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It’s been a month since I wrote my last blog. The time has flown by in a giant jumble of family, friends, travel and DIY. However, all good things must come to an end and in this case they are being replaced a with great new challenge. As of next week I start at Raw TV as an Executive Producer. It’s big job with brilliant people and lots of scope and I’m delighted and daunted in equal measure.
My Dad in customary pose taking pictures in Harris
Despite the precarious nature of being a freelance Series Producer, one of the benefits (especially if you have your next contract lined up) is being able to take long breaks. In all I’ve had six weeks off and it’s been utterly memorable. After returning from France in what Jen and I reckon was one of our best ever holidays, I spent just a day to in London before heading north to the Hebrides with my Dad. The Maynard and Maynard tour of the Highlands is becoming something of an annual event. My father is an astounding ninety years old in February so these are precious journeys. Last year we circumnavigated Scotland but this time we concentrated on family and friends in Lewis and Harris.
Grandson Drew delights at tiddlywinks victory. Great Grandfather Archie is overcome.
I detected a positive vibe to the islands that I hadn’t felt for many years. There are some inspiring examples of young people returning to the islands and getting on with plasterboard and projects. Nickolai and Beka Globe have made a fantastic new space for their pottery and photography at their converted Mission House Studio. And my old friend Ruraidh Beaton continues to build the legend of Am Bothan in his magical bunkhouse in Leverburgh. The advent of the long overdue Sunday Ferry and the reduction in ferry fares to the Islands through the Scottish Parliament’s revolutionary Road Equivalent Tarrif (RET) initiative have had an enormous impact on tourism. The roads were busier than I’ve ever seen them, lots of cars with surfboards on the roof and ever more dreaded camper vans in their wake. Ah well progress always comes at a price.
Laura surfs at Traigh Mhor
Talking of progress, my last day on the Island was spent at the helm of the Jubilee, sailing out of Loch Stornoway as the new Sunday ferry steamed past…bizarre. The Jubilee is fully restored 80 year old ‘Sgoth’ that I last sailed fifteen years ago. It’s another sign of renaissance in the Islands. The Jubilee, which was one of the island’s last serviceable traditional wooden sailing boats is now one of a fast growing number of this class of boat being built sailed regularly by locals and visitors alike.
Hand on the helm of the jubilee
Returning to London, I concentrated on getting the new kitchen installed interspersed with lots of catching up with friends in London. Amongst the highlights was the launch of Phil Stebbing’s massively ambitious ‘Lifeline’ project in Hyde Park. Phil is trying raise funds to send three teams of people around the world. Their mission is to meet others who are trying to live sustainably and build a Digital Ark filled with the secrets of sustainability. I did say it was ambitious.
The lifeline launch in Hyde Park
Another memorable event was going to the one day England V Australia cricket match. Even to a relative newcomer to the game it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t a brilliant match, and England got soundly beaten. But nonetheless, great company, good weather and enough beer to last a lifetime more than compensated for the poor performance.
Cricket at Lords
So that’s it. The holidays are over and the work begins. Bring it on.
A Eurostar of Americans
It seemed it would never come. For the last two weeks of July, I was working the maddest hours of my last nine months at Raw TV on ‘Locked Up Abroad‘ for National Geographic Channel.
The amazing Mas Dagan
Wrapping the edit up at the wonderful Envy after nine months and leaving everything shipshape was harder than I imagined. But in the end I was really pleased with the series. It’s been doing well in the US and is going to go out soon in the UK on five. The upshot of this final push was that I left the show more than a tad tired after some very late nights.
Provence light on our window
And then there was the actual last night itself when I should have done what any mature and sensible man would do and that is go home and fall into the arms of his neglected wife. But not Sammy, no, instead after a couple of pints at the Toucan we headed to Zoe Brewer’s 40th party.
