Tony Garnett - Film and TV Producer HARDtalk


Tony Garnett - Film and TV Producer

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Welcome to HARDTalk, I'm Stephen Sackur.

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Watching TV is something pretty much all of us do for news,

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sport, and entertainment, but how much of what we stare

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at on the box do we actually remember?

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Well, over the past 50 years my guest today produced some

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of the most memorable, brilliant and shocking TV

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drama ever made.

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Tony Garnett's subjects - homelessness, illegal abortion,

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police corruption - point to his radicalism.

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He uncovered dark corners of British life.

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How much of his motivation came from the dark corners

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in his own life?

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Tony Garnett, welcome to HARDTalk.

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Sometimes it feels simplistic to make causal links

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between people's professional lives and their personal lives,

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but in your case would you say there are grounds for making

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a very direct connection?

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There are, of course there are with everyone.

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Sometimes they are unconscious and they remain unconscious.

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I have only just recently, finally, through hammering through the first

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draft of this memoir, realised what the connections were.

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I think it is true of everyone.

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You fascinate me in that sense, because you have waited

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until your late 70s, 80 years old, to write a memoir which has exposed

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very bleak and dark things about your own past,

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which, in a sense, cast new light upon your professional work

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as a television and film producer.

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If we start with the personal, as a child you went through the most

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extraordinary trauma which most people watching this would not be

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able to imagine.

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Can you tell me a little bit about it?

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Well, very, very briefly, it was 1941 in December.

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The bombs were dropping in Birmingham and my dad

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was in a reserved occupation working in a munitions factory.

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It was down the air raid shelter every night,

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up the next morning to see if the house was still there.

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I was loving it, it was a lot of fun for me.

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You were a kid, five years old.

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I was five, it was pretty exciting.

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I was in a very loving family.

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My mum adored me and my dad was strict but I worshipped him,

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my aunt and uncle were next-door and my grandma was down the road.

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It was a typical old fashioned close family.

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My mum got pregnant and my mum and dad decided for reasons,

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some of which have probably died with them, that it just wasn't

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the time to have another baby.

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In those days, it was illegal and it was against God.

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Abortion, you mean?

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Abortion was completely illegal.

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They found an abortionist, there was always a woman

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in the neighbourhood who would help girls.

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She had this abortion and something went wrong with it

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and she got very ill.

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My dad, three nights later, went to work and I was sent to bed.

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When he was on nights I slept with her, which I loved.

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I was woken up in the middle of the night and there was my mum

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banging on the adjoining wall to my uncle's house next door,

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shouting and screaming and wailing.

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It was a sound I had never heard before and have never heard since.

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And my aunt and uncle came round, whisked me away, of course.

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Some of this I learned later and pieced together,

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my mum died during the night before my dad got home.

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No one said anything to me.

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The next morning, I was at my auntie's house and my dad came

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in and he was weeping, in an uncontrolled way.

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I had never seen a man cry.

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I'd never believed my dad could cry.

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I was sent to my grandma's and then I was sent to an aunt.

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I saw my dad once more on Christmas Day, he came

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round for half an hour or so and I sat on his knee.

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Then, the day after New Year, he got a hose, put it in the gas,

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and laid down with a bottle of Scotch, and he didn't finish it.

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He gassed himself to death?

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Yes.

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My aunt said, "your father is dead".

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No one explained anything to me, no one asked me how I felt.

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To be fair to them, I think they were planning when I was much

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older to tell me these awful things.

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It is 75 years on and I can tell, even the way you tell the story

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today, it lives with you in a very real sense now.

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It lives with me now but it didn't because I buried it.

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My theory now is that I could not experience it.

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It was almost an act of self preservation.

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But remember, for them, not only had they lost...

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My granddad and grandma had 12 children, and my mum was one

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of the favourites of them all.

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Not only had they lost two people that they loved,

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but an abortion?

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A suicide?

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Attempted suicide was against the law.

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These are all massive taboos.

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And against God.

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Just put yourself back to those times and in that class,

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they are respectable working-class people -

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the shame of it.

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You somehow saved yourself.

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To put this into context, this was the Second World War.

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All over Europe, little children were having it a lot worse

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than I was.

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They were going to concentration camps, their parents were taken away

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from them, the suffering and the starvation.

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It was difficult and I had to deal with it.

