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NIGEL WALTERS BSC
“Because of my long experience, what I suppose I can offer is the ability to help produce quality product quickly.”
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dane groundwork as a cub reporter pretty dispiriting.
So he took off for Sweden and work in a Rudolf Steiner home for handi- capped children where he’d once spent an inspirational month during his post-school travelling years.
Eventually returning to Wales, with a Swedish wife-to-be in tow, to find a permanent job, three in the apprentice mould suddenly cropped up all at the same time: sales rep for Marley Tiles, the RAF as a pilot, and as a general trainee for the BBC.
Choosing the last, he went to work for the Beeb at a time when – and this apparently applied to the regions only – they trained you in camera, sound and editing.
Though actually employed by BBC Wales, he arrived at Ealing in that ‘dogsbody’ capacity, “doing jobs like synch-ing rushes for The Great War.
“It was an intensive course and I also got to see all the great directors working. The idea was that after a year, you and they would have a mutu- al understanding about which area you’d be best in. I had absolutely no doubt I wanted to be a film camera- man,” he recalled.
Starting out as a trainee assistant cameraman, he remained predomi- nantly based in his native Wales for the next five years However, he said, “one of the Welsh crews was paid for by Ealing so we’d have some work up there. And one by one the trainees escaped to London.”
He made the full-time switch him- self in 1968 and was, as he explained, “lucky to be put with one of the better cameramen, Peter Sargent.
“I remember the first time I went out with him. He looked at the cam- era, then he looked at me and said,
‘Get on with it, boy!’ For a moment I wondered what he was on about, and then I suddenly realised I was being asked to operate the camera. Here I was, given trust and confidence by a man I didn’t even know.”
He eventually ‘graduated’ to director of photography (“my first big drama series was, I think, Wings, set during the First World War. I saw the film Aces High but I thought ours was better considering we didn’t have the budget”). He has affection- ate memories of his own various assistants down the years - “who’ve remained friends” - like Ian Pugsley, Ray Brislin, Simon Maggs and Graham Frake, not to mention his regular gaffers, Alan Muhley, Dave Oldroyd and George Vince.
There were high and lowlights dur- ing his time at the BBC. A low has to have been when he did a Bergerac. “I criticised Louise Jameson’s clothes and it turned out they were her own. And it got back to her. That was the only Bergerac I did,” he smiled.
Michael Palin’s 1989 BAFTA-win- ning global odyssey in the footsteps of Phileas Fogg was an undoubted high and also helped lead, though Walters was too modest to make much of it, to a Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society - for “fostering human under- standing through the camera.”
And as a film buff, he could barely suppress his excitement when shoot- ing some of the Hollywood Greats series as he trained his camera on the legendary likes of Howard Hawks, George Cukor, Lilian Gish, Hal Roach and Ginger Rogers.
There were even some echoes of that early ambition to be a foreign cor- respondent when, in 1973, he found himself in the middle of the Yom
Photo main: Linda Rook, Sarah Lancashire and Eva Pope in My Fragile Heart; Above l-r: Jeff Goldblum and Greta Scacchi in Karl Francis’ One Of The Hollywood Ten;
Nigel Walters and Director Karl Francis; Nigel Walters (right) on location shooting Saigon Baby; Joanna Lumley and Geraldine McEwan in Miss Marple: Far right: On the set of Queer As Folk
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