Garden light on leaves at dusk
Now anyone who knows the Brewers knows that a night there, never mind a night as big as a fortieth, is going to be (how should I put it?) an occasion for celebration. Consequently we lived up to our joint expectations, did our very merry duty by Colin and Zoe and returned home a little after 6am. Again, most sensible people would have spent the day in bed but I had to clean the flat before my grandaughter and her mum arrived off the train from Scotland for a week’s entertainment in London.
Dusk on our first night at Mas Dagan
We had a brilliant time but the days were busy and the nights were late as we saw the sights and talked the talk into the wee sma hours. When Jen and I finally boarded the Eurostar for two weeks in the South of France the omens weren’t good either. The carriage suddenly filled with many uniformed red Americans ‘doing Europe’. They were all very excited about going under the English Channel and getting a good seat, (to view the darkness I presume).
Night Pool
However my fear of uniformity proved unfounded (I had a tough time in the Scouts); our American cousins were models of decorum. After arriving in Paris, yoga in the Jardin du Luxembourg, a pit-stop in our favourite Cafe Tournon (expensive, non? Charcuterie, fromage, pain and cafe creme – 50 euro/nearly quid – but well worth the experience), a mad dash across the city to Gare de Lyon, a whisk on the TGV and a thirty minute drive we found ourselves at the amazing Mas Dagan. It’s been a complete delight since then and exactly what a holiday should be, nothing and everything.
I’ve been writing this particular blog about my adventures with Mark and Olly for some time now. To see the rest of the blogs in sequence click here. But if you haven’t the time to read the backstory, here is the story so far. I produced a series of eight one hour documentaries for Travel Channel and Discovery in the remote rain forests of West Papua two years ago that was great adventure.
Along with explorers, Mark Anstice and Olly Steeds, a production crew from Cicada Films and many local ‘Yali’, porters we climbed into the mountains of West Papua in search of the ‘Mek’ people. This elusive tribe have had little contact with the outside world for thousands of years.
Heading towards Mek Territory
The previous year, Mark and Olly had lived in with the Kombai people in the swamps of West Papua. During their three months there, the two explorers became aware that things were changing fast for the native people of Papua. Money, religion, politics, education, logging, military action, disease, metal goods, converse sneakers, tee-shirts, cheap chinese lighters; all these things and many more were flooding into these remote and ancient cultures, altering them irrevocably.
Spurred on by this experience, Mark and Olly decided to go to West Papua again, but this time they were to go high into the montains to make a series of films see with the Mek people. It was a big ask. The territory was ferocious and there was little guarantee the tribe would allow them to stay for the four months the two explorers and our film crew needed to really get under the skin of village life.
The Mek tribe of around two thousand people had been known to the outside world for many years. But there were small villages on the edge of Mek territory that we hoped still stood on the cusp of modernity where we could still learn of the old ways while witnessing how the tribe adapted to the new.
The blog picks up after we’d been four days into the expedition and just spent an uncomfortable night in a village called ‘Tohamak’. Our guide, the ‘Legendary Bob Pelege’ had hoped the villagers might let us stay. But in the end it was a rather disappointing encounter. The villagers were Mek people but they had moved further into modernity than we’d hoped for. This was demonstrated when they asked us for $800 dollars to kill a pig for a feast of welcome.
Wild boar jawbones on the edge of Merengman territory
Our porters were from the Yali tribe and the Mek are their traditional enemies. The tension in the village was palpable as we tried to sleep in a village where not so long ago we would have been killed and eaten for such a transgression. Come first light we head further into the mountains. Bob planned to take us to the village of Merengman. It was two days walk away through ever worsening territory but it was there that he believed we’d find what we were looking for. I was sick with nerves by now. Months and months planning were hanging in the balance.