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But we all have difficulties, not as difficult as that perhaps.

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You do not judge life by the hand that people are dealt,

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you judge life by how they play the hand.

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How they deal with it.

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You have to deal with it.

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I dealt with it by burying it and only very gradually,

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recently, have I been able to resurrect it.

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I totally take the point about the burial of it emotionally

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and personally, but you didn't bury it entirely because it clearly

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coloured your consciousness, your awareness of how

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the world works.

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If we get onto the beginnings of your film-making

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and television-drama-making career, you always had a very strong sense

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that there are powerful people in society, but there are a lot more

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powerless people, people who have bad stuff happen to them

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and for whom the system does not really work.

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You were quite radical, quite young.

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Yes, just to tease that out a little bit, first of all my work has

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been about secrets.

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My whole childhood and adolescence was that I did not want

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any more secrets.

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I interrogated relatives mercilessly, I just wanted to know.

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Looking back on it now, these connections were unconscious

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to me until recently, my work is that I want

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to expose the secrets.

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Like, for instance, we did a film, Newman wrote the screenplays

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and Les Blair directed them, about the Metropolitan Police

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detectives in the 70s.

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I wanted to know the truth.

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And the abuses that were within the police force?

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The abuses in the police.

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The police had interrogated my dad, there had been a policeman outside

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the house, they had followed him wherever he went.

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After your mother's death?

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Yes, because they wanted to find the abortionist.

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My dad didn't shop, he didn't say anything,

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he killed himself.

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So that is one aspect of it.

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Let's go to a clip which will give people, many of whom are young

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and will not know your work so well, let's go to a clip that encapsulates

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the degree to which you in the end dramatised some of the terrible

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things that you had somewhere in your own consciousness.

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Let's start with Up The Junction, a drama that you made in 1965,

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had a huge audience on the BBC, filmed in black and white.

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It was all about a backstreet abortion.

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Let's play a little, and quite difficult to watch, clip.

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Let's look at this.

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GRUNTS AND CRIES

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Take the lowest figure, 52,000 abortions a year.

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That is 1,000 abortions a week.

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Something like five or six every hour, of every day.

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And that is taking the minimum figure.

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It is a pretty extraordinary piece of film because there you have got,

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obviously we've only taken a short clip, but you have a very graphic

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portrayal of a woman in the middle of terrible suffering but you chose,

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in a pretty new and revolutionary way for television, to juxtapose

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that with a very measured, dispassionate voice,

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giving some true facts, some journalism, about the scale

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of the problem of illegal abortions.

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It was a mix of drama and fact, which Britain hadn't

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really seen before.

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No, a lot of it was new.

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That voice-over was my GP.

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My doctor from Kentish Town, Dr Grant.

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His specialty was pregnancy and birth and so on.

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He knew a lot about it.

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Did you tell anybody that you wanted to be involved in this project

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partly because your own mother had died in a backstreet abortion?

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No.

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I told no one.

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Why?

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I don't know why.

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Why would I?

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Because that would give everybody a sense of how much it

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mattered to you.

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I don't know, in Birmingham we don't talk about stuff,

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we keep things to ourselves.

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Why would I burden people with all of that?

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There is one thing I want to correct, if I may?

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It is an inexcusable shorthand for you to say "films that I made".

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I have never made a film.

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Ever.

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Produced is the right word.

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Yes.

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You could say I had a role in it if I produced it,

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or wrote it, or directed it, but for me films

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are social activities.

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They are not like novels.

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I have always gathered people around me who have worked

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together very closely.

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One of the men you have worked closest with is Ken Loach.

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And, of course, Ken Loach has had a fantastic career and has won

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prizes at Cannes and all over the world.

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You and he, I think, are regarded as pioneers

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of and revolutionaries working with this idea of social realism,

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of using actors who are encouraged to extemporise, to be spontaneous,

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not to obsess about memorising scripts but to let drama unfold

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and live with the drama unfolding.

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How new was all of that and do you accept this notion that you set

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a trend that still matters to a great many film makers

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around the world?

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I don't know, I don't see much sign of the trend now, frankly.

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I never thought of it like that.

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This all started for me as an actor and the terrible way actors

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are treated, were treated and still are to some

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extent, by everybody.

