NORMA PERCY - Winner of the FIAT/IFTA Award 1996

Cashing a cheque is fairly straightforward, is it not? Think again. Say that you intend to cash a cheque relating to something you are going to be interviewed about in an hour, then you would be very distressed to hear that this is not possible due to the small matter of your name not being on the cheque. Hypothetically, you could take your cheque to, say, a colleague, who then fills in your name, and, hey presto, you have a valid cheque. But you would not do that, would you? Still, it would be typical if after having made all the major players in the ongoing conflict in Yugoslavia say too much in front of a camera you would find yourself defeated by a bank (hypothetically, of course).

Brian Lapping Productions and Norma Percy have received many awards for their outstanding documentaries, including an Emmy for their programme on Watergate, but rarely do the awards come with a monetary compensation. This may not matter much to producers of light entertainment, who in today's broadcasting climate seem to have money thrown at them in the quest for the biggest audience share, but to producers of documentaries it is a welcome addition to a bank balance in the red. The FIAT/IFTA Award received by Norma Percy for The Road to War, the second programme in the series The Death of Yugoslavia, came with a cheque for 10,000 DEM, courtesy of sponsors GÙrtler and TechMath. Although she was the one in the spotlight at the FIAT/IFTA Award ceremony she is careful to point out that equal credit has to go to the producer/directors Angus MacQueen and Paul Mitchell, and to film researcher Michael Simkin.

She came to Paris from Jordan to pick up the award and when I met her in the less than glamorous offices in Camden, London, she had just got back from a trip to the USA; in both countries she had been gathering information for a new landmark documentary: Israel & the Arabs: the 50-year Conflict. I asked her why they go for these mammoth subjects, apart from the obvious interest in them: "I am slow and expensive, so the subject has to be big enough to justify it". Their documentaries are expensive, partly because of the research involved, and partly because of long time in editing (13 weeks per programme) and whereas the initial cost is very high, the more programmes you make, the cheaper per programme (in theory) so not only is it easier to get funding for a "big" subject, but it is also easier to get funding for a series than for a one-off (always buy the jumbo-sized economy pack). One-offs are also more difficult to sell. (Although they have done a one-off on The Falklands War.)

Norma Percy and Brian Lapping

I must admit that I did not think there would be any problem selling documentaries as good as The Death of Yugoslavia, especially when you have an impeccable track record, but I was wrong: "Yugoslavia was a fluke, it could have bankrupt the company, we certainly would have lost money... but it hit the headlines just before it went out: the fall of Srebrenica and Tudjman re-taking Knin". The interest in the series went up and in the end it sold quite well, but only because it was in the news. So far, the productions have made up for the limited funding through sales of the programmes, but much has been down to luck, having the right programme at the right time: Nixon's death made the Watergate programme top of many broadcasters' list and The Second Russian Revolution caught the eye due to the coup - quality merged with luck. At present, the funding for Israel & the Arabs: the 50-year Conflict is not complete, but they hope that once production has started and they have something to show broadcasters will get interested.

Norma Percy gives her seal of approval to the nomination of The Road to War for the FIAT/IFTA Award; the extensive use of archive footage made it an obvious choice out of the six programmes. But Norma confesses that it was possibly the most difficult programme to make, and at least the longest in the making. For a while it was left on the shelf while work was done on programmes 3 and 4. One reason for this was that they lacked vital footage. They had material from the demonstrations in Knin when the meeting between Serbian Croat police officers and Croatian officials took place, but they felt that that was not enough; they had heard that there was extensive footage from the meeting of the Yugoslavian General Council in the freezing basement of the military headquarters, but where was it? The programme was kept on hold, while the film researcher Michael Simkin worked his way through archives and contacts with the help of locally recruited researchers. It is unclear how they finally got hold of footage of the actual meeting between the Serbian Croat police officers and Croatian officials, and it is absolutely spectacular that they managed to get hold of the 3 x 5 hours of rushes from the Council meeting. In a western country this would have been inconceivable, political advisers would have cried. The rushes include not only the formal meeting but also small talk during recesses, informal conversations in corners, etc. 15 hours of insight into the private life of politics.

Almost as surprising is the openness of the interviewees. The show of emotions and lack of restraint is almost shocking to viewers used to the ducking and diving of most western politicians. Apart from the obvious skill of the interviewer Norma Percy feels that much of it is due to their novel interviewing technique: first they do a research interview which is fairly loose in form and content, and from that they take out the interesting bits, write a script and go back for a second interview. Not only do you know better what to ask the second time - very specific questions are absolutely vital in order to get answers, but the answers are also less rehearsed. Another "trick" is to let the interviewed person talk a lot: "You allow them to talk for a long time and you get more than they think they have given you". Together with careful editing, using short sound bites from interviews with several people interspersed with archive material (a technique Brian Lapping Productions take credit for), it creates eye opening results. There is an immediacy to the programme that is very rare in politico-historical documentaries; information presented with flair.

We discussed the ethics concerning the use of moving images, especially archive material. Such material is used to show, to prove what happened, but what happens when some footage is used as a substitute for the footage you cannot get hold of and no-one tells the viewer? Norma Percy admits that she is not as strict as many of FIAT/IFTA's members think she should be, or even as strict as some of her co-producers, but her aim is not to get the authentic footage for the voice over, instead she says "we see ourselves as making stories". What she wants to do is "give the viewer a feeling of what it was like". Her main concern is to not give people the wrong impression. Take an example from the award winning programme: for experienced viewers it would seem likely that the footage of the three helicopters being forced to turn back to their base is not from the incident mentioned in the voice over (and it is not). Does that matter? Should it be made clear? Although she hesitates when asked these questions, when actually making the films story-telling takes precedence over absolute archival correctness, and having seen the end result I would have to agree with her judgement. It makes a more involving programme though being true in spirit and this helps us understand a very difficult issue.

So, if you have some spare money to spend on a worthy cause, give Norma Percy a call.

Gösta Johansson
Editor and Administrative Secretary