Day five’s march was awful with leeches, vertical walls of vegetation, torrential rain and a gnawing uncertainty about whether I was leading the expedition towards disaster. A night camp made in the pitch black under what seemed like a waterfall didn’t help the mood either. But on day six when we encountered a staff of pigs jaws we knew we were nearing what we hoped would be our final destination. This frightening totem marked the territorial edges of Meregman. I felt exhausted, worried but elated mostly. All the hard work, all the blood sweat and tears had all lead to this point.
Chief Markus gives us a traditional Mek 'welcome'
The following day, after little sleep, we edged closer to the village. Bob knew that by tradition, no stranger would be allowed to enter the village without a show of strength. Less than two hundred meters from the village a tribesman who turned out to be the chief himself, leapt from behind trees and challenged us to leave his territory. We spoke English, the porters spoke Yali and and Indonesian and a few words of Mek. Between, Bob, Olly, Mark and the porters, we managed to get the Chief, Markus, to allow us to enter the village.
The villagers of Merengman meet their first westerners
It was an amazing sight. The villagers looked on with a mixture of anxiety and curiosity. Ed Kelly, the camerman and director allayed people’s fears by letting them see and hear what we were recording. We’d decided that if we found somewhere that would let us stay we would share our world with them as we hoped they would do with us.
We'd decided to let the villagers know from the start what were were doing
Chief Markus called a meeting of the elders and after some debate they decided to let us stay and see what we were made of. Exhausted but elated we started to make camp and prepare ourselves for what we hoped would be the long haul. We were in.
Chief Markus addresses the elders
I’m cleaning up my old laptop to move everything to the shiny new Mac that should be arriving any day now (yes I’m becoming one of those people).
In an effort to quell my excitement about the imminent defection, I thought I’d post this very cool video that I found on my old PC desktop. It’s an advert that National Geographic Channel made for the new series of ‘Locked Up Abroad’ that I’m producing for Raw Television.
The ad was shown on a huge video billboard in Times Square, New York, which is definitely a first for any series I’ve made. The UK version is called ‘Banged Up Abroad’ and can be seen on National Geographic Channel in the UK on Sky, Virgin and Tiscali. Find out when on the Nat Geo website.
Since I’ve spent the day writing about TV shows and doing scripts for Locked Up Abroad, I thought I should update the blog on where I got to on the ‘Adventures of Mark and Olly – Living with the Mek’. This is a show I did for Discovery Channel and Travel Channel a couple of years ago. I’ve documented the journey we took to find the Mek tribe in the mountains of West Papua so far in the blog and this is the next instalment.
Day three and we’d made precious little headway in the appallingly hot, steep and sticky conditions. We were averaging about a mile a day but despite this and the fact that we were heading deeper into Mek territory, with threats of attacks from warriors and witches, we seemed to be pretty happy in this picture. The left to right is myself, the series producer; Olly Steeds the explorer; Associate Producer, Toby Paton and Olly’s fellow explorer, Mark Anstice.
First encounter with the Mek
After a hard days march we came to our first Mek village. It was called Tohamak and after the appropriate show of strength the villagers let us in.
Olly shakes hands and offers tobacco
Things seemed to be going well until the village chief asked Olly and Mark for $800 to kill a pig for a welcome feast.
Tohamak Mek Elders
We politely declined and spent an awkward night camped in the village before moving on early the following day deeper into the jungle.
The village chief
Locked Up Abroad
It seems strange that I haven’t mentioned what has been pre-occupying a huge amount of my time for the last year and a half. I’m right in the middle of producing another series of ‘Locked Up Abroad’ for the National Geographic Channel, (it’s called ‘Banged Up Abroad’ in the UK). You can watch the trailer here.
Last season I produced thirteen shows from around the world and this year I’m doing the same. They are action-packed drama/documentaries that recreate the true life testimonies of people who have found themselves imprisoned in far-off places. In some cases the contributor has made a stupid attempt to get rich quick, while in others they’ve have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But either way, most of the films attest to people’s inner strength and resilience in extreme situations. The shows are a bit like ‘Midnight Express‘ on speed except as a rule we make more of the dilemmas and decisions that lead to the subject’s capture and less of their incarceration.
