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Welcome to HARDTalk, I'm Stephen Sackur. | 0:00:07 | 0:00:11 | |
Watching TV is something pretty much all of us do for news, | 0:00:11 | 0:00:14 | |
sport, and entertainment, but how much of what we stare | 0:00:14 | 0:00:18 | |
at on the box do we actually remember? | 0:00:18 | 0:00:22 | |
Well, over the past 50 years my guest today produced some | 0:00:22 | 0:00:25 | |
of the most memorable, brilliant and shocking TV | 0:00:25 | 0:00:27 | |
drama ever made. | 0:00:27 | 0:00:32 | |
Tony Garnett's subjects - homelessness, illegal abortion, | 0:00:32 | 0:00:35 | |
police corruption - point to his radicalism. | 0:00:35 | 0:00:37 | |
He uncovered dark corners of British life. | 0:00:37 | 0:00:41 | |
How much of his motivation came from the dark corners | 0:00:41 | 0:00:43 | |
in his own life? | 0:00:43 | 0:00:46 | |
Tony Garnett, welcome to HARDTalk. | 0:01:14 | 0:01:17 | |
Sometimes it feels simplistic to make causal links | 0:01:17 | 0:01:19 | |
between people's professional lives and their personal lives, | 0:01:19 | 0:01:22 | |
but in your case would you say there are grounds for making | 0:01:22 | 0:01:25 | |
a very direct connection? | 0:01:25 | 0:01:29 | |
There are, of course there are with everyone. | 0:01:29 | 0:01:32 | |
Sometimes they are unconscious and they remain unconscious. | 0:01:32 | 0:01:37 | |
I have only just recently, finally, through hammering through the first | 0:01:37 | 0:01:39 | |
draft of this memoir, realised what the connections were. | 0:01:39 | 0:01:42 | |
I think it is true of everyone. | 0:01:42 | 0:01:48 | |
You fascinate me in that sense, because you have waited | 0:01:48 | 0:01:54 | |
until your late 70s, 80 years old, to write a memoir which has exposed | 0:01:54 | 0:01:58 | |
very bleak and dark things about your own past, | 0:01:58 | 0:02:00 | |
which, in a sense, cast new light upon your professional work | 0:02:00 | 0:02:05 | |
as a television and film producer. | 0:02:05 | 0:02:09 | |
If we start with the personal, as a child you went through the most | 0:02:09 | 0:02:14 | |
extraordinary trauma which most people watching this would not be | 0:02:14 | 0:02:16 | |
able to imagine. | 0:02:17 | 0:02:19 | |
Can you tell me a little bit about it? | 0:02:19 | 0:02:23 | |
Well, very, very briefly, it was 1941 in December. | 0:02:23 | 0:02:28 | |
The bombs were dropping in Birmingham and my dad | 0:02:28 | 0:02:33 | |
was in a reserved occupation working in a munitions factory. | 0:02:33 | 0:02:37 | |
It was down the air raid shelter every night, | 0:02:37 | 0:02:40 | |
up the next morning to see if the house was still there. | 0:02:40 | 0:02:43 | |
I was loving it, it was a lot of fun for me. | 0:02:43 | 0:02:46 | |
You were a kid, five years old. | 0:02:46 | 0:02:48 | |
I was five, it was pretty exciting. | 0:02:48 | 0:02:50 | |
I was in a very loving family. | 0:02:50 | 0:02:52 | |
My mum adored me and my dad was strict but I worshipped him, | 0:02:52 | 0:02:55 | |
my aunt and uncle were next-door and my grandma was down the road. | 0:02:55 | 0:02:58 | |
It was a typical old fashioned close family. | 0:02:58 | 0:03:01 | |
My mum got pregnant and my mum and dad decided for reasons, | 0:03:01 | 0:03:06 | |
some of which have probably died with them, that it just wasn't | 0:03:06 | 0:03:11 | |
the time to have another baby. | 0:03:11 | 0:03:15 | |
In those days, it was illegal and it was against God. | 0:03:15 | 0:03:18 | |
