundreds of British films – the reappraisals and discoveries, the diversity of talent and storytelling, the visual tapestry that afforded a view on social history as well as the dreams of successive generations.

Another special happening through the series was at the end of 1988, when the Museum Of Moving Image opened on the South Bank in London. As part of the permanent exhibits, we were asked to put a compilation together highlighting some of the films featured in our series. Since we had completed the Rank and Korda episodes by then and were already in production with the ITC season, it provided quite an extensive opportunity.

Using both the orchestral version of the Main Theme as well as the Love Theme adaptation, we put together a seven-and-a-half-minute montage. It was rewarding to see visitors passing through the entrance to the museum via a re-created old cinema and sit to enjoy the flickering fragments of the past. Since it was on repeat play, visitors often stayed to watch the piece more than once. It was a shame when MOMI closed ten years later. But during that time, Best Of British provided a purest glimpse of cinematic history.

Our hope is that the overall series communicated some of this excitement for film and perhaps even encouraged people to search out some of those hidden gems. We certainly didn’t make an academic study or pretended that it was critically comprehensive, yet even if just a few people found something rewarding, entertaining or even an appreciation of film history, then perhaps we were partly successful.

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