The Accidental Coca Lord

Chapter 3 part 1

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The BBC

If at first you don’t succeed, cheat and lie

In my early twenties I sent off a package of my best otter images to Kurt Mutchler, a picture editor at National Geographic. I’d read the staff listings at the front of the magazine and randomly plucked poor Kurt’s name out. I heard nothing back, of course, and despite numerous expensive phone calls across the pond, only managed to get Kurt on the phone for less than a minute, only to be summarily dismissed by him.

Eventually, four months later, my transparencies arrived back through the letterbox, with an accompanying letter from Kurt, telling me that my images were shit and to fuck off. To be fair those weren’t his exact words, but knowing Kurt as I do now, they were the exact words he was thinking. (Kurt gave me my fist full assignment for the magazine twenty years later. Otters, of course. He’s still a sweary motherfucker.)

This made me put my dreams of becoming a National Geographic photographer on hold and concentrate on becoming a wildlife cameraman for the BBC instead. Television was a far more accessible industry and provided consistent, well-paid work. I’d had some success and a few odd jobs since filming the otter underwater, but nothing substantial. Competition to get into wildlife filmmaking was fierce back then. The BBC generally required a first in zoology from Oxford or Cambridge, and I understood clearly that, despite my ability to dovetail two bits of wood, my woodwork GCSE wasn’t going to cut it. I’d have to pull something special off if I was going to break in, something to get me noticed and stand out from the hundreds of other far more qualified middle-and upper-class white guys.

I realised the value of being present, though, and as I lived just up the road from the BBC I made it my mission to bother the shit out of everyone, as often as I could. I became extremely adept at talking my way through security, which allowed me to stalk the offices of the Natural History Unit and accidently bump into producers. They’d always be in a hurry, but nonetheless I’d pester them, trailing along the corridors pitching my latest ideas.

One day I made it my mission to walk past Keith Scholey’s office as many times as I could until eventually I accidently bumped into him. He was the head of the Natural History Unit back then, and I managed to slow him down and present him with a picture I’d taken. It was a dull 10×8 print of a chair in a river. On it sat a television set. Inside this was a kingfisher catching a fish. It was badly lit, badly composed and the set design was shocking. I’d just smashed up a TV, filled it with fish and persuaded a kingfisher to dive into it. Everything about the image was awful, except the concept, which Keith immediately got.

Keith dragged me off to see his sidekick Alastair Fothergill. I stood quietly by while the silverbacks mulled over my picture. Alastair saw something in the image too, and both agreed that they’d get back to me but didn’t really say what for. I was excited, of course, but assumed that would be the last I’d hear of it.

The image was awful but the idea apparently had something.

A few months later I was surprised to get a call from Alastair; he explained that they wanted to use the concept to create a new title sequence for Wildlife on Two. Wildlife on Two was a series based on re-runs of the long running strand Wildlife on One. The shows were to be moved from BBC One over to BBC Two and needed a title sequence to rebrand them. The graphics department had, apparently, already storyboarded a fifteen-second slow-motion sequence of a kingfisher diving into a TV set to catch a fish and they wanted a meeting with me the following week. I begged Alastair to explain what my involvement in the project would be, but he just brushed me off, telling me that it was in the hands of the graphics department. I was concerned – it was my idea and I had to shoot it. The only problem was that I’d never shot 16mm film before and nobody was going to even consider me if I hadn’t.

I’d been doing the odd bit of work logging other people’s footage back then for a small independent production company called Partridge Films. I was hopeless at it, as I couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes, so I’d just wander around annoying everyone and getting told off instead. The day after the BBC conversation I managed to get a meeting, way above my pay grade, with Michael Rosenberg, the boss of Partridge Films. I explained to him excitedly that I had a golden opportunity to film kingfishers mating, which would fit perfectly in to a sequence he needed for a film he was making.

‘Have you ever used a film camera?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ I lied.

He told me to go away and do a budget, which I promptly did. It came to about £1,600 and included a hire car, my day rate, film and hire of a film camera system. Michael was hesitant, but after a little enthusiastic persuading he approved it. He gave me a lecture on not fucking it up, and I assured him I wouldn’t.

Filming kingfishers mating was a lie. I had no intention of even attempting it. The money was what I needed, to hire a 16mm film camera to practise on before my meeting with the BBC. The following day I went to the BBC hire department to rent an Aaton Super16 camera. It was an expensive and delicate piece of equipment that you needed training to operate. I lied confidently that I knew how to use it and eventually walked out the door with it. I then offered my friend, a young cameraman, a big bag of weed if he’d spend some time showing me how it worked. He agreed, and I filmed him on my little video camera showing me how to load film into it and how to operate the buttons. It was pretty complex, so I went home and watched the video back and practised loading the film into it over and over again. The following day I drove out to my river; got into my hide and started filming everything that moved – ducks, dippers, wrens, sparkly water and kingfishers, but none of them mating, of course.