Abortion, you mean? | 0:03:18 | 0:03:24 | |
Abortion was completely illegal. | 0:03:24 | 0:03:30 | |
They found an abortionist, there was always a woman | 0:03:30 | 0:03:34 | |
in the neighbourhood who would help girls. | 0:03:34 | 0:03:37 | |
She had this abortion and something went wrong with it | 0:03:37 | 0:03:39 | |
and she got very ill. | 0:03:39 | 0:03:45 | |
My dad, three nights later, went to work and I was sent to bed. | 0:03:45 | 0:03:50 | |
When he was on nights I slept with her, which I loved. | 0:03:50 | 0:03:54 | |
I was woken up in the middle of the night and there was my mum | 0:03:54 | 0:03:58 | |
banging on the adjoining wall to my uncle's house next door, | 0:03:58 | 0:04:00 | |
shouting and screaming and wailing. | 0:04:00 | 0:04:07 | |
It was a sound I had never heard before and have never heard since. | 0:04:07 | 0:04:10 | |
And my aunt and uncle came round, whisked me away, of course. | 0:04:10 | 0:04:14 | |
Some of this I learned later and pieced together, | 0:04:14 | 0:04:17 | |
my mum died during the night before my dad got home. | 0:04:17 | 0:04:26 | |
No one said anything to me. | 0:04:26 | 0:04:28 | |
The next morning, I was at my auntie's house and my dad came | 0:04:28 | 0:04:31 | |
in and he was weeping, in an uncontrolled way. | 0:04:31 | 0:04:39 | |
I had never seen a man cry. | 0:04:39 | 0:04:43 | |
I'd never believed my dad could cry. | 0:04:43 | 0:04:46 | |
I was sent to my grandma's and then I was sent to an aunt. | 0:04:46 | 0:04:49 | |
I saw my dad once more on Christmas Day, he came | 0:04:49 | 0:04:54 | |
round for half an hour or so and I sat on his knee. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:58 | |
Then, the day after New Year, he got a hose, put it in the gas, | 0:04:58 | 0:05:03 | |
and laid down with a bottle of Scotch, and he didn't finish it. | 0:05:03 | 0:05:09 | |
He gassed himself to death? | 0:05:09 | 0:05:11 | |
Yes. | 0:05:11 | 0:05:13 | |
My aunt said, "your father is dead". | 0:05:13 | 0:05:15 | |
No one explained anything to me, no one asked me how I felt. | 0:05:15 | 0:05:19 | |
To be fair to them, I think they were planning when I was much | 0:05:19 | 0:05:26 | |
older to tell me these awful things. | 0:05:26 | 0:05:32 | |
It is 75 years on and I can tell, even the way you tell the story | 0:05:32 | 0:05:36 | |
today, it lives with you in a very real sense now. | 0:05:36 | 0:05:39 | |
It lives with me now but it didn't because I buried it. | 0:05:39 | 0:05:44 | |
My theory now is that I could not experience it. | 0:05:44 | 0:05:46 | |
It was almost an act of self preservation. | 0:05:46 | 0:05:49 | |
But remember, for them, not only had they lost... | 0:05:49 | 0:05:51 | |
My granddad and grandma had 12 children, and my mum was one | 0:05:51 | 0:05:54 | |
of the favourites of them all. | 0:05:54 | 0:06:02 | |
Not only had they lost two people that they loved, | 0:06:02 | 0:06:05 | |
but an abortion? | 0:06:05 | 0:06:09 | |
A suicide? | 0:06:09 | 0:06:11 | |
Attempted suicide was against the law. | 0:06:11 | 0:06:13 | |
These are all massive taboos. | 0:06:14 | 0:06:15 | |
And against God. | 0:06:15 | 0:06:17 | |
Just put yourself back to those times and in that class, | 0:06:17 | 0:06:20 | |
they are respectable working-class people - | 0:06:20 | 0:06:22 | |
the shame of it. | 0:06:22 | 0:06:26 | |
You somehow saved yourself. | 0:06:26 | 0:06:29 | |
To put this into context, this was the Second World War. | 0:06:29 | 0:06:32 | |
All over Europe, little children were having it a lot worse | 0:06:32 | 0:06:34 | |