The series gets great reviews and a really good audience (“One of the most compelling and riveting series TV has ever provided” – New York Post). This season we’ve found a new range of incredible stories in Iraq, Cuba, Sierra Leone and as many other far flung locations we dig up to test our tight schedules and preposterous ambitions.
Producing this series with all the possible permutations for problems is a rock n roll journey but it’s one I make behind a desk in the East End of London. My home is a five minute cycle ride from Raw Television who makes the series, and the edit suites at Envy (where they are being cut) are a fifteen minute cycle ride from Raw. I love my job and living in London, but having been the director sent off to the far-flung place many times before, I do get a touch of adventure-envy when I hear the experiences of my teams when they return from filming.
The new series is broadacsting just now in the US on Wednesday evenings at 10pm EST, but its also available on Video on demand from NGC’s site (and the last series is on Hulu – watchable only in the US).
Some of the many people involved in making Mission Africa
I’m trying to get my old PC and scanner up and running so I can begin to tackle digitising my enormous archive of negatives and transparencies. Lo and behold when I finally got the PC up and running, I found a disc of images from Mission Africa (MA) in the CD drawer. I’ve mentioned MA before in my blog. Mission Africa resulted in a series of documentaries for BBC 1 (there are lots of clips on You Tube) on the trials and tribulations of building a game reserve for the Samburu people of Sera in Northern Kenya.
I can’t remember seeing this disc of pictures before but looking at them now, I’m reminded of how crazy the project was. Fifty degree celsius heat, wild animals, seriously remote locations with real life bandits and a show to make every two and half days were just a few of the problems we had to overcome. I was employed as series producer but with so many shows to make and too few able bodied personnel I had to pick up the camera as well.
Me shooting in Kenya
With about two weeks to go before we finished filming on location, we had to dart a mature bull elephant to fix a tracking collar round its neck. Darting this enormous beast with tranquilisers was tricky. Trying to follow a fully grown drunk elephant rampaging through the bush was dodgier still. But it was when we finally found the animal that the real fun began.
It had eventually succumbed to the tranquilisers and had stumbled and crashed to a halt amongst trees on the side of a steep hill. As I ran through the bush, checking all the time to make sure my camera was running and I was ready to capture the scene, I was stopped dead in my tracks. Nothing prepares you for five tonnes of wild animal legs akimbo, snoring louder than twenty old men in a dormitory. I was overcome with emotion. Stunned by the magnitude of what lay in front of me.
Five tonnes of snoozing bull elephant
The group caught up and all stopped dead. No-one moved until the Rangers from Lewa broke the spell and started shouting orders. Although the animal was blissfully unaware of its predicament, it was actually in mortal danger. The dose of tranquilisers required to knock out an elephant has to be so powerful that an antidote must be administered quickly or the animal will die. It lay awkwardly with it’s legs uphill and needed to be rolled down hill so the collar could be slipped under its enormous neck.
It’s not something you get taught in first year at school, but while some of the rangers attached ropes others gave a crash course to our trainees on how to flip an elephant. Soon, some were pushing from above and others from down below.
The sight and the sounds were incredible. The animal snored and grunted as they shouted and heaved. I raced around trying to get as many angles as I could. My heart was in my mouth as I ran to the down-side of the hill to capture that final moment as the elephant finally reached its tipping point.
I looked at the animal, working out its likely trajectory and stuck my eye back in the viewfinder. Looking through lenses is a rewarding but dangerous job at the best of times. It’s a well known phenomenon that a photographer’s sense of danger is diminished by the act viewing rather than participating. This is exacerbated by the myriad of decisions that go through the filmmaker’s head. Am I running? Am I framed and sharp? Do I need an establisher again? Which of the characters is telling the story best? Is that a boom in shot? Where is my sound recordist? Have I all the shots I need to do the story justice? Where should I be next? How much tape do I have? How will I wrap this scene…crash.
