Life behind the lights

THE basic aim and concept of all Denis Mitchell’s unique television documentary work — Chicago, The Intruders, Morning in the Streets, Grass Roots — has been to get as close to real life as possible.

With The Entertainers (Wednesday, 9.40 p.m.) the first of two consecutive programmes for Granada, he may have got closer still with a study of the private lives and problems of club entertainers in the North of England for two reasons:

☆ He used a mobile videotape installed in a Travelling Eye vehicle (instant vision and sound recorded on tape) to get a direct transcript of events as they happened. This is the first time that this method has been used to obtain a continuous record for TV documentary purposes.

☆ The whole story was shot entirely “off the cuff” and unplanned, in an empty house specially rented for the purpose.

Let Denis Mitchell himself explain: “The behind-the-scenes lives of club entertainers, their struggles, their day-to-day life, their relations with each other and their background, is a subject that has always had a great fascination for me.

“But I could never quite see how to get to grips with it the way I wanted — truthfully and genuinely — until I had this idea, about the house.

“Yes, I thought. Get a house. Then get a half-dozen or so entertainers, put them in the house, and see what happens.

“No plan, no script. Just turn on the cameras, and let the videotape take over. Let the machines record life exactly as it unfolds.

“And that’s the way it was. It wasn’t quite a simple as that, but it worked.”

The house was in Whalley Range, not far from Manchester’s city centre.

He went on: “I got the design department of Granada to furnish it in the style of a decayed boarding-house — the regular background of the people whose lives I wanted to explore.

“Then I did a round of the Lancashire clubs to find the types I wanted. The idea fascinated them as much as it did me. They moved in, bringing their essentials with them. If they wanted, they could sleep in the house. Sometimes they did.

“There was Archie Tower, 60 years old, an old-style comedian — one of those who’d always just missed the big time. Shirley, 22, a professional singer for only a year. There was Bridgette, a strip dancer. She was married, and brought her baby along.

“Arlette was a strip dancer, too. She’d been taking a degree course in English literature at Manchester’s College of Commerce when the club offer came along. She’d settled for the cash.

“There were Bob and Dave, two boys from Openshaw, with their guitars and their dreams. And there was Johnnie Kennedy, 24 years old and a singer, with ambition bursting out of him. Always, there was Johnnie.

“In the film, you can see how he gets an audition — in an empty Manchester club — and how this leads to a booking at a leading London night spot. This is the way it happened. No fake.

“Naturally, I had to compress the action. The way I’ve told the stories of these young people (and Archie) is by showing a typical 24 hours in their lives.

“Their day really begins in the afternoon. so I started from there. Often, they sleep until 3 p.m. (They usually work until around 3 a.m.)

“You see them shaving, gossiping, cooking, dressmaking, phoning their agents, making tea. Just as it happened. Then the videotape follows them to their evening engagements in, the clubs.

“The story ends in the morning. Actually, it ended with a party which came about in the house, at mid-day.”

Cheshire-born Denis Mitchell is 52, and made his first TV film, On The Threshold, 12 years ago.

Since then, for his varied, but always highly individualistic work, he has received the Prix Italia (1959) for Morning in the Streets (his own personal favourite), and the Vancouver Award for Main Street, South Africa, and Soho Story.

He is a man who thinks entirely in terms of television; believes that the medium holds endless possibilities for development.

In the presentation of his subjects, his approach is invariably laconic — letting the facts and the pictures speak for themselves. Nevertheless, he stresses that, if you look for a social commentary, you will always find it.

“I am disturbed by poverty, loneliness, old age, people in the backwaters of life,” he says frankly. “If I have pictured these things in the North of England mainly, it is because that is my background. and that is what I understand best.”

Before making TV films, Denis Mitchell spent many years in South Africa. He went there at the age of 20 and worked as bank clerk, cheese salesman, cattle hand, and journalist, “remarkably badly,’’ he says.

But while there he got the job of chief script writer for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. Returning to England, he finally joined the BBC’s staff as a radio features producer based in Manchester. There he made his mark with “People Talking”, which developed an entirely new kind of interview technique.