than I was. | 0:06:34 | 0:06:38 | |
They were going to concentration camps, their parents were taken away | 0:06:38 | 0:06:41 | |
from them, the suffering and the starvation. | 0:06:41 | 0:06:42 | |
It was difficult and I had to deal with it. | 0:06:42 | 0:06:46 | |
But we all have difficulties, not as difficult as that perhaps. | 0:06:46 | 0:06:53 | |
You do not judge life by the hand that people are dealt, | 0:06:53 | 0:06:58 | |
you judge life by how they play the hand. | 0:06:58 | 0:07:05 | |
How they deal with it. | 0:07:05 | 0:07:08 | |
You have to deal with it. | 0:07:08 | 0:07:11 | |
I dealt with it by burying it and only very gradually, | 0:07:11 | 0:07:13 | |
recently, have I been able to resurrect it. | 0:07:13 | 0:07:18 | |
I totally take the point about the burial of it emotionally | 0:07:18 | 0:07:21 | |
and personally, but you didn't bury it entirely because it clearly | 0:07:21 | 0:07:25 | |
coloured your consciousness, your awareness of how | 0:07:25 | 0:07:32 | |
the world works. | 0:07:33 | 0:07:35 | |
If we get onto the beginnings of your film-making | 0:07:35 | 0:07:37 | |
and television-drama-making career, you always had a very strong sense | 0:07:37 | 0:07:39 | |
that there are powerful people in society, but there are a lot more | 0:07:39 | 0:07:43 | |
powerless people, people who have bad stuff happen to them | 0:07:43 | 0:07:45 | |
and for whom the system does not really work. | 0:07:45 | 0:07:50 | |
You were quite radical, quite young. | 0:07:50 | 0:07:53 | |
Yes, just to tease that out a little bit, first of all my work has | 0:07:53 | 0:07:59 | |
been about secrets. | 0:07:59 | 0:08:03 | |
My whole childhood and adolescence was that I did not want | 0:08:03 | 0:08:06 | |
any more secrets. | 0:08:06 | 0:08:09 | |
I interrogated relatives mercilessly, I just wanted to know. | 0:08:09 | 0:08:13 | |
Looking back on it now, these connections were unconscious | 0:08:13 | 0:08:19 | |
to me until recently, my work is that I want | 0:08:19 | 0:08:21 | |
to expose the secrets. | 0:08:21 | 0:08:25 | |
Like, for instance, we did a film, Newman wrote the screenplays | 0:08:25 | 0:08:29 | |
and Les Blair directed them, about the Metropolitan Police | 0:08:29 | 0:08:35 | |
detectives in the 70s. | 0:08:35 | 0:08:38 | |
I wanted to know the truth. | 0:08:38 | 0:08:40 | |
And the abuses that were within the police force? | 0:08:40 | 0:08:43 | |
The abuses in the police. | 0:08:43 | 0:08:45 | |
The police had interrogated my dad, there had been a policeman outside | 0:08:45 | 0:08:48 | |
the house, they had followed him wherever he went. | 0:08:48 | 0:08:50 | |
After your mother's death? | 0:08:50 | 0:08:53 | |
Yes, because they wanted to find the abortionist. | 0:08:53 | 0:08:56 | |
My dad didn't shop, he didn't say anything, | 0:08:56 | 0:08:58 | |
he killed himself. | 0:08:58 | 0:09:02 | |
So that is one aspect of it. | 0:09:02 | 0:09:06 | |
Let's go to a clip which will give people, many of whom are young | 0:09:06 | 0:09:10 | |
and will not know your work so well, let's go to a clip that encapsulates | 0:09:10 | 0:09:13 | |
the degree to which you in the end dramatised some of the terrible | 0:09:13 | 0:09:18 | |
things that you had somewhere in your own consciousness. | 0:09:18 | 0:09:22 | |
Let's start with Up The Junction, a drama that you made in 1965, | 0:09:22 | 0:09:26 | |
had a huge audience on the BBC, filmed in black and white. | 0:09:26 | 0:09:30 | |
