Shooting the Past (1999) s01e99 Episode Script

"Shooting the Past", there was a lot of reference to the past, hence the title, but um it was set now about people who he was suggesting lived in a kind of backwater of a nostalgic England.
It's in a sense, as you say, about this photographic exhibition these weird people looked after, that apparently nobody cared about or knew apart from specialists.
And, so, you had a gallery of eccentrics, although two of them were young and contemporary.
This character I played was an eccentric.
Tim Spall, whose extraordinary performance as Oswald, is all those characters who have an enormous amount of knowledge, never written a book, carrying it in their head, should really pass it on.
That sort of level of master and apprentice is gone out of professional life now.
So he is a living computer.
It's all in his head.
He makes all the connections with the lifelong knowledge he's got.
He's threatened with change and becomes impossible to deal with.
I think in the case of Oswald, the character I play, he keeps telling Lindsay's character, "I know I'm a shaggy, overweight buffoon, but I know the world, I know how it works.
" You keep thinking, "No.
He doesn't.
How can he?" He's been locked away in this bizarre museum nearly all his life.
He says if he loses his job he's not going to be able to work anywhere else.
You find that he does know how the world works.
He is an eccentric.
He is his own man.
He is, as he says, a shaggy buffoon.
But he is incredibly intelligent and he sets this trail eventually, having attempted suicide, which saves this museum.
That's the great thing about Stephen's characters.
He introduces them.
You think you know where they're going.
But he invariably surprises you with them.
He's both deeply sympathetic and deeply irritating.
I wanted to dramatise that.
I think that's very true of a lot of people that are used to working in their own ways and are threatened by a new process of working, or people that are younger than them who are more senior to them.
That situation is played out all over this country and all over Western society in the last 15 years, often to both parties being the losers.
Both the institution and the individual lose out very badly because it usually results in the brutal exit of the person who refuses to respond to change.
And that institution or organisation is without that wealth of knowledge, which is unreclaimable if, as in Oswald's case, it's all in his head.
It's lost for ever, that expertise.
It takes five people to fill his job.
Then they do it much slower.
"Shooting the Past" isn't about the history of photography.
It's about people and the world we live in.
But, without photography those stories wouldn't exist.
And you get a kind of adrenaline rush as Stephen delivers this this powerful piece of information to you, which is about the connections that tie people together.
That's why I think his stories are so compelling, and why they're, um they're inevitably irresistible for for actors.
We're approaching the wonderfully named Middleton Gate, which leads to the written archive of the British Broadcasting Corporation, housed in what looks like two meek little bungalows approached across the gravel path with a nice, neat privet hedge.
Little bay windows you expect Miss Marple to be staring out of.
And it looks like this is all there is, which is why I'm rather obsessed with this place.
You approach this wonderful door and you really do expect various Agatha Christie characters to pop up.
And, instead, you're greeted by a whole Tardis, a world which opens and opens and opens.
Hi.
Welcome back to the BBC's written archive centre.
Do come in.
Me again.
Right Do come to the reading room.
And this bungalow opens out into this enormous Tardis, this warren of rooms and Come on over and look at the cases here.
Yeah.
I remember this case.
It's fantastic.
You've looked at these before? This orange paper, this wonderful PVC orange paper of 1938.
Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess recommending Anthony Blunt to be hired.
"Mr Blunt is a reputable art critic and should be paid the maximum for this period.
" Fantastic.
Burgess was a BBC producer at that stage.
Two spies already helping each other out for a series, "At Home Today".
Wonderful.
We're still one of the most secretive societies on Earth.
North Korea possibly beats us but we are so secret.
There are all these tunnels in London full of archives.
People have stored things and merrily said that people can't see.
They've forgotten where a lot of the secrets are.
Hence, government secrets are found blowing along towpaths.
They've escaped through some orifice.
That's a very English set up.
Then we go through Past the old registry indexes.
We had a lot of these in "Shooting the Past".
These wonderful index boxes.
I'm glad you still use them.
And Ah! Thousands and thousands of "Radio Times"es.
Complete sets.
All the "Radio Times"es there've ever been.
We've marked out the one that relates to your earliest work for the BBC.
All right.
That's good.
Music to my ears.
I always like peering at "Radio Times"es.
There.
Is that the one? Right.
Yes, it went out too long ago to be accurate! 1977.
I was extremely young, I have to say.
Perhaps you might like to have a look.
Right.
Ah! Ah! I'd completely forgotten about that.
They had an article This is wonderful.
They had an article.
This is my first film for the BBC I wrote.
Here's a lovely big picture of the director, Michael Apted.
Once I'd got out of my head that it had been somehow written with me in mind When you say that to an actor, it's immediately flattering then you read it and think, "Oh, what do you think I am?" I thought it was a fantastic part but I had no idea how I was going to do it.
The character was completely original to me.
"Play for Today"! I grew up on the Wednesday play.
There it is.
"Play for Today".
Fantastic.
Yeah, I think it's probably This might well have been one, um Not long for this world, "Play for Today", when I started writing for the BBC.
But, anyway, there we are.
A huge contemporary film.
Huge in length, anyway! On BBC1, prime time.
An era as distant as the Edwardian era.
Would you like to come further down? "Shooting the Past" was written as a sort of experiment.
I became interested in how short scenes had become on television.
I thought, "Rightl I will slow television down to the point that it stops, "make scenes so long that they seem ridiculous, "and try to compel people in that way.
