After 40 years of travel shows, Griff Rhys Jones hits the Deep South
This summer, on Channel 4, I will appear to lay claim to the Land of Cotton.
Griff’s American South contains all the essential aerial, train and crowd shots you desire, and introduces y’all to six states, in six weeks.
I plunge into the Deep South – from quilt-making to bluegrass (at the Gospel Chicken House in the Appalachian Mountains) and meet cheerleaders casually tossing one another 16 feet into the air.
There’s no CGI. It’s all real. I do actually get into a drag-racing car with Frogg, we do actually hit 100mph after a sixth of a mile, and that is my real facial expression as I try to find a non-existent seat belt.
Forty years after I was first recruited to point at things and say, ‘How beautiful,’ I still get the thrills, even if these days they come mainly from trying to do the whole shoot on a ludicrously hectic schedule.
We used to be given three weeks to make one 45-minute programme. For this series, they allowed us a whole five days for the same length of show, and that was after I had asked for an extra day.
Mind you, the ambition of the commissioners has not diminished one jot. They still demand distance, jeopardy and ludicrous spectacle. I flew in microlights and biplanes, drove pick-up trucks and piloted tiny canoes through massive locks, but just a wee bit faster than before.
Instead of spending a day filming an item, we aimed to get it done before breakfast. ‘You’ll have to put me down now, pilot. No time for another go-round, I’m afraid.’
Improvisation is the key. ‘There’s a massive Thanksgiving Parade happening downtown – we’ll shoot that.’
I watch those self-indulgent natural- history follow-ups – The Making of The Turquoise Planet, or whatever – and I goggle. ‘They returned the next year?!’ I’d be lucky if I got three minutes with any penguins.
Forty years ago, I was sent to the delta in Sudan to provide some inserts for Comic Relief. That initiation felt odd. I had previously only ever mocked being a presenter: ‘I’m standing in the middle of a lake ... and I don’t know why.’ Now I was purporting to be a real one.
The Bridget Jones author, Helen Fielding, was our producer. I drank too much coffee from a thimble-sized cup, and lay awake all
night, fretting about the short bit we had travelled 10,000 miles to shoot.
Cameraman, assistant, producer, sound man, fixers and assistant producer waited. And I was the one who had to point out the inconsistencies.
‘This is the delta. It hasn’t rained here for ten years...’ I intoned. ‘Er, Helen, there’s a problem here.’
‘What?’ ‘Well, it’s raining.’ ‘Where?’ ‘Look – coming down from that cloud.’ ‘We can’t see that.’ ‘All right, but I am standing in a puddle.’ We settled on ‘It may be raining now... etc.’ I found the whole process oddly liberating – though not as much as my next director, Harry Hook, did. After proper features in Hollywood, he could now film in the bush without a hundred studio execs pecking him to death, and with no lengthy pauses while make-up artfully rearranged a lock of my hair.
He gleefully shot over 30 hours of material. He hardly had enough time to view it all before the edit.
But then ‘factual TV’ itself got edited. Celluloid was junked. Cameras got tiny and then, mysteriously, huge again, festooned with more and more batteries and gizmos. The spray-shooting era began. The drone buzzed in, and every shot could be a helicopter shot. The sound man’s assistant got laid off. The cameraman’s assistant went to work in Currys. I’m surprised I’m still working myself, frankly.
Dumbing down? Oddly, I think I’ve dumbed up. In the past, it was essential to hog-tie a crocodile. Or dangle off a mountain – ‘But I’ve never climbed a mountain. What if I fall off?’
‘If you could fall off, that would be terrific.’
In the past, when my bike skidded off a low cliff in New Zealand, and I grabbed a bush, and was finally in my own cliffhanger, I actually yelled, ‘Don’t stop shooting!’
Every whizz, bang and crash went in. My thoughtful and well-researched commentaries got cut.
Then a couple of years ago, I went off to cross the second-biggest country in the world in six weeks. There was no time for second takes. What I intoned in Canada stayed in the picture. It was a content hit and I’m back.
Otherwise, nothing has changed.
The interview in the oldest gay bookshop in the world with a girl who had only started the previous week and knew absolutely nothing about it. The hunting club where 12 separate members looked peeved when I declined to shoot a real moose. The 100-mile detour to gather honey in the forests of Zambia in winter, when the bees had eaten the lot.
All still needed a bit of improvisation and extra guff. That’s the kick of the thing. I love it.
Griff’s American South is on Channel 4 this summer