It was all about a backstreet abortion. | 0:09:30 | 0:09:34 | |
Let's play a little, and quite difficult to watch, clip. | 0:09:34 | 0:09:37 | |
Let's look at this. | 0:09:37 | 0:09:41 | |
GRUNTS AND CRIES | 0:09:46 | 0:09:50 | |
Take the lowest figure, 52,000 abortions a year. | 0:09:50 | 0:09:53 | |
That is 1,000 abortions a week. | 0:09:53 | 0:09:55 | |
Something like five or six every hour, of every day. | 0:09:55 | 0:09:59 | |
And that is taking the minimum figure. | 0:09:59 | 0:10:02 | |
It is a pretty extraordinary piece of film because there you have got, | 0:10:02 | 0:10:06 | |
obviously we've only taken a short clip, but you have a very graphic | 0:10:06 | 0:10:09 | |
portrayal of a woman in the middle of terrible suffering but you chose, | 0:10:09 | 0:10:12 | |
in a pretty new and revolutionary way for television, to juxtapose | 0:10:12 | 0:10:15 | |
that with a very measured, dispassionate voice, | 0:10:15 | 0:10:21 | |
giving some true facts, some journalism, about the scale | 0:10:21 | 0:10:24 | |
of the problem of illegal abortions. | 0:10:24 | 0:10:28 | |
It was a mix of drama and fact, which Britain hadn't | 0:10:28 | 0:10:30 | |
really seen before. | 0:10:30 | 0:10:33 | |
No, a lot of it was new. | 0:10:33 | 0:10:37 | |
That voice-over was my GP. | 0:10:37 | 0:10:43 | |
My doctor from Kentish Town, Dr Grant. | 0:10:43 | 0:10:47 | |
His specialty was pregnancy and birth and so on. | 0:10:47 | 0:10:52 | |
He knew a lot about it. | 0:10:52 | 0:10:55 | |
Did you tell anybody that you wanted to be involved in this project | 0:10:55 | 0:10:59 | |
partly because your own mother had died in a backstreet abortion? | 0:10:59 | 0:11:03 | |
No. | 0:11:03 | 0:11:05 | |
I told no one. | 0:11:05 | 0:11:06 | |
Why? | 0:11:06 | 0:11:10 | |
I don't know why. | 0:11:10 | 0:11:11 | |
Why would I? | 0:11:11 | 0:11:14 | |
Because that would give everybody a sense of how much it | 0:11:14 | 0:11:17 | |
mattered to you. | 0:11:17 | 0:11:19 | |
I don't know, in Birmingham we don't talk about stuff, | 0:11:19 | 0:11:24 | |
we keep things to ourselves. | 0:11:24 | 0:11:29 | |
Why would I burden people with all of that? | 0:11:29 | 0:11:32 | |
There is one thing I want to correct, if I may? | 0:11:32 | 0:11:35 | |
It is an inexcusable shorthand for you to say "films that I made". | 0:11:35 | 0:11:38 | |
I have never made a film. | 0:11:38 | 0:11:41 | |
Ever. | 0:11:41 | 0:11:43 | |
Produced is the right word. | 0:11:43 | 0:11:45 | |
Yes. | 0:11:45 | 0:11:47 | |
You could say I had a role in it if I produced it, | 0:11:47 | 0:11:50 | |
or wrote it, or directed it, but for me films | 0:11:50 | 0:11:52 | |
are social activities. | 0:11:52 | 0:11:53 | |
They are not like novels. | 0:11:53 | 0:11:54 | |
I have always gathered people around me who have worked | 0:11:54 | 0:11:57 | |
together very closely. | 0:11:57 | 0:11:59 | |
One of the men you have worked closest with is Ken Loach. | 0:11:59 | 0:12:04 | |
And, of course, Ken Loach has had a fantastic career and has won | 0:12:04 | 0:12:08 | |
prizes at Cannes and all over the world. | 0:12:08 | 0:12:11 | |
You and he, I think, are regarded as pioneers | 0:12:11 | 0:12:13 | |
of and revolutionaries working with this idea of social realism, | 0:12:13 | 0:12:18 | |
of using actors who are encouraged to extemporise, to be spontaneous, | 0:12:18 | 0:12:23 | |
not to obsess about memorising scripts but to let drama unfold | 0:12:23 | 0:12:28 | |
and live with the drama unfolding. | 0:12:28 | 0:12:36 | |
