All my working life, I’ve wanted to fight the forces trashing the living world. I’ve wanted to fight them in the most powerful medium, television. Instead, I’ve found myself fighting TV executives, who for 36 years have nixed almost every proposal I’ve made.
Doubtless unwittingly, they stand guard in front of the corporations and governments destroying our life support systems, ensuring that journalists can very seldom make the hard-hitting exposes required to hold them to account.
They appear to be terrified of the kind of kinetic, campaigning, investigative journalism I want to do. And their fear seems to make them furious. The treatments I’ve written seem to press a button, which makes them shout and swear and dismiss them out of hand.
I never wanted to be a print journalist. But I had no choice: there was simply no way into television. It’s infuriating to see how people who get their information from TV have been left in near-total ignorance about what’s happening to our planet.
So, yes, this is why we made Rivercide without them. They would never have let it pass.
What we tried to do was to bust TV out of its box. To make something that reflects the real world: not just in terms of subject matter, but also in terms of the messy, glitchy reality in which we all live.
A typical television documentary creates an imaginary world, in which everything is smooth and slick and pre-ordained, and both issues and production stay within certain borders, borders that don't exist outside the box.
It's my belief that unless things can sometimes go wrong, they can never go right. It's the grit that makes the pearl.
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