Page 5 - Fujifilm Exposure_3 Michael Winner_ok

behind the camera
IN THE
IN THE
GREAT BRITISH
GREAT BRITISH
TRADITION
TRADITION
An interview with Robin Vidgeon BSC
Even though it might make him sound just a bit robotic, it’s still rather tempting to describe the manifestly human Robin Vidgeon as a template for all the traditional virtues of British cinematog- raphy. From studio camera department to DP via all the usual rungs of that industry ladder has been fiftysomething Vidgeon’s time-honoured, year-hardened progress ever since sitting as an obviously talented, yet understandably nervous teenager in a smoke-filled Soho interview room at the union HQ awaiting his fate.
From his current working perch in the North-East where he’s lighting Colour Blind, his third Catherine Cookson-authored mini-series for Festival Films, Tyne Tees and the network, the ever-cheerful Vidgeon can look back with some pride on a long career that was properly ignited the moment, aged 17,hewasawardedthatallimportant-passporttowork- hisACTticket.
In fact the seeds of cinematic passion were sown some years before that when film-mad Vidgeon constructed his own small cinema at the family home in West London. He’d rent 9.5mm films - like Battleship Potemkin - from a local library then coerce some 15 friends a month, including long-suffering parents and neighbours, to his bespoke fleapit, complete with opening and closing curtains, dimming lights and underfloor cables.
Later, the love affair was further fuelled when he got a 9.5mm Pathe cam- era - “sprocket holes down the middle, frame size not much smaller than the old 16mm and very steady” - which yielded decades of holiday movies (now, potential Vidgeon biographers please note, transferred to video).
Such an early sense of film-making and exhibiting independence must have seemed far removed from that first job in the camera department at Pinewood Studios where - forbidden to touch anything remotely optical - he learned all about ... boxes. Which boxes housed which cameras and which shelves the boxes then went on.
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Photos: Robin Vidgeon at work on the set of Catherine Cookson’s Colour Blind and (bottom left) on The Moth with regular crew members Paul Hatchman, John Maskall, ‘Vicar Vidgeon’ and Danny Shelmerdine.