How new was all of that and do you accept this notion that you set | 0:12:36 | 0:12:40 | |
a trend that still matters to a great many film makers | 0:12:40 | 0:12:47 | |
around the world? | 0:12:47 | 0:12:49 | |
I don't know, I don't see much sign of the trend now, frankly. | 0:12:49 | 0:12:53 | |
I never thought of it like that. | 0:12:53 | 0:12:57 | |
This all started for me as an actor and the terrible way actors | 0:12:57 | 0:13:01 | |
are treated, were treated and still are to some | 0:13:01 | 0:13:06 | |
extent, by everybody. | 0:13:07 | 0:13:09 | |
I thought they had got everything wrong, everything wrong | 0:13:09 | 0:13:11 | |
with their attitudes to screenplays, their attitude | 0:13:11 | 0:13:14 | |
to lights and cameras. | 0:13:14 | 0:13:16 | |
The actor was in the service of all of that, but I wanted | 0:13:16 | 0:13:19 | |
all of that to be in the service of the actor. | 0:13:19 | 0:13:23 | |
It is the audience that sees the actor or the character - | 0:13:23 | 0:13:26 | |
they should not even see the actor. | 0:13:26 | 0:13:29 | |
When I met Ken, we were up both working on The Wednesday Play. | 0:13:29 | 0:13:32 | |
We did not have to talk very much because we just knew of each other. | 0:13:32 | 0:13:38 | |
He had seen the light too. | 0:13:38 | 0:13:41 | |
Ken is the finest director of actors, of conjuring | 0:13:41 | 0:13:44 | |
a performance from actors, that I have ever worked with. | 0:13:44 | 0:13:46 | |
We were brothers from the start. | 0:13:46 | 0:13:58 | |
Talking of truthful performances and the power that television drama | 0:13:58 | 0:14:04 | |
can generate, let's look to one more clip that is perhaps the most famous | 0:14:04 | 0:14:08 | |
project you collaborated on and that is a drama called | 0:14:08 | 0:14:10 | |
Cathy Come Home, which exposed the problem of poverty | 0:14:10 | 0:14:12 | |
and homelessness in the Britain of the mid-sixties. | 0:14:12 | 0:14:18 | |
This scene we are going to see is very upsetting. | 0:14:18 | 0:14:24 | |
It is based on a true life story, it is where the authorities have | 0:14:24 | 0:14:28 | |
come to take away the children of a young mother. | 0:14:28 | 0:14:30 | |
Let's have a look. | 0:14:30 | 0:14:34 | |
You are not having my babies. | 0:14:36 | 0:14:39 | |
SCREAMING AND CRYING | 0:14:39 | 0:14:42 | |
Get out! | 0:14:42 | 0:14:47 | |
SCREAMING AND CRYING | 0:14:47 | 0:14:56 | |
I tell you what, it is hard to watch that and not feel a stab of pain | 0:14:56 | 0:15:01 | |
in your heart. | 0:15:01 | 0:15:07 | |
Well, I felt it because I had lost my mum. | 0:15:07 | 0:15:09 | |
I had been taken in by the family, what your mum is your mum. | 0:15:09 | 0:15:15 | |
-- I had been taken in by the family, but your mum | 0:15:15 | 0:15:18 | |
is your mum. | 0:15:18 | 0:15:19 | |
There was an advertisement when I was young for something that | 0:15:19 | 0:15:22 | |
said, "accept no substitutes". | 0:15:22 | 0:15:23 | |
There are no substitutes. | 0:15:23 | 0:15:24 | |
You lose your mum. | 0:15:24 | 0:15:27 | |
What I am thinking about was the degree to which your films had | 0:15:27 | 0:15:30 | |
such an impact that they became almost part of the political | 0:15:30 | 0:15:33 | |
discourse in Britain. | 0:15:33 | 0:15:38 | |
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think you had a meeting | 0:15:38 | 0:15:41 | |
with the British Government's Housing Minister as a result | 0:15:41 | 0:15:44 | |
of Cathy Come Home, the furore, 12-14 million people had watched it, | 0:15:44 | 0:15:48 | |