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I thought they had got everything wrong, everything wrong

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with their attitudes to screenplays, their attitude

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to lights and cameras.

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The actor was in the service of all of that, but I wanted

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all of that to be in the service of the actor.

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It is the audience that sees the actor or the character -

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they should not even see the actor.

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When I met Ken, we were up both working on The Wednesday Play.

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We did not have to talk very much because we just knew of each other.

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He had seen the light too.

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Ken is the finest director of actors, of conjuring

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a performance from actors, that I have ever worked with.

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We were brothers from the start.

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Talking of truthful performances and the power that television drama

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can generate, let's look to one more clip that is perhaps the most famous

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project you collaborated on and that is a drama called

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Cathy Come Home, which exposed the problem of poverty

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and homelessness in the Britain of the mid-sixties.

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This scene we are going to see is very upsetting.

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It is based on a true life story, it is where the authorities have

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come to take away the children of a young mother.

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Let's have a look.

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You are not having my babies.

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SCREAMING AND CRYING

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Get out!

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SCREAMING AND CRYING

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I tell you what, it is hard to watch that and not feel a stab of pain

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in your heart.

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Well, I felt it because I had lost my mum.

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I had been taken in by the family, what your mum is your mum.

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-- I had been taken in by the family, but your mum

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is your mum.

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There was an advertisement when I was young for something that

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said, "accept no substitutes".

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There are no substitutes.

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You lose your mum.

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What I am thinking about was the degree to which your films had

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such an impact that they became almost part of the political

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discourse in Britain.

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Correct me if I am wrong, but I think you had a meeting

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with the British Government's Housing Minister as a result

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of Cathy Come Home, the furore, 12-14 million people had watched it,

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the nation was talking about this problem of young people

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who could not get homes, who were forced out of homes

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and ended up losing their families.

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You made a difference.

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Do you feel your films, going back to the 60s and beyond,

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made a difference?

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It depends on what you mean by making a difference.

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When I was young and arrogant, I thought we could make a film

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and change the world.

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Film don't do that.

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The most that a film can do, to use an old political phrase,

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is raise consciousness, so that people who are active

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in politics can be affected and then they can change the world.

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We did have a meeting, Jeremy Sandford, the writer,

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and the director and me with the Minister at the Ministry

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in a beautiful and huge room in Whitehall -

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I have never had a flat as big as that - and it was a very

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English occasion.

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He was there with his permanent secretary.

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We sat down for tea.

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The china was very nice and the biscuits were palpable.

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We sipped tea while we talked.

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He was very complimentary about the film but in the end said,

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"well, but what can one do?".

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And I said, "build more houses".

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He looked at his permanent secretary, who smiled back at him.

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Then we were on the street again in Whitehall.

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I take the point, then.

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Maybe it didn't change anything in the short term,

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but there are two things that strike me and the first one is this:

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I find it hard, being a professional and having worked in TV for quite

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a while myself, I find hard today to think of film-makers and films

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on television or on the big screen that have the same kind of impact

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that would encourage a Government Minister to call

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in the film-maker for talks about the subject at hand.

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Do you think radical boundary-pushing stuff is being made

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today on television or in film in the same way you were doing it

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in the 1960s?

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There may be some political films for the cinema,

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for the arthouse circuit, very low budget being made

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here and certainly there are in other countries,

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but you will not see it on television.

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Nothing to do with the quality of the film-makers, but because it

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would not be allowed.

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Television now is different business.

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Do you mean the bosses?

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The people who run organisations like mine,

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the BBC, have lost their nerve?

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They are no longer interested in being radical?

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In confrontation and saying difficult things?

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I do.

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I don't blame them as individuals necessarily.

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We can talk about the BBC.

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The BBC lives in a cultural and political environment.

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It affects that environment and it is affected by it.

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But if you wanted to make a film like Cathy Come Home today,

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would you find an easy place to put it on mainstream terrestrial

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television?

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I doubt it, and in any case I wouldn't, if I were still working

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in films, I would not want to produce a film

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like Cathy today.

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Cathy let everybody off the hook.

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Cathy was not a political enough.

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Cathy was a nice, soft, liberal film.

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It wasn't seen that way at the time.

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It didn't put the boot in where it should have done.

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That is what I would want to do now.

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There would be no chance now.

