TV Memories

Guest article by Richard Else

When I was researching Wainwright Revealed, one question kept recurring and was fundamental to our years together. I kept asking myself, did he enjoy making the films? It’s a simple question that I found impossible to answer for a long time. Usually, I’d say let the facts speak for themselves, but Wainwright was not averse to altering those facts to suit the occasion.

For example, he was happy to exaggerate the size and age of the small film team in one of his letters to his old friend Doris Snape. So, whilst he and Betty would say how much they had enjoyed some filming and how much they liked Eric Robson and the crew, Wainwright sometimes complained about the filming process when other people asked the same question. It was, I thought, a question of maintaining a carefully crafted image – could someone who had spent most of his life avoiding crowds and publicity now admit that he might have missed out?

What interested me was how quickly he took to the filming process and what a huge step it must have been for him. So, for someone used to issuing instructions – be it to the long-suffering Andrew Nichol at the Westmorland Gazette or to photographer Derry Brabbs – he now, albeit begrudgingly at times, had to accept them from me. Yet, on the other hand, he never understood what I call the elasticity of film, even just a few months before his death. That ability to jump backwards and forward through time, juxtapose, and make connections when none might appear obvious.

Our penultimate day together was Sunday, 28 October 1990, and we went to see Peter Bayes in the Pen-y-ghent café. Sadly, the scene we filmed was never shown. We had planned to follow an augmented version of AW’s Pennine Journey, but the last sequences we shot became part of Wainwright Remembered after his death. Looking at the film, as we approach the 30th anniversary of his death, I’m struck by how relaxed he often looked in front of the camera, but that apparent ease was hard-won. When we filmed that last time at Horton-in-Ribblesdale, AW couldn’t see how this scene would become part of a larger film because the café didn’t exist during his original walk in 1938.

The following day, AW became ill and returned home to Kendal, and our time together ended abruptly. Like Wainwright, I wouldn’t say I like change, and although I could see he was less well with each passing year, I had hoped we still had some more time left. It was, of course, a vain hope: after all, a diet of fish ‘n chips and continuous smoking doesn’t figure in any NHS healthy living guide. To answer my original question, I think the films became a means to an end for Wainwright.

When we first met, his eyesight was already failing, and his days walking the 26 miles from Ullapool to Lochinver were a distant memory, although one remembered in minute detail. When we were out with the film crew, and courtesy of my Land Rover, he savoured revisiting places he thought he’d never see again. But away from the cameras, our relationship was very different. We spent hours poring over maps, discussing the finer points of a particular landscape, and sharing a past with striking similarities despite our vast age difference. I’m immensely pleased our films became cult viewing with huge audiences, rave reviews and overturning the media maxim that articulates people make the best television.

Yet, on the anniversary of his death on 20 January, I won’t be thinking about any of this. I’ll simply be remembering how we shared our love of the hills and how this was both a cause for celebration and the enduring love of our lives in very different ways.

<<>>

Richard Else
Producer of the original Wainwright BBC TV series

27 November 2020