Eating Albion

As I explained yesterday the other day, this blog is about my impending trip around the UK working on organic farms and smallholdings. But that’s not kicking off until April, so why am I blogging now?

Well, for a number of reasons. Firstly is to build up a ‘head of steam’ behind this project. You can’t just launch it on April 20th and expect people to come. Secondly, as the old exam rule goes, you get points for showing your working out. So as the ‘wheel’s still in spin’ on who exactly may support this project and how, I thought I’d give your a behind the scenes view of it coming together. Thirdly I’d like to tell you about how this project came together, and why I’m doing it.

So let’s start there shall we.. About how this whole thing came about. Sitting comfortably because there’s a fair bit of back-story to this? Then I’ll begin.

It’s January 2006 and I’m working at the BBC. I’ve an idea for a food based TV show – a skilful blend of food, heritage and social history. It was simple yet effective project, which mixed new media elements with a linear TV show. The one pager goes in front of Elaine Bedell, then Contemporary Factual commissioner. She makes some suggestions and gives me a few names of people to speak too. What happens next is akin to the trials of Odysseus, that sees me knocking on doors, buying people lots of coffee and hearing 26 different view points on the same subject, and receiving such sage advice as ‘the 8pm slot is radically different from the 8:30’ and phrases like ‘warehoused through internal productions’. So far so ‘working in telly’.

It’s now mid-summer and a development producer is assigned to my project and a ‘pitch’ is worked up. It goes back to Elaine. She has some more thoughts. It comes back to the lifestyle factual development team, where I’m told it’s to be extensively reworked, and that ‘I shouldn’t be disappointed’. One person actually said to me, ‘I’ve worked here for three years and pitched 16 ideas, not one of them has been commissioned’. Only in the BBC would that happen and that person still have a job. The overhaul begins and though I’m still involved it’s moving further and further away from what I wanted to make and the story I wanted to tell.

Around the same time the BBC World Service was offering an Alexander Onassis bursary. This was to be it’s final year as all the money had all been spent. The scheme was set up in memory of Onassis’s son Alexander who died at 24 in a plane crash. The criteria was it had to involve going overseas and filing some sort of audio report for the World Service. My entry focused on a group of British producers who were planning to attend Foodex ‘07, a food expo in Tokyo in March. They were being helped by www.foodfrombritain.com a Government quango spun out of the Trade and Industry dept to promote UK food and produce in international markets. Anyway, I didn’t win the bursary, a big negative that I didn’t know about was that the previous year’s winner had gone to Japan to look at the effects of an ageing population. I then thought, what the hell, I’ve done all this work, I’ll pitch it to the magazines, but it was a little too ‘economics’ for the likes of food porn mags like Delicious and Olive. The expo was getting nearer and I eventually secured a commission from Overseas Trade magazine (what do you mean you’ve never heard of it?) who couldn’t contribute a penny. I was going to have to fund the trip myself, it was all getting out of hand…ahh the life of a would-be freelancer.

The end of 2006 saw the TV show idea changing from something fantastic into a celebrity spinach eating contest, my other freelance pitches and ideas were falling on barren ground, it was time to take stock. A year of work in the bin? Sometimes you sulk, sometimes you burn, as Radiohead sang….. Well yes, but in the ‘recycle’ bin. And I’d learnt a lot, the key thing being most people involved in developing telly don’t have the foggiest where the next cool thing is coming from. The second that if you believe in your ideas, and in yourself, you’ll find a way. So with a ‘Sod you, me and my ideas are off’ I left the BBC at the end of December ‘06 for Channel 4.

Anyway, so what to do now? Well 2007 started, and there were new relationships to develop and new people to meet at Channel 4. But the idea of the British producers kept coming back. Also during 2006 my eyedropper blog had started to move away from photography and design and incorporate more food related posts. I’ve always been interested in food, as the about section shows on this site. My father was a chef and my family were all good cooks.

Then in early autumn ‘07 life changed lanes again when me and my girlfriend of seven years split up. It was mutual, and we hope to remain friends, but suddenly the future you think you had in front of you falls away and you think ‘glup’. So my plan was to take a gap year and travel like everyone else. Straight on the plane to Thailand right? Drinking little buckets of whiskey, catching something itchy that’ll require a prescription, on to Sydney and New Zealand, over to America, bumming around, writing a yawny travelogue type blog to piss off all the people back home. Lots of pictures on flickr of me in front of the World’s monuments. But what’s the point, everyone else has done it, no one’s remotely interested except perhaps your mum, meanwhile you end up looking like the gnome in Amélie.

No, I wanted to do something productive, more