Before the first Paralympics, there was the Seventh World Wheelchair Games in 1984, held at Stoke Mandeville and filmed for Channel 4. Making a sports documentary on videotape then involved a great deal of improvisation and luck, carting around heavy 1" video recorders strapped to customised shopping trollies, shooting the marathon precariously out of the back of a moving car. They were dangerous but exciting times!
When domestic camcorders arrived on the market, no-one at the BBC believed we could make television programmes from videos shot by members of the public. There were strict men in sandals working in the BBC TV Centre basement who said it simply couldn't - wouldn't - happen.
It did happen, awards were won and the Video Diaries and Teenage Diaries - and later Video Nation - were labours of love. Producers and editors wrangled hundreds of hours of footage into highly crafted, unfolding stories that seemed somehow real.
Nowadays, these projects might be shot on 4k phones, but then all analogue. Rachel (right) is at a campfire, with her mother, who lived as a hippy traveller. Rachel recorded her life on her camera as it happened, in a way that a crew could never have done.
Chris Needham, spent most of the time in his bedroom, riven by angst and anger. He finds expression through some terrible but brave musicianship. Two teenagers asking the same question. Who am I?
The experimental documentary, Language Lessons, (left), was made with Steve Hawley for Channel 4 in 1995. It explores the world of artificial languages and the men and women who use them. The film has been shown extensively around the world.
More recently, Stranger Than Known: South Home Town (right, 2015) was selected for the Independent Film Festival in New York. Again created with Steve Hawley, filmed messages from soldiers abroad, in a kind of early Skype, were combined with super slow motion footage of Southampton.
My father, Leo, was stationed near Wolverhampton with fellow Dutch men and women during the Second World War. There he met a teenage girl living locally, who was desperate to leave home. She was my mother.
Two years later he married Peggy, who became a qualified truck driver for the Dutch Red Cross. They criss-crossed the front line, meeting up on weekend leave, as the Allies recaptured Belgium and then Holland. The Love Beyond Borders film took years to make and is part memorial to my parents, part autobiobiography.
The slums of Mathare in Nairobi are the second largest in Africa and there's just one toilet for every 500 people. In The Last Taboo (2012) Jeff Ochieng and others guide us through the chaos of living there, and show how and why contaminated food and water kills.
The film then reveals that Community Led Total Sanitation is a technique to educate about the dangers of open defecation, shattering superstitions and taboos that perpetuate the lack of hygiene. The film has won awards for an unflinching approach to talking about s**t.
In the summer of 2018, the first national Pride event was staged in Ryde, and the Pride UK film was made for BBC South's Inside Out strand. Shot over several days with a mixed crew of students, graduates and professionals organised through Solent Productions.
Contributors were able to tell their LGBTQ+ stories for the first time, celebrating the tolerance and diversity of the Isle of Wight, countering the stereotype of an island behind the times.
People Media UK have made several films for BBC1's One Show since 2022. Refugee Choirs. Dementia. Veterans, Tiger Rescue. Polar Bears. Yorkshire Dialects, Electric Cars, Badger, Modern Archaeologists, Detectorists, Foragers, Refugee Boxers and on and on.
Filmed across the UK, these small stories with a universal appeal compress their characters and emotional engagement into four and a half concentrated minutes.
As media technology becomes smaller and more sophisticated, multi-skilling is inevitable - and great fun. And diverse topics sustain the appeal of factual programme making, allowing privileged access into worlds for a short time. Always fascinating with plenty to learn about life.
With digital kit came much more functionality. This meant less people doing more things. So, directing and producing often included second camera operation, and monitoring of the pictures could easily be done on a handheld mobile phone via bluetooth, which doubled as a notepad and location stills camera.
But smaller crews often made life more interesting and adding presenters into the mix, as was often the case with BBC's The One Show, meant lively banter. Hannah Stitfall was a joy to work with on natural history shorts, and they always had a sense of drama at their heart, especially with wild animals such as tigers and polar bears.
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