the nation was talking about this problem of young people | 0:15:48 | 0:15:51 | |
who could not get homes, who were forced out of homes | 0:15:51 | 0:15:53 | |
and ended up losing their families. | 0:15:53 | 0:15:55 | |
You made a difference. | 0:15:55 | 0:15:58 | |
Do you feel your films, going back to the 60s and beyond, | 0:15:58 | 0:16:01 | |
made a difference? | 0:16:01 | 0:16:03 | |
It depends on what you mean by making a difference. | 0:16:03 | 0:16:06 | |
When I was young and arrogant, I thought we could make a film | 0:16:06 | 0:16:09 | |
and change the world. | 0:16:09 | 0:16:10 | |
Film don't do that. | 0:16:10 | 0:16:11 | |
The most that a film can do, to use an old political phrase, | 0:16:11 | 0:16:15 | |
is raise consciousness, so that people who are active | 0:16:15 | 0:16:17 | |
in politics can be affected and then they can change the world. | 0:16:17 | 0:16:30 | |
We did have a meeting, Jeremy Sandford, the writer, | 0:16:30 | 0:16:32 | |
and the director and me with the Minister at the Ministry | 0:16:32 | 0:16:35 | |
in a beautiful and huge room in Whitehall - | 0:16:35 | 0:16:38 | |
I have never had a flat as big as that - and it was a very | 0:16:38 | 0:16:41 | |
English occasion. | 0:16:41 | 0:16:46 | |
He was there with his permanent secretary. | 0:16:46 | 0:16:48 | |
We sat down for tea. | 0:16:48 | 0:16:49 | |
The china was very nice and the biscuits were palpable. | 0:16:49 | 0:16:52 | |
We sipped tea while we talked. | 0:16:52 | 0:16:58 | |
He was very complimentary about the film but in the end said, | 0:16:58 | 0:17:05 | |
"well, but what can one do?". | 0:17:05 | 0:17:08 | |
And I said, "build more houses". | 0:17:08 | 0:17:15 | |
He looked at his permanent secretary, who smiled back at him. | 0:17:15 | 0:17:18 | |
Then we were on the street again in Whitehall. | 0:17:18 | 0:17:21 | |
I take the point, then. | 0:17:21 | 0:17:22 | |
Maybe it didn't change anything in the short term, | 0:17:22 | 0:17:24 | |
but there are two things that strike me and the first one is this: | 0:17:24 | 0:17:28 | |
I find it hard, being a professional and having worked in TV for quite | 0:17:28 | 0:17:31 | |
a while myself, I find hard today to think of film-makers and films | 0:17:31 | 0:17:35 | |
on television or on the big screen that have the same kind of impact | 0:17:35 | 0:17:38 | |
that would encourage a Government Minister to call | 0:17:38 | 0:17:40 | |
in the film-maker for talks about the subject at hand. | 0:17:40 | 0:17:43 | |
Do you think radical boundary-pushing stuff is being made | 0:17:43 | 0:17:45 | |
today on television or in film in the same way you were doing it | 0:17:45 | 0:17:48 | |
in the 1960s? | 0:17:48 | 0:17:58 | |
There may be some political films for the cinema, | 0:17:58 | 0:18:00 | |
for the arthouse circuit, very low budget being made | 0:18:00 | 0:18:08 | |
here and certainly there are in other countries, | 0:18:08 | 0:18:10 | |
but you will not see it on television. | 0:18:10 | 0:18:14 | |
Nothing to do with the quality of the film-makers, but because it | 0:18:14 | 0:18:17 | |
would not be allowed. | 0:18:17 | 0:18:18 | |
Television now is different business. | 0:18:18 | 0:18:20 | |
Do you mean the bosses? | 0:18:20 | 0:18:24 | |
The people who run organisations like mine, | 0:18:24 | 0:18:26 | |
the BBC, have lost their nerve? | 0:18:26 | 0:18:27 | |
They are no longer interested in being radical? | 0:18:27 | 0:18:29 | |