Filming the elephant as it is being turned over
We used the shot in the title sequence. The elephant reaches its tipping point, starts to roll toward camera then, woosh, there’s a blur of colour and light. I may have positioned myself to miss the animal but I failed to notice that its huge sharp tusks were lying on either side of a tree. The momentum of tonnes of elephant flesh snapped the tree at its roots and hammered it down on my head.
Apparently I came to quite quickly. Took the viewfinder which had been smashed off the camera stuck it back in my eye and started filming. The only problem was, it wasn’t attached to the camera. I have vague recollections of plugging it back in and getting the camera working after a fashion. My AP tells me she held me round the waist as I alternately filmed and blacked out. You can watch what was broadcast of this event in a clip on You Tube – keep an eye out for 2:05, which is the tree landing on my head.
I still have little memory of the rest of the events of that day. Even the following day when we were darting lion I was still blacking out.
The end of filming Mission Africa
From then on until the end of the shoot two weeks later, it’s all a bit of a blur. There is a book in the adventures we had on this shoot but on the last day, when the people from Sera gathered to take possession of their new lodges, wells and animals it all seemed worth it… or at least I think it did.
The Leg-end Bob Pelege's hat.
The West Papua adventure began in earnest when our expedition left Welarek. We planned to travel deep into the rainforset in search of the Mek tribe. The people who live in Welarek and the surrounding area are from the Yali tribe. They are the traditional enemy of the Mek people who live to the east, across a fast flowing river. Led by our mountain guide – the ‘Leg-endary Bob Pelege’ as he called himself – after two days of hard walking, we arrived at a long rattan suspension bridge.
The border between Yali and Mek territory
The bridge is known locally as the bridge of suicide and spans the river that is the border between Yali and Mek people. In the past, women threw themselves off the bridge when their husbands died and many people have died in accidents. So we were all nervous when we crossed. But despite it being in a bad condition we managed to cross the bridge safely and by day three of the expedition we were in Mek territory.
Mark Anstice and Olly Steeds heading into Mek territory
Yali Porter
The porters were now uneasy as they were not only in the land of their enemy but this was an area renowned for flying witches.
I cross the repaired bridge into Mek territory
As producer of the shoot, I’d factored in risks like crossing bridges made of vines, but I’d made no allowances for flying witches in my health and safety plan.
The last night before we set off
On the night before we set off on the expedition to find the Mek Tribe in the Mountains of West Papua, everything seemed set. The months of planning across the other side of the globe at Cicada in London had come to an end. All I had left to do was get all my personal bits and pieces together, think of home and try to get some sleep.
Across West Papua
For me the expedition finally became a reality when we’d loaded up our small planes and were in the air crossing the interior of West Papua. Looking down on the silver rivers snaking through the limitless expanse of rainforest, all thoughts were on what lay ahead in the mountains.
Landing at Welarek
We’d been worried that our landing at Welarek could be put in danger by bad visibility and rain, but our final approach was perfect.
Plane lands at Welarek
Mark meets Bob
Once down on the ground Mark Anstice was greeted by the legendary Papuan mountain guide, Bob Pelege, and Olly Steeds met his first local tribesman. This man was and elder from the Yali tribe, some of whom would become our porters when we travelled into the mountains towards the Mek’s territory.
Olly meets Yali tribesman
As we unloaded our supplies and I considered the enormity of what lay ahead, one of the crew snapped this carefree picture of me.
Sam gets worried
TV Tower overlooking Kabul
Kabul is surrounded by mountains. One of the ways into Kabul is over this mountain, where the communications and radio masts sit. Also on top of the mountain were trenches used during the long-running civil war.
This man was guarding the access to the masts on the summit of the mountain.
The startling sculpture consists of four anti-aircraft missiles, one anti-tank missile and several mortar shells.
