A Sort of Career

A couple of weeks ago I celebrated, if that’s the right word, 39 years working in broadcasting, 33 of them for the BBC and the rest as a freelance. I started on the bottom rung of the ladder as a Technical Assistant, grade D. Within 3 weeks I’d been regraded to OP1 on a scale that went to OP10. I reached OP5 before transferring into the management structure at MP3. In later years I was a 4J6M and then a Band 9. None of this made sense to anyone involved other than those working in the Personnel Department (a term used before people became a mere commodity to be administered by Human Resources). No doubt there was a whole floor of highly-paid individuals at Broadcasting House dedicated purely to dreaming up and implementing grading structures within the Beeb.

For 26 years I’ve been lighting television productions. There are few genre that I’ve not stuck my toe into although my speciality was drama; I held out for a long time before I was forced to work on light entertainment shows with their nasty up-beat songs and jokey presenters and as for sit coms, I avoided them like the plague; the few I was offered I managed to pass on to junior colleagues so they could gain experience. Underhand? You bet, but it maintained my sanity.

So any drama production, if it was deep, dark and melodramatic, was right up my street. Some of my favourite scenes – a woman crying at a window, a man sobbing under a prison bunk, two men fighting in blazing sun through a French window, Shakespeare attempting suicide. If I say so myself, they were gems of the lighting designer’s art.

Although I specialised in gloom, there must have been occasional bursts of levity. I just can’t remember any of them. I thought I had one a moment ago, the wedding of Amelia and George in the BBC’s 1987 production of Vanity Fair. However, thinking back, I realize that I filled the church with mist and kept it sombre to reflect the desperation of their situation, marrying on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo.

So darkness prevailed. Is it reflected in other realms of my life? I hope not. I admit I’m fond of funereal music but I’m also very taken with laughter. I like to work in a light, humorous atmosphere, where only the actual image making is taken seriously; everything else should be as fun as it possibly can be. That is my mission in life. Let jollity prevail. However please don’t bring on any clowns. I can’t be doing with them; they’re far too weird.

If I’d been working for 70 years or was having my 70th birthday or had started work in 1970, then the following image would have some relevance. However none of those things are true. It’s just a reflection shot that appealed to me while I hung around outside a department store waiting for Pixie to emerge, a not uncommon activity on my part.