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Reprinted from Archive Zones, Autumn 2016 Issue No. 99 © FOCAL International

Reprinted from Archive Zones, Autumn 2016 Issue No. 99 © FOCAL International

FEATURE

I’m surely not the only person who was deeply envious of our colleague James Smith’s escape from archive research into the far more exciting world of music (see Archive Zones, Spring 2016). In my case, there may be some hidden creative talent waiting to blossom from this seemingly barren soil, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is!

I can sing in tune, but not pleasantly. I can dance, ’80s disco style. I’ve tried playing the piano, but only once made an impact – by playing the Ulster Loyalist anthem The Sash Me Father Wore, while some high-ranking Irish Republicans were visiting the house next door! I survived that one – and a few more equally perilous incidents – in my career thus far as an archive researcher. It’s not what you’d naturally think of as a dangerous occupation, but in my experience it can be. 

In 1986, when I left BBC Enterprises (now BBC Worldwide) Library Sales (now BBC Motion Gallery) to take up a job as Film Researcher at London Weekend Television (LWT), our boss, the formidable Jill Hawkins (founder of FOCAL International), who’d rescued me from the cataloguing department a few years earlier, looked at me through the haze of cigarette smoke that was typical of offices in those days and told me I was making a mistake.

She may have been right – in the same way as my parents may have been when they said I should have studied Accountancy, like my cousin Seamus, rather than English Literature. But I still feel that I was always more inclined to be a shopper rather than a merchant, getting the kind of pleasure from research that Nigella Lawson and

Rick Stein do when rummaging around wonderful exotic markets and delis. 

Working at LWT, with Chief Film Researcher Helen Bennitt and eighteen (yes, 18!) other film researchers, was a valuable but not really hazardous experience. After a couple of years, though, I felt it was time to move out into deeper water. So, I took a job on the Channel 4 series for The Media Show – very deep, with many a dangerous current!

Demanded my dismissalThe first ‘near-drowning’ was two days after the first show I did, when Series Editor Alex Graham plonked a fax on my desk, from an executive at an ad agency, claiming that I had lied about the way we were going to use one of their ads, in an item on (offensive and patronising) images of older people in TV commercials – and demanding my instant dismissal. For twenty seconds I thought I was sunk, but Alex just slapped me on the shoulder and asked me to draft a response.

Served them right, thinking they could get a bit of free airtime, and not realising that our famously acerbic presenter Muriel Grey was bound to slag it off! I did three years on that series, and never told a bare-faced untruth – except for the unfailing “Oh, please. If you don’t give me clearance to use that footage, I’ll lose my job”.

On the other hand, with success, came carelessness. I really shouldn’t have got away with sending a fax slagging off the idiots at the Buckingham Palace Press Office to the wrong number – that of the Buckingham Palace Press Office! Maybe they didn’t receive it, or regally decided it was beneath comment, or maybe that’s why I still haven’t made it onto the Honours List!

The 1990s were lively but relatively untroubled, except for an incidence of air-sickness while going for a spin in a two-seater plane with an Italian Contessa, curator of a splendid archive of aviation posters and photos. Her cook made wonderful ravioli, and the wine was exquisite – such a shame I couldn’t keep them down.

Every researcher has had their share of “Please don’t make me do that” moments, or whole contracts. The jobs I’ve done for Norma

Declan Smith on his very individual ‘Researcher’s Survival Course’

The odd unattributable Passport Accreditation can come in very handy on occasion!

Declan Smith

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Reprinted from Archive Zones, Autumn 2016 Issue No. 99 © FOCAL International

FEATURE

Percy, Brian Lapping and their team at Brook Lapping have been wonderful, especially for the overseas research trips, but they did have a good many of those moments. I was often unprepared, as when I arrived at the railway station in Belfast, late on a winter’s night, and was nervous about getting into a shared taxi.

Schnauzer as ‘flatmate’My trips to Serbia in 2002/3 had some nerve-wracking moments, especially on the almost-empty motorways, where my wonderful colleague Jelena Samac’s cousin drove at over 130 km per hour, on a bellyful of slivovitz. I sat in the back seat, nervously clutching my folder full of license agreements and Deutschmarks. Jelena rented me a brilliant apartment in the old part of Belgrade, with one major snag – a schnauzer called Tara who barked, snarled and bared his teeth every time I went in or out. His owners were unhelpful – “Serves him right; three years ago, they bombed us”. I had to resort to biscuits, you know those chocolate ones that dogs love, but are particularly harmful to them. 

Three years later, while working on the series Israel and the Arabs: Elusive Peace, to prepare me for visits to the West Bank and Gaza, I was sent on a Hazardous Environments Course, at a stately home near Wokingham in Berkshire. It should have scared the life out of me, but it was tremendously exciting, especially on the last day, when I was chased along a muddy ditch by a rabid Scotsman acting as a Chechen, tied-up, blindfolded and peed on, interrogated at gunpoint and finally shot – after, I hasten to add, a heroic but failed escape attempt.

For me, and a few of my co-victims who were BBC managers on a jolly, it was great fun. Not so for some others, who would shortly be reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia. I figured it was just for insurance purposes, I’d never really need to put the lessons I’d learned into practice. Not so!

A few months later, I remembered the lesson “Don’t trust your fixer”, standing with my hands up, in pouring rain, by a burnt-out bunker at the VIP checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem, surrounded by soldiers. My Israeli-Arab colleague had decided that, rather than queuing up for ages at the Qalandiya checkpoint with hundreds of ordinary people, we’d take a taxi from Ramallah and nip through the VIP checkpoint – unaware that no Palestinian car could approach it without getting shot, and it was forbidden to cross on foot. The driver dumped us nearby and scarpered.

I stood by for a while, as our fixer and some officers screamed at each other in Hebrew, then asked one of the improbably young soldiers what was going on, and he replied “If your friend doesn’t shut up, you’ll be arrested and deported”. The infamy! I took a deep breath, stepped forward, and with a calm diplomatic mien that I didn’t think I had in me, took command and talked those officers into escorting my now-silent colleague and me through the barriers to a taxi waiting for us on the other end. I went back to the production’s flat near the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem, feeling very grown-up.

…and an earthquake!The following evening, as I was typing up my shot lists, I felt the room shake, as if there were a train passing underground, the crockery rattled, and I asked myself what the Hazardous Environments Course had said about earthquakes. This one registered 2 on the Richter Scale. 

Sadly, in a way, this was the last of my hazardous overseas postings. Iran wouldn’t give me a visa, and Iraq was a no-no – $1800 a day for security – even if I’d been willing. Since then, the biggest danger I’ve faced is overspending, and the most arduous diplomatic effort is in

Declan Smith +44 (0)1548 831 450

declansmith14@hotmail.com

mediating between a director who wants to do an Adam Curtis and a production manager who wants a nice tidy spreadsheet.

Online catalogues have made a difference at the more organised end of the footage market, but the most significant change is the ability to download video clips from the comfort and safety of your desk, rather than having to schlepp off to some faraway place with a blank tape and a wad of dollars.

Of course, sitting at a desk, staring at a screen, is dangerous in itself, as the Lancet and the World Health Organization recently reported. Being inactive is linked to 5.3 million deaths a year worldwide, as opposed to 5.1 million from smoking. In our case the danger is compounded by the gruesome and demoralising nature of the material we find ourselves ploughing through, hour after hour – fourth-rate sitcoms, tedious political speeches, terrorist attack aftermaths, jihadi propaganda videos – enough to shatter the morale of the strongest person, unless you have a regular laugh and a gossip by the water-cooler, and a glass of prosecco – at 6 PM, no later!