A few days later I went back to Michael, sheepishly pretended to apologise and got an ass-kicking as expected. The following morning I dressed smart and went for my meeting with Rachael from the graphics department of the BBC. I arrived on time with washed hair and clean teeth. Rachael was smart and pretty, and we got on straight away. She asked me whether I’d ever shot film before and I proudly opened my laptop to show her some of my footage, only to discover that my flatmate Bisley had kindly stuck a GIF of a woman being loudly fucked by three men onto my home screen. He’d also locked it there so I couldn’t do anything on my computer. We moved on from that to the VHS of the boring footage I’d shot of kingfishers not mating. Suitably impressed, she gave me the job. The sequence was to be fifteen seconds long, the budget £15k.

The shot involved using the slow-motion Locam camera I’d assisted Rod Clarke using when he and I had filmed kingfishers hunting baby eels a few years previously. It was a wonderful but absurdly complicated piece of engineering; able to shoot 16mm film at 500 frames per second – super slow motion. It was a pain in the arse to load with film, and if you got it even slightly wrong it would explode. At top speed the camera could burn through a 400-foot roll of film in around thirty-four seconds, which was terrifying, as to buy and process that roll back then cost about £250.

It took two weeks to shoot the sequence. The camera running at top speed required full sunlight to expose the film properly, which meant days waiting for clouds to clear, while watching the kingfishers diving in and out of the television set tank we’d made. When conditions were good the birds would be put off diving by the camera, which took about a second and a half to get up to speed and made a loud whirring noise. This meant I burned hundreds of pounds’ worth of film just getting them used to the noise. When they did finally accept it, I needed to anticipate them diving and hit record before they left the perch, to get the camera to speed. It meant having lightning-fast reactions, which my mate Pete undermined by constantly passing me joints in the hide.

Once Rachael had edited it and branded the titles on, it looked amazing. I’d replaced the kingfisher’s usual perch with a television aerial, which it dived off before hitting the water and appearing inside the television set to grab an unsuspecting minnow. As the kingfisher erupted back out of the water with its prey, the Wildlife on Two title appeared in the TV. Alastair and Keith loved it, and it went on to run weekly on BBC Two for years, as did my affair with Rachael. She was thirty-seven, I was twenty-three.

Despite the clammy handshake I gave Keith Scholey in the interview, he awarded me the BBC Natural History Unit cameraman bursary 1998. Seven thousand people had applied for the full-time two-year contract, but my kingfisher title sequence got me the job. The aim of the bursary was to bring on young promising cameramen to fill the spaces of the old guard, who were starting to thin out a little. For my first year I was signed over to Living Britain, a so-called ‘landmark series’ pitched as a ‘celebration’ of Britain’s landscapes and wildlife. Of course, anything described as a ‘celebration’ meant it had no narrative and thus no purpose; it simply wandered around the remoter parts of Britain not saying much, just gurgling, really, like a confused drunk. It looked good, though, like an empty jigsaw box.

Despite the often unexciting sequences assigned to me, I was shooting film from day one, which was hugely important for a novice cameraman, as the cost of film cameras and the film itself was what held most people back. I was given boring subjects at first, low-cost, low-responsibility sequences that would be wasted on the established cameramen. But luckily Peter, the series producer, was so bad at running a budget that it soon dwindled, which meant I was awarded sequences way above my paygrade. I did well, taking on the otter and kingfisher sequences, of course, but more importantly I always seemed to get lucky and bring home something special with which to wow the bosses. My brand of professionalism seemed to always be in question, however.

Being the embodiment of an entitled, privileged little shit who’d been given too much praise by his mother, I very quickly became proudly rebellious, chaotic and arrogant. As a consequence I treated the BBC like school – a place of authority where I would exaggerate every instruction I was given by my bosses into tyranny so that I could rally against them with enormous struggle and drama. I constantly seemed to be in trouble with human resources and always did badly in my assessments.

I remember one producer, Phil Hurrell, a nice guy, coming up to me in the underground car park of the BBC. ‘Charlie, can we have a quiet word?’ he asked in serious tones.

‘Of course,’ I replied.

‘I’ve been hearing from a few people, producers mainly, that you’re getting a reputation as, well, unprofessional.’ He looked sincere in his delivery and I nodded politely to acknowledge him.

‘Well, fuck those people,’ I replied.

He kind of smiled at me in a resigned way. ‘That’s what I mean,’ he concluded.

I was perpetually stoned. My dawn shoots would often start late in the morning because I’d drunk and smoked so much the night before. I remember a young green assistant called Mark McEwan being sent up to the Kyle of Lochalsh to help me. I picked him up, handed him a joint in the car and drove him across to the Isle of Skye to go filming. Ten days later I remember slumping over a burger in the Little Chef near Spean Bridge on the drive home, barely able to speak, then staggering to the toilets and throwing up from exhaustion.

It was grotesque unprofessionalism but it was a hugely successful shoot. Along with the shots of otters hunting, sea eagles fishing and the gorgeous red deer, we fluked a sequence from the Texaco petrol station car park in Broadford of northern bottlenose whales erupting out of the water and breaching in slow motion. It was the first time the species had ever been filmed and the footage became the key sequence of the series. All my trips ended up being the same. I’d choose assistants who were mates, and we’d just smoke and drink. We were perpetually stoned and doing so much coke that we’d be waking up with blood on our pillows. Then we’d go out shooting otters all day. I shot killer whales in Shetland for Springwatch completely wasted and appeared on screen in the same state.

In the next instalment I head to Kenya to work on Big Cat Diary and screw up my first major filming event.