Saving The Film Industry

In 1993 I was invited to become chairman of PACT, the body that represents every film and television producer in the UK. Although my experience was limited to the small screen, I had to write to the membership setting out a strategy for helping both sides of the production spectrum.

TV was easy: as someone who’d left the north east after school and spent his entire career in London, I wanted to help my colleagues who’d remained in the regions. So we started a campaign that led directly to the BBC and Channel 4 quotas for programmes produced outside the M25: they exist to this day, and have resulted in thousands of hours of regional production.

Film policy was tougher to get my head around, because I knew nothing about the politics of the industry. I asked the chief executive of PACT, John Woodward, what British cinema needed most. He said simply, “More British films”. Apparently more than 95% of all films shown in UK cinemas were American. “What we need are tax incentives to bring money into UK film production”.

“Well, that’s easy”, I said naively, “all our MPs will find it appalling that we’re feeding our children a diet of American movies. It’s a cultural argument.”

John shook his head. It wasn’t as simple as it looked. The Conservatives had never looked kindly on film luvvies: many of our stars names were openly left of centre and frequently showed up at Labour fund-raising events. And the cultural argument was a non-starter: one only had to look at the isolationist French film industry, producing esoteric films at a huge cost in public subsidy. Nor could we use anti-American sentiment: our cinemas were controlled by the American distributors, so we had to carry Hollywood with us.

This needed to be a commercial, not cultural, argument. There were huge financial benefits to the economy from film production, and we had to convince the government that our industry was capable of making big profitable blockbusters as well as art house classics.

So one morning in 1994 John and I hosted a press conference in the Savoy Hotel, with Michael Winner on one side, Tim Bevan of Working Title on the other, and men in ties from Warner Brothers and Paramount nodding tacit approval; together we launched a campaign for tax breaks for British films.

It was the first time the entire film industry had come together with a united voice. But it took many years of lobbying and a change of government before the campaign succeeded. To persuade Gordon Brown, we produced a complex financial model that showed the economic benefits that would derive from a relatively modest tax concession.

We got our sums right. Since the breaks were brought in, the proportion of UK films shown in our cinemas has more than tripled to 17% and British films now contribute £4.3 billion a year to our economy.

So it’s not surprising there’s been such a universal outcry to the knee-jerk decision of the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to axe the body set up to make the whole thing work: the UK Film Council. Run by the very same John Woodward who masterminded our original PACT campaign, the organisation was set up in 2000 as the cornerstone of the revitalised industry. Since then box office takings have increased by 60%, and, more importantly, over 8% of that revenue has been spent on British “indie” films. Currently 44,000 people are directly employed in film, with a further 95,000 working on ancillary services. It’s a multi-billion industry that’s the envy of the rest of the world.

Now, thanks to one ill-judged government announcement, the future of British film is in jeopardy. It’s no wonder that stars, technicians and film-lovers everywhere are up in arms.

Getting High

[This week the Government rejected the report of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which concluded that marijuana is not as dangerous as Class B drugs, and should therefore remain as a Class C drug]

I rather envied my friends who smoked marijuana. Looking back at old photographs of myself at university, bearded with wild curly hair, I could easily have been taken for a pothead, sitting in a circle on a Flokati shagpile rug with Grateful Dead on the record player. Trouble was, when it came to the passing of the joint, I never knew quite what to do.

There was always some terrifying new-fangled way of smoking it: cupping it in your palm, up your nose, through a bong: every week a new gimmick. Petrified of being found out for the goody-two-shoes I was, at parties I dreaded this illicit game of Pass-The-Parcel and watched the thing approach with growing terror. In the end I turned round, put it in my mouth like a cigarette and took a surreptitious puff.

Then I waited for the euphoria, the relaxation, even a bit of cloud floating. Whilst my friends were giggling like maniacs, I went into the kitchen and unscrewed a bottle of Hirondelle. Half a glass of terrible red wine later, and I could really join the party.

Mind you, it wasn’t the smoking of the joint I found most scary so much as the thought that I might be asked to roll one. It looked straightforward enough: stick three Rizla cigarette papers together; fold up a bit of cardboard for a roach; mix some tobacco and marijuana toegether; then deftly roll the thing up with your thumbs. Like all my failed attempts at woodwork, I knew that if I tried the whole thing would go horribly wrong, disintegrate and set fire to the shagpile.

The truth is, I was the world’s worst hippy. Even when I spent my summer vacation in flower-powered California I never really felt part of the club, man. Maybe it was my terrible purple corduroys and striped brown polyester shirt; perhaps I had too many showers: I neither looked nor smelt the part. Frankly, I never saw what the fuss was about, for my brain stubbornly refused to intoxicate itself. Probably because, like Bill Clinton, I never learnt how to inhale.

