Old Dog New Tricks
I’m trying to learn to roll my kayak but I’m not very good at it. I took up white water kayaking as a slightly bizarre compensation for not being able to pedal my bike due to ongoing back problems. Working from home all day, i wanted a hobby where I’d spend time with other people, I was bored of my own company. I suspect its typical of my need to constantly challenge what convention suggests I should be doing.
Convention suggests I should be taking gentle walks with the dogs, resting not testing my constantly nagging back. Convention can do one.
But I have to confess, this particular skill, the skill of rolling the kayak and righting it again from being upside down under the water is eluding me. I’ve spent every Friday night for the last 4 week’s capsizing then failing to un-capsize (or whatever the reverse is, mainly trying not to drown/run out of air). There’s a small voice in my head muttering that perhaps I am too old, scarred, inflexible, just not good enough at this sport to learn how to do this. A small voice in my head is muttering that this old dog might be beyond learning this new trick. I am swithering over whether to give up and stick to what I know (and as a result not really be able to push myself to experience more difficult grades on more challenging rivers) but, sticking to what I know has never been terribly appealing, even if that means my spending Friday nights upside down trying not to drown.
And it’s the same when it comes to programme making. There’s a comfort in sticking to what you know. Finding a format you know works and will deliver on your promises makes life easy, as programme makers the path of least resistance has significant appeal.
When it came to finding a format for Hidden in Plain Sight, our new drama-documentary series funded by the Audio Content Fund and made in collaboration with Ullapool Museum, it would have been easy to make a straightforward history documentary, weave experts with a bit of location recording, use a score of Highland music and baddaboom, you’ve got your series. But where’s the fun and creativity in that? What we wanted to do something different and challenging, something which would make the audience engage and have to do some work, come up with a format which would push the audience between the past and present, to acknowledge that no decision in history is simple, to push us to see the decision makers who change the course of history as human beings, albeit flawed ones.
It was really the list of characters that emerged from the research being done by the Lost Inverlael project which sparked our imagination. Siobhan Beatson at Ullapool Museum has a wonderful way of making you connect to people from the past. As soon as she started describing young Anna Fraser, the 14-year-old married off to Hector Munro of Foulis as part of a land deal in order to breed heirs, you could feel Anna’s fragility and vulnerability; Siobhan’s empathy and passionate interest in George Steuart Mackenzie of Coul who sparked the clearance at Inverlael and her understanding that Minister Ross of Clachan Church must have been a conflicted and complex man, gave each character shape and form. They stopped being historical footnotes and instead started to walk the landscape again.
So that’s what we decided to do. To have the characters which Siobhan and the other team members working on the project has discovered, come to life. To place them somewhere between the present and the past, a twilight zone where they could reflect on their own lives but also, potentially, hear us putting flesh on their bones. In order to put that flesh on their bones we enlisted the help of writer Chris Dolan – a superb dramatist who I’ve worked with many times over the years and has a wonderful gift for creating characters which walk, fully formed, off the page in only a sentence or two. Chris came and walked the hillside up above Inverlael with Duncan Mackenzie – a descendent of the clearances who started the whole Inverlael project off - he started listening intently to the stories Duncan and the other historians told and slowly the 8 characters we needed for the series came to life.
Once we had Chris working on the drama side, Dan and I gathered and edited interviews with historians into a focussed narrative then passed it all back to Chris for him to weave with his characters. The end result is unusual, ear-catching and fresh. The characters really do seem to leap out of history into the present, they re-inhabit the landscape they left 2 centuries ago or more in a way that is hard-edged, powerful, they have a voice which feels relevant and contemporary.
So, what does it take to try new tricks, to be bold and step out into the unknown? Trust becomes your currency – you’ve got to trust your instinct as a programme maker that you won’t make an arse of it, trust to the process you’ve spent years honing but you’ve also got to gain the trust of the people around you – the actors, the writer, the commissioning team, you need them to trust you too, so they feel safe in your creative hands. Nothing is more unnerving for an actor or writer than to feel that you’re playing free and loose at their expense, you need to have them come with you on this, to trust that you’re going to do something exciting and special rather than leave egg on anyone’s face or in their ears.
Being honest you also have to be prepared for it to not work. There’s a danger in messing with something you know works perfectly well without your fussing and I’d be lying if I didn’t fess up to making a dog’s breakfast of plenty of perfectly good stories in the past. But unless you try and fail, you never get to work out why it failed and what else might work.
Hidden in Plain Sight has pushed our creativity in so many directions, but we’re chuffed with the result and recognising how good trying something new and succeeding has made us feel has made my mind up.
Stuff convention, stuff comfort. This particular old and battered dog has just booked herself onto a kayak rolling clinic weekend at Glenmore Lodge…and it will require lots of trust, lots of confusion over the direction of travel, plenty of fear of failure and floundering out of my comfort zone. I can't wait...