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Doctor, now proliferate every- where else too.
He’d been at Five for five years and after taking stock of his career to date suddenly realised that after having “done all the channels” as an exec he’d somehow lost sight of what he’d originally entered television to do – that is, make programmes.
Less than a fortnight after he quit Five, 9/11 occurred. He immediately conceived a pro- gramme, got it commissioned and the resulting acclaimed fea- ture-length documentary was shown Europe-wide on the first anniversary of the tragedy.
It also earned him a BAFTA TV nomination in the Flaherty Documentary Award strand. He knows that because he received a letter informing him of the fact, as well as a year’s free member- ship at the Academy, signed, “sincerely, Michael Attwell.”
By this time he’d, of course, become chairman of BAFTA having been a member for nigh on 25 years but only, very reluctantly at first, getting involved with matters corpo-
rate on the direct orders of his C5 boss, Ms Airey.
He has, he says, been “part of a generational change at BAFTA. It has changed dramatically in the five or six years I’ve been active. I think for the better – but not every- one does. I have been accused by some of helping give away mem- berships to every Tom, Dick or Harry.
“That’s one way of looking at it. The other way is that we’ve properly opened BAFTA up to film, TV and new media, and made it much more democratic and rep- resentative of those industries.
“One of the first things I did when first involved with BAFTA was to undertake to look at the membership. There were a lot issues involved - one was that we didn’t even have a proper data- base so didn’t really know who our members were or where they were drawn from.
“It actually turned out that the overwhelming majority of the membership were freelances of various kinds; even more remark- ably, compared with other peo- ple working in the industry, they were relatively a very old cross
section. So one of the things we’ve done is work very hard to encourage younger people to become involved.
“They join because they gen- uinely want to network and meet older people with experience who can talk to them and, hope- fully, help. In the end they are part of what we’re all trying to do, which is set standards and get people to think about what constitutes excellence in craft and creativity.”
While wanting always to do his best for BAFTA, Attwell admits that his day job – running an independ- ent production in a cut-throat world - must always take precedence.
He followed up 9/11 with a programme about Myra Hindley and is now deeply into the El Greco documentary and a series for Five tantalising titled Secrets Of The Old Testament. This gets him all wide-eyed again: “The evidence we’ve amassed shows overwhelmingly, almost to the point of being cat- egoric, that the Old Testament is complete fiction...” His evidence arrives in 2005.
FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
UK SCREENINGS
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Wed.10December 1:00pm Tues. 6 January 7:00 pm
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Wed. 10 December 6:30 pm UGC Fountain Park
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Photos by Richard Kendal