Despite the accusations of drug-infused iniquity surrounding the television industry, I only ever once tried cocaine. That was on the night of my 40^th birthday when a very good friend of mine, who happens to be a fairly well-known comedian, decided that I really ought to give it a go.

It was 4am and after a very drunken party in a local restaurant about a dozen friends retired to my flat for a nightcap. After my glass coffee table was duly prepared, I did as I was told, snorted like a horse and ignored the assembled groans when I sneezed most of the remaining powder onto the floor. I waited: not a sausage. Until 9am, that is.

I had just crawled into bed when I had a strange, eery sensation that my entire bedroom was upside down. In a cold sweat I switched on the light.

It was real. The room was upside down. But it wasn’t the drug. The wardrobe, dressing table, armchairs and lamps had been upended – it was my comedian friend’s parting joke. That’s the closest I’ve ever got to a psychedelic high.

So I’m not the best person in the world to offer advice on the marijuana debate. However neither, I suspect, is Gordon Brown. I can’t imagine him rolling a “Saturday Night Special” when the Darlings pop round for supper. I guess that’s why the Government set up the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to review the status of cannabis — because they wanted real experts to tell us the true story.

Now they have: marijuana is far less dangerous and addictive than cigarettes and alcohol. But we knew that before, didn’t we? So why aren’t fags and beer classified as Class B drugs? Ask the taxman. And why has yet another expert report been ignored? Ask Gordon Brown.

Death of Jeremy Clarkson (almost)

Lord Goldsmith's proposal last week that the words of our national anthem should be changed to make it more “inclusive” has led to a spate of suggestions for national anthem replacements on the Downing Street e-petition website.

Although there is predictable support for Land of Hope and Glory and Jerusalem there are some radical proposals, including a spirited campaign for the theme from The Archers. At least we’ll all remember the words: “Rum te tum te tum te dum”.

The e-petition site is supposed to be a way of connecting our government with its electorate. I see that a few thousand people have signed an e-petition calling for the upgrading of the A1 north of Morpeth and a few more want the widening of the Western by-pass.

However you question the site’s value to the democratic process when you see that the sixth most popular proposal is “Make Jeremy Clarkson Prime Minister”. Why 26,000 people would waste their time voting for a man who single-handedly killed the jeans industry is beyond me.

Ten years ago, I very nearly killed Jeremy Clarkson. I’d created a television series called Robot Wars and Jeremy was the first presenter.

I knew the robots were dangerous. They had real axes, saws and other weapons of mass destruction and they were given names like “Panic Attack”, ”Razer” (sic!), and “Chaos”. Because members of the public had built them from second hand wheelchair motors and radio-controlled toy cars, they were notoriously unreliable. So, in order to stop stray robots running into the audience, we put up some Perspex screens round the stage.

I asked Jeremy to host the first series because his support for motorized metal mayhem was pretty close to the Robot Wars ethos. So he stood high above the carnage on a rostrum, making facetious comments about the little boxes below, which had taken grown men months to build, and less than two minutes to destroy.

The first day of shooting went fairly well, despite the fact that a lot of the robots had technical problems and we had to pull them onto the stage with fishing wire.

The second morning, just as we were getting into our stride, disaster struck. A robot being driven by a tearful eight year old was being carefully carved into tiny pieces by one of the house robots. Suddenly a circular metal blade (from a robot appropriately called “Dead Metal”) flew into the air at more than 200 miles an hour and embedded itself deep in a solid concrete wall just behind where Jeremy was standing.

When we studied the recording in slow motion, we found that the blade, rotating at a more than 6000 rpm, had missed the Clarkson scalp by less than two inches. With only a slight adjustment to the trajectory, the person now being proposed as our country’s leader would have been decapitated.

Of course within minutes the entire show had been shut down and it took a week for us to find enough bulletproof Perspex to seal off the auditorium from danger. The rest is history, except that Jeremy wisely decided his life was more valuable than our second series, and went back to abusing Skodas.

Clarkson’s profile has grown over the years, but somehow I can’t see his fan club getting far with their campaign. In fact, I doubt that Downing Street takes any notice of its e-petition site at all, certainly not enough to listen to a few thousand people trying to get the North East a decent motorway to link it with the rest of the world.

But here’s a solution. Instead of wasting valuable time on the government’s site, people who want us to have a road infrastructure for the 21st century might do a lot worse than to send a petition to Jeremy Clarkson himself. After all, with six million adoring Top Gear fans, he’s probably got more clout than the real prime minister.