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By the way, just to finish that point very quickly,

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when we did Cathy Come Home, there

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was a homeless problem but it wasn't that huge.

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And most people knew nothing about it.

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When Jeremy Sandford told us about it, because he had researched

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it, neither Ken nor I knew there was homeless problem.

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It went out and caused a stir, to put it mildly.

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Now there is a huge problem of homelessness and housing.

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Acknowledged by everyone.

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Television does a documentary every week or two on it

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and it is in the newspapers, but no one cares.

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The politicians of all parties have neglected it for 30 or 40 years,

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but they are our politicians, so maybe we live in a country

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that does not care as it used to.

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Your staples, the films you are known for, for having

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collaborated on, are really all about class, powerlessness

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of so many people in society, corruption and abuse,

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abuse of power.

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When you look at Britain today, Britain that has just voted Brexit

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and exposed all sorts of new divisions between young

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and old, north and south, urban and rural, poor and wealthy,

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when you look at Britain today, do you look at a society

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that is in worse shape than it was when you set out

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on your film-making career?

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It is in worse shape but it is also in better shape.

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There are all sorts of wonderful things happening.

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We value our individuality, we cooperate and compete.

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It is finding a balance between those two elements

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in society and now we are far too much individuals,

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the competition has cancelled out the cooperation

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and we are an unhappy society because we are unbalanced.

0:21:170:21:21

We need to get the balance back.

0:21:210:21:27

If you wanted to make people care today by force of a creative medium,

0:21:270:21:31

would you choose television or would you try to harness the Internet?

0:21:310:21:38

What would you do?

0:21:380:21:39

If Tony Garnett wasn't 80 but was 25 and setting out to influence people,

0:21:390:21:42

influence debate, and change the world, how would

0:21:420:21:44

you go about it?

0:21:440:21:45

I would, without hesitation, be working on the Internet.

0:21:450:21:54

The barriers to entry into our business have more

0:21:540:21:56

or less disappeared.

0:21:560:22:02

When I started very few people were allowed,

0:22:020:22:04

because it was so expensive and the technology was

0:22:040:22:06

so complex to master.

0:22:060:22:11

Now, any kid in a provincial town can get a digital camera

0:22:110:22:14

which is point and shoot.

0:22:140:22:15

They can edit on their laptop.

0:22:150:22:18

Server space is cheap.

0:22:180:22:20

They are there for billions of people.

0:22:200:22:24

No one will know you're there, but that is a marketing problem

0:22:240:22:28

and kids find things.

0:22:280:22:29

The final thought, and it may be bleak or it may not,

0:22:290:22:31

the kind of serious message and the serious analysis of how

0:22:310:22:34

society works that you have always wanted to make,

0:22:340:22:37

is that going to find a big audience anyway?

0:22:370:22:48

Is that, you know, if it's the internet, is that ever

0:22:480:22:51

going to go viral or are people too busy looking

0:22:510:22:54

at cute cats?

0:22:540:22:54

It depends on how good you are.

0:22:540:22:56

When we were making films for television, there were all sorts

0:22:560:22:59

of other things that people could look at.

0:22:590:23:01

The problem now is that it is all available all the time.

0:23:010:23:14

There is too much?

0:23:140:23:15

It is not that there is too much, the choice is there all the time,

0:23:150:23:19

whereas when there were two channels of television it was one

0:23:190:23:22

after the other.

0:23:220:23:22

But you still had to get people to watch.

0:23:220:23:24

I want to end by going back to where we started and your decision,

0:23:240:23:28

after so many years, decades and decades of bottling up

0:23:280:23:31

the personal that has been so much of a part of your life

0:23:310:23:34

through all this professional success, you have now unbottled

0:23:340:23:36

and you have been very open about your own tragedy and trauma.

0:23:360:23:39

Have you conquered your demons, do you think?

0:23:390:23:41

I am a lot happier.

0:23:410:23:42

Do any of us ever conquer all of our demons?

0:23:420:23:45

As an old psychoanalyst friend of mine who said,

0:23:450:23:53

"it is our scars the make us interesting."

0:23:530:23:55

But I'm happier now.

0:23:550:23:56

That is a great way to end, a happy thought to end with.

0:23:560:24:02

Tony Garnett, thank you so much for being on HARDTalk.

0:24:020:24:04

Thank you.

0:24:040:24:06

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