The Shetland Folk Festival is one of the world's most exotic events with a hard earned reputation as the festival where nobody sleeps.
Celebrating its 30th birthday, a hundred folk-musicians from as far afield as New York, Mumbai and Stockholm descend on the islands for four days and 200 performances, aided by 700 volunteers. With non-stop music from before the ferry leaves Aberdeen until the moment the visiting musicians return.
Directed: Brian Ross
Produced: John Archer
Greg Hemphill takes a sideways look at some remarkable documentary films. Between 1938 and 1982 over a hundred and fifty films were made to sell Scotland to the world and tell Scots themselves about their own country.
The first Films of Scotland were made for the 1938 Empire Exhibition. Rare colour film shows how magical the exhibition was for the children of depression-scarred Glasgow. The seven amazing films made especially for the exhibition showed audiences something they'd not seen before - real people in real places, from the remote Highlands to the shipyards of Dundee. As well as stunning extracts from these early films, we hear from people who remember the Empire Exhibition, and from a pupil featured in one of the original documentaries.
Directed and produced by Clara Glynn and John Archer
Hollywood actor Brian Cox is a son of Dundee. It's the big constant in his life. He grew up amid the clatter of the Jute mills, where both his parents began their working lives. The Jute trade, making hessian from India’s ‘golden’ fibre, dominated Dundee for over a century, linking it with Calcutta. Now it is fast becoming a memory. This documentary is a journey into Brian Cox’s own past, and on to Calcutta in the footsteps of the Dundee Jute workers who left to seek their fortunes in India.
Director: Brian Ross
Producer: John Archer
Review:
Scotland is the only region that is making a distinct identity for itself on television at the moment. There is a little age of reason on television across the Tweed, and this week it was led by the actor Brian Cox, who made a really interesting and unusual and rather beautiful documentary, Brian Cox’s Jute Journey, linking Dundee to Calcutta. The jute made the sack that the empire came in, but it was wrapped up and made obsolete by the ubiquitous plastic bag. Dundee was always known as the city of jute, jam and journalism. Today, it’s smack, crack and prostitution.
Living Lockerbie - The Media To mark the 20th anniversary, an examination of how the media reacted to Britain's worst terrorist attack - the Lockerbie Air Disaster - and how events in 1988 and 1989 changed the way the media behaves in disaster situations. With extensive archive from the time and including interviews with Lockerbie residents and some of the media who covered the story and then worked with them to find a better relationship between those covering a story – and their victims.
Living Lockerbie - Memorials On the 20th anniversary a look at some of the positive memorials created since 1988 to honour the 270 people who died in Britain's worst terrorist attack - the bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie. Interviewees include people in Lockerbie who have worked to remember the disaster, and the relatives who want to remember the missing.
Director / Producer: John Wallace
Editor: Cassandra McGrogan
Executive Producer: John Archer
Thomas Fraser, Shetland fisherman and closet country music star, fell in love with country music listening to US Forces radio in World War 2. When electricity came to his island of Burra in 1953 he bought himself a tape recorder and recorded hundreds of songs. When he died in 1978 he was unknown outside Shetland. Thirty years later a clutch of posthumously released CD’s have lead to him being acclaimed as ‘the most important figure in British country music.’ His friends, family and admirers tell his story.
Producer: John Archer
Director: Brian Ross
Review in the Scotsman:
SHETLAND LONE STAR
Published Date: 21 December 2008
By Mik Duffy
BBC2 Friday, 10pm
SEVEN years ago, during his hilarious but sadly short-lived Channel 4 show, Armando Iannucci posited a special afterlife for Scottish TV viewers. There we’d finally be allowed to see the networked programmes which had been yanked from our screens over the decades to provide Lebensraum for that Dougie Donnelly chat-show and other impossibly dreary regional quota-fillers.
Still, though no one’s about to mistake River City for The Sopranos, the phrase “except for viewers in Scotland” doesn’t quite carry the same chill it once did. This is partly due to the digital revolution. Hard-drive recorders and the BBC’s iPlayer have made chasing down programmes dislodged by the stirrings in Shieldinch a far less frustrating endeavour. More to the point, recent homegrown fare seems to be exhibiting a hitherto unprecedented sense of technical confidence and cultural pride, qualities the sublime BBC Scotland offering Shetland Lone Star had in abundance.