In confrontation and saying difficult things? | 0:18:29 | 0:18:31 | |
I do. | 0:18:31 | 0:18:31 | |
I don't blame them as individuals necessarily. | 0:18:31 | 0:18:33 | |
We can talk about the BBC. | 0:18:33 | 0:18:34 | |
The BBC lives in a cultural and political environment. | 0:18:34 | 0:18:37 | |
It affects that environment and it is affected by it. | 0:18:37 | 0:18:52 | |
But if you wanted to make a film like Cathy Come Home today, | 0:18:52 | 0:18:55 | |
would you find an easy place to put it on mainstream terrestrial | 0:18:55 | 0:18:58 | |
television? | 0:18:58 | 0:19:02 | |
I doubt it, and in any case I wouldn't, if I were still working | 0:19:02 | 0:19:05 | |
in films, I would not want to produce a film | 0:19:05 | 0:19:08 | |
like Cathy today. | 0:19:08 | 0:19:09 | |
Cathy let everybody off the hook. | 0:19:09 | 0:19:13 | |
Cathy was not a political enough. | 0:19:13 | 0:19:17 | |
Cathy was a nice, soft, liberal film. | 0:19:17 | 0:19:25 | |
It wasn't seen that way at the time. | 0:19:25 | 0:19:27 | |
It didn't put the boot in where it should have done. | 0:19:27 | 0:19:30 | |
That is what I would want to do now. | 0:19:30 | 0:19:32 | |
There would be no chance now. | 0:19:32 | 0:19:36 | |
By the way, just to finish that point very quickly, | 0:19:36 | 0:19:38 | |
when we did Cathy Come Home, there | 0:19:38 | 0:19:40 | |
was a homeless problem but it wasn't that huge. | 0:19:40 | 0:19:42 | |
And most people knew nothing about it. | 0:19:42 | 0:19:44 | |
When Jeremy Sandford told us about it, because he had researched | 0:19:44 | 0:19:47 | |
it, neither Ken nor I knew there was homeless problem. | 0:19:47 | 0:19:54 | |
It went out and caused a stir, to put it mildly. | 0:19:54 | 0:20:00 | |
Now there is a huge problem of homelessness and housing. | 0:20:00 | 0:20:03 | |
Acknowledged by everyone. | 0:20:04 | 0:20:05 | |
Television does a documentary every week or two on it | 0:20:05 | 0:20:07 | |
and it is in the newspapers, but no one cares. | 0:20:07 | 0:20:11 | |
The politicians of all parties have neglected it for 30 or 40 years, | 0:20:11 | 0:20:15 | |
but they are our politicians, so maybe we live in a country | 0:20:15 | 0:20:18 | |
that does not care as it used to. | 0:20:18 | 0:20:24 | |
Your staples, the films you are known for, for having | 0:20:24 | 0:20:29 | |
collaborated on, are really all about class, powerlessness | 0:20:29 | 0:20:32 | |
of so many people in society, corruption and abuse, | 0:20:32 | 0:20:34 | |
abuse of power. | 0:20:34 | 0:20:36 | |
When you look at Britain today, Britain that has just voted Brexit | 0:20:36 | 0:20:42 | |
and exposed all sorts of new divisions between young | 0:20:42 | 0:20:49 | |
and old, north and south, urban and rural, poor and wealthy, | 0:20:49 | 0:20:52 | |
when you look at Britain today, do you look at a society | 0:20:52 | 0:20:55 | |
that is in worse shape than it was when you set out | 0:20:55 | 0:20:58 | |
on your film-making career? | 0:20:58 | 0:20:59 | |
It is in worse shape but it is also in better shape. | 0:20:59 | 0:21:02 | |
There are all sorts of wonderful things happening. | 0:21:02 | 0:21:04 | |
We value our individuality, we cooperate and compete. | 0:21:04 | 0:21:11 | |
It is finding a balance between those two elements | 0:21:11 | 0:21:13 | |
in society and now we are far too much individuals, | 0:21:13 | 0:21:15 | |
the competition has cancelled out the cooperation | 0:21:15 | 0:21:17 | |
and we are an unhappy society because we are unbalanced. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:21 | |
