Page 16 - Fujifilm Exposure_16 Bob The Builder_ok

ANDREW DUNN BSC
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Although, back in the 60s, he had absolutely no doubt about what he wanted to do with his life, that didn’t mean that life was prepared to fall in straightaway with his aspirations. The British film industry was beginning to go through one of its periodic declines, the MGM studio itself was about to pack up and when Dunn then tried to get into the camera department at the BBC there were no vacancies.
He admits that, in retrospect, this was rather fortuitous. If he had entered one of the old style studio camera departments - and at MGM he had actually been taught during school holidays how to load maga-
zines - then he would have been at the very foot of the old hierarchical ladder.
Getting a BBC place- ment instead in its editing department gave him con- venient access to every- thing from ‘short ends’ to the lab with which he could continue to make his own weekend films. In fact, he and his pals were once so confident about their work they even offered up an example to Top Of The Pops as a kind of pioneer- ing promo. Sadly, it never made it to air.
Dunn finally got his camera break with BBC Scotland, first as an assis- tant then as a fully fledged cameraman working on
every kind of local and networked footage, including a rather accidental stint in Belfast when he happened to be in the right place at the right time with his own 16mm camera when one of the bloodier news stories broke at the turn of the 70s. The result was seen around the world.
“All I really ever wanted to do were feature films,” he avows, “but I knew that whatever I was doing then would somehow be an investment for the future.”
Dunn, quite a cautious man who once - and perhaps still does -
believed in setting himself quite spe- cific career targets, got his first major bullseye when he switched from Scotland to BBC Bristol. In his own mind he was now quite clear that this was his time for drama and as the runes would have it, his move soon coincided with one of the Beeb’s greatest - arguably, greatest ever - periods of original drama production of which Dunn seemed to nab the lion’s share.
He worked on Barry Hines’ nuclear shocker Threads - “we shot next to the Bassett’s factory in Sheffield so whenever I smell a licorice allsort I now think of Armageddon”- and the Falkland Islands war story Tumbledown as well as series like The Monocled Mutineer and, perhaps most fondly remem- bered, the noir-ish conspiracy thriller, Edge Of Darkness.
After the latter came the first seri- ous encouragement to go cinema. But
“One day, I’ll learn to do the job properly... and to my proper satisfaction.”
EXPOSURE • 14 & 15