Charting the life of Thomas Fraser, a shy Shetland Islander whose unlikely recordings of country and western songs have earned him posthumous acclaim, this was a truly marvellous documentary. A gifted musical polymath who grew up idolising the country pioneer Jimmie ‘The Singing Brakeman’ Rodgers, Fraser spent his days working as a fisherman and his nights recording his own cover versions of country and western standards. And, though his native Isle of Burra could scarcely be further removed from the American West, Fraser’s feel for the genre was undeniable. Now, some 30 years after his passing, his primitive but impossibly evocative reel-to-reel recordings have been released on CD, prompting rapture from critics, kudos from the Nashville country establishment and bemusement from those who knew him.
Friends and relatives painted a picture of a painfully shy man who, though sanguine about the risks of fishing in tumultuous seas, was too self-conscious to play in public. His daughter, May, relayed the tale of how he overcame stage-fright at his sister’s wedding by playing from within the safety of a closet. Fellow musician Robbie Cumming recalled how Fraser’s solitary night-time yodelling could be heard echoing across Burra, a private ritual which seems to have been the closest the Hank Williams of the Shetland Isles ever came to a public performance. Elsewhere, aficionados who know Fraser only through the recordings he left us, waxed ecstatic about his astounding musical prowess.
Given such rich subject matter, even the most dimwitted of filmmakers could easily have crafted a compelling documentary. Thankfully, the makers of Shetland Lone Star opted for a more imaginative approach, combining Fraser’s beguiling music with some equally accomplished visuals.
The lovingly photographed island vistas suggested a link between the choppy seascapes of the north and the vast expansive spaces of the American plains. The linking graphics mimicked the warm familiarity of a well-worn map, while Fraser’s extraordinarily moving rendition of ‘Over The Rainbow’ was accompanied by the sight of musical notation floating against a serene backdrop of rolling clouds. The overall effect was joyous. And, in a long overdue reversal of historical tradition, it was viewers south of the Tweed who were being denied the week’s most gloriously accomplished programme.
The full article contains 1017 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
A documentary for BBC Scotland celebrating Alasdair Gray’s seventieth birthday. Alasdair Gray is multi-talented - one of Scotland’s greatest living writers, painter of portraits and ambitious work yet, the ceiling of Oran Mor arts centre in Glasgow. In this elegant and imaginative film Gray reflects on his life to date and comes face to face with his harshest critic - himself.
Director: Kevin Cameron
Producer: John Archer
The four great cooling towers at Chapelcross have dominated the local landscape for fifty years. Their demolition was an emotional event, particularly for those who had helped build them.
Winner Best Factual Programme Royal Television Society North East
Director: John Wallace
Producer: John Archer
Stephen Joyce has never heard a sound since birth. He’s never heard his child laugh - or cry. Throughout his life he’s fought to overcome every obstacle in his silent world, but now he faces his greatest challenge as his condition, Usher Syndrome, delivers its cruellest blow. It’s a moment that touches our darkest fears.
“Losing My Senses spurned all facile melodrama in quietly telling its tale and was thus all the more inspirational. When life next throws an obstacle in your path, no matter how apparently major, think of Stephen Joyce’s steady progress towards whatever lies ahead of him and vow to walk in his footsteps.” David Belcher, The Herald.
Director: Sarah Howitt
Producer: John Archer
David Gillanders is an internationally acclaimed photojournalist. Artworks follows him from the mean streets of Glasgow’s east End where he documents the city’s knife crime, to the Ukraine where he is on a mission to bring the hellish underground existence of the country’s street kids to the world’s attention.
The film looks at the background to David’s UNICEF photograph of the year.
Short-listed for Best Arts Programme at the 2007 Celtic Media Festival and winner of a Special Commendation in the 2007 Commonwealth Broadcasting Awards in the Human Rights category sponsored by Amnesty International.
Director: Zam Salim
Producer: John Archer
The film explores the transitory nature of this underground sport and its relationship to contemporary car culture, the traditions of gypsies and their relationship with horses. The race involve a group of travellers in a rolling roadblock on motorways and dual-carriage, while two trotting horses, with sulkies and riders, run a very fast race lasting a couple of minutes on the road. Bets have been placed, large sums of money exchange hands, travellers come from miles around, the police turn a blind eye.
Director: Clio Barnard
Producer: Charlotte Wontner