We need to get the balance back. | 0:21:21 | 0:21:27 | |
If you wanted to make people care today by force of a creative medium, | 0:21:27 | 0:21:31 | |
would you choose television or would you try to harness the Internet? | 0:21:31 | 0:21:38 | |
What would you do? | 0:21:38 | 0:21:39 | |
If Tony Garnett wasn't 80 but was 25 and setting out to influence people, | 0:21:39 | 0:21:42 | |
influence debate, and change the world, how would | 0:21:42 | 0:21:44 | |
you go about it? | 0:21:44 | 0:21:45 | |
I would, without hesitation, be working on the Internet. | 0:21:45 | 0:21:54 | |
The barriers to entry into our business have more | 0:21:54 | 0:21:56 | |
or less disappeared. | 0:21:56 | 0:22:02 | |
When I started very few people were allowed, | 0:22:02 | 0:22:04 | |
because it was so expensive and the technology was | 0:22:04 | 0:22:06 | |
so complex to master. | 0:22:06 | 0:22:11 | |
Now, any kid in a provincial town can get a digital camera | 0:22:11 | 0:22:14 | |
which is point and shoot. | 0:22:14 | 0:22:15 | |
They can edit on their laptop. | 0:22:15 | 0:22:18 | |
Server space is cheap. | 0:22:18 | 0:22:20 | |
They are there for billions of people. | 0:22:20 | 0:22:24 | |
No one will know you're there, but that is a marketing problem | 0:22:24 | 0:22:28 | |
and kids find things. | 0:22:28 | 0:22:29 | |
The final thought, and it may be bleak or it may not, | 0:22:29 | 0:22:31 | |
the kind of serious message and the serious analysis of how | 0:22:31 | 0:22:34 | |
society works that you have always wanted to make, | 0:22:34 | 0:22:37 | |
is that going to find a big audience anyway? | 0:22:37 | 0:22:48 | |
Is that, you know, if it's the internet, is that ever | 0:22:48 | 0:22:51 | |
going to go viral or are people too busy looking | 0:22:51 | 0:22:54 | |
at cute cats? | 0:22:54 | 0:22:54 | |
It depends on how good you are. | 0:22:54 | 0:22:56 | |
When we were making films for television, there were all sorts | 0:22:56 | 0:22:59 | |
of other things that people could look at. | 0:22:59 | 0:23:01 | |
The problem now is that it is all available all the time. | 0:23:01 | 0:23:14 | |
There is too much? | 0:23:14 | 0:23:15 | |
It is not that there is too much, the choice is there all the time, | 0:23:15 | 0:23:19 | |
whereas when there were two channels of television it was one | 0:23:19 | 0:23:22 | |
after the other. | 0:23:22 | 0:23:22 | |
But you still had to get people to watch. | 0:23:22 | 0:23:24 | |
I want to end by going back to where we started and your decision, | 0:23:24 | 0:23:28 | |
after so many years, decades and decades of bottling up | 0:23:28 | 0:23:31 | |
the personal that has been so much of a part of your life | 0:23:31 | 0:23:34 | |
through all this professional success, you have now unbottled | 0:23:34 | 0:23:36 | |
and you have been very open about your own tragedy and trauma. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:39 | |
Have you conquered your demons, do you think? | 0:23:39 | 0:23:41 | |
I am a lot happier. | 0:23:41 | 0:23:42 | |
Do any of us ever conquer all of our demons? | 0:23:42 | 0:23:45 | |
As an old psychoanalyst friend of mine who said, | 0:23:45 | 0:23:53 | |
"it is our scars the make us interesting." | 0:23:53 | 0:23:55 | |
But I'm happier now. | 0:23:55 | 0:23:56 | |
That is a great way to end, a happy thought to end with. | 0:23:56 | 0:24:02 | |
Tony Garnett, thank you so much for being on HARDTalk. | 0:24:02 | 0:24:04 | |
Thank you. | 0:24:04 | 0:24:06 |