" Stephen never had any doubt about whether these long scenes would sustain in front of an audience.
They're quite terrifying to shoot.
I mean, I would happily shoot scenes like that for the rest of my career because they're really, really well written and it's like walking on a tightrope.
He creates these intricate, emotional characters that are from the world of unglamorous jobs or are from ordinary worlds, who are both ordinary but, within their interior life, extraordinary.
And, you He's one of the great dramatists, I think, of the old saying of "we've all got a story to tell".
But then something happens in the park.
We don't know what happened, but the mother decides they must leave immediately.
She goes first.
We're all capable of making huge assumptions about what people are like because of their appearance, their age, because of, you know, where they're from.
I think he just has a magnificent, subtle way of introducing the complexities of the human condition, without it ever being self congratulatory or in any way self conscious.
I'm always interested in characters which are trying to be individual and trying not to be dragged into just being little cogs in a world of mass culture.
That's a consistent theme for a lot of my work.
I believe that's what people are like.
As somebody who works in a mass medium like television a lot, people often patronise the audience, think they're not capable of being stretched, and do in their lives stretch themselves imaginatively.
That's what I often write about.
Although he has a very political mind, a very astute political mind, you never get a sense of it being rammed down your face.
Dramatically, you're always hit with it emotionally, the effects of what politics does to people, the cruelty of technology, redundancy and so forth.
Well, I think the world of archives, whether they're film archives like in "Hidden City", or photos like in "Shooting the Past", or a written archive like we're in now, they're all very fascinating places.
Physically, they're quite severe, like this place.
The material is boxed in compact ways because it has to be.
Then you literally open boxes and most extraordinary things appear, a fascinating route into the past.
Where we are, for instance, where we're standing, within three feet of us there are six or seven hair raising things.
Like here.
You know the contents of every box without reading the label.
Not every one.
No.
So, in here, there are the three fat brothers that committed a very bizarre murder with three apples and a crossbow.
Because life moves so fast now and we're told people can concentrate for less I'm not sure if that's true, but it's accepted wisdom for less long periods, because they've been bombarded by so much information.
Do we remember less? I don't know.
I think that's disputable.
Nevertheless, I think we want to record the past as much as possible because life's changing so much more quickly than it used to.
Technology's changing so quickly.
We want to keep our children's developments and film our parents.
There's a strong urge amongst people, as their parents get old, "I must get them on video, talking, because they might go.
" People couldn't do that 2O years ago.
He's attracted by odd things, like a photographic library.
About a whole group of people living out their lives almost, in this place which is both physically and culturally separate from the modern world that we live in but, of course, is profoundly connected to the world we live in.
You don't want more time? No.
I don't.
That is a surprise.
What do you want, then? I want you to buy the collection.
Me? Yes.
If you can enter other people's worlds, that's a prerequisite of being a writer.
I have always done that from a very early age.
"Shooting the Past", I didn't know anything about those libraries of photos until I started researching it.
So I was entering a world that I didn't know but that I felt some affinity with.
These things I'm constantly exploring.
I've written about science.
I had to understand it because I'm very unscientific.
It's always an exploration, but using things that are more immediate or buried inside one, trying to colour a world or make a world vivid using both research and also things that come more instinctively from inside.
I thought "Shooting the Past" was brilliant.
I thought it was a fantastic premise and idea and examination of modern values, in a way.
All those people protecting those photographs and a sense of history.
Everything is so disposable these days.
It's expedience everywhere.
People are only interested in what they can grab very quickly.
Experience them.
Another reason I wanted to make "Shooting the Past" was the fact that when a film camera looks at a photo for a split second, it's always interesting.
It's almost impossible not to be drawn to the image.
I was really interested in using that drama.
In documentaries, photos are used and you think, "I wished that one had stayed.
" It's rare to have a lot of photos in a drama.
They're usually used when police are watching and you go "click".
The freeze frame is normally how you see a photo.
Or a brief flurry of childhood photos and that's it.
In drama, the picture has to move, has to move.
I Part of this experiment of slowing down television was to use photos the mute image of a photo as a powerful, visual tool, but also something that has an insistent pace of its own.
I saw the first one and I was really excited and rang him.
I was excited for him because it was special.
I just did my work on it, learned the lines, obviously, thought a lot about the character, started speaking him.
Because Stephen didn't object to what I was doing, I presumed I was getting it right! At the end of the day, it turned out to be People seemed to accept it as being, you know, what I saw in the script, so completely unique.
I thought I'd just watch the first 20 minutes, and it was about 10.
30 in the evening.
And then I sort of finished it at 2.
30, completely gripped.
I turned the phone off.
We're all channel flickers, and so often you see telly which is very fast, twisty, sexy telly.
Cut! Cut! Cut! There's a dead body.
There's a car crash.
And it was sort of long enough to draw you in.
There were these big, long scenes, like a play.
Um And, er Which I think is terrific.
It's no bad thing if people can't You either switch it off or watch the whole thing entirely.
I think why we're all haunted by pictures is because they capture memories, which is always deeply appealing to us, a memory caught.
Also, a photo can be returned to and take on different shades, you notice things in it.
Depending on your mood, they change.
You can't respond to a moving picture in the same way.
You can handle it.
It's an object that you can handle.
So all those things make them very important objects.
It can be depressing because you look so young or so happy when you're miserable.
A loved one who's not with you any more.
They can be devastating objects as well as poignant or happy objects.