The Natural Inclination to Censorship

Posted on November 7, 2006
Filed Under Error and bias |

I promised yesterday to convey some of my impressions of censorship around film making. Now I don’t want to make out that I am a film maker. The word Director is not on the back of my chair. And nor do I take the coward’s way out and print it on my T shirt and then wear a woolly jumper. But last year I made a film for the BBC, the first one I’d been involved with for about 15 years.

Given the nature of yesterday’s blog you can guess what the film was about - not quite World War II but its aftermath. And that was the working title: Aftermath.

It has taken me 4 year to get the film made - at least that was the headline figure. But I’d made a story item for a TV show twenty years earlier, on the same theme, so on another count it was twenty two years in the making.

As the film making came to an end and transmission day appeared a behind the scenes row broke out over censorship. I’d written an article for the Radio Times, a British publication owned by the BBC, which covers TV related matters.

In the article I had intimated that the film about to be transmitted was not the one I believed we should have made. I obviously meant the public deserved a film that challenged their beliefs. We’d made something triumphalist which was not where I began at all. Aftermath had become Conquering Germany, a title irrelevant to the immediate post-war period.

The fact that the film ever got made was down in large part to the efforts of Roy Ackerman, now creative director at FBC, a large multinational media group.

I’d worked with Roy briefly twenty years earlier and on that basis alone he backed the idea of a film that reappraises British strategy and policy around the end of World War II.

At our first meeting with the BBC, a senior commissioner asked what was the driving vision behind the film. I answered: To question the sense of moral accomplishment that the British have regarding World War II.

I have never come close to seeing somebody physically levitate from the seat but that’s what happened. Furious, yer man says: In that case the film won’t be made.

So began the compromises. But I had an agreement with Roy. I could have my say later in print.

He and I went to a variety of meetings over a twenty month period, and gradually worked our way round to a commission and a budget. Dealing with somebody like me, with no name in the business, Roy was taking a risk. On the other hand we had that agreement. I wouldn’t push too hard for my views to be incorporated providing I got first stab at the big article based on the film. The Radio Times offered the space.

I’ll describe the lead up and fall out tomorrow. But for now, what was the point of questioning that sense of moral accomplishment? There are two answers.

One is to ask if it reflected the history of those years accurately. The other is to ask if we are still building a future based on a triumphalist past, can it ever work? It has seemed to me for about a decade now, if not longer, that a foreign policy from Britain and America that reflected the views of the quiet and modest majority might make for a better world. In fact as far back as the early 1980s and the British invasion of the Falklands, there are people who’ve quietly regretted the persistance of militarism among the politicians, a view that seems to be gaining traction only now.

Far from questioning anybody’s courage in the 1940s I wanted to make film that asked if that courage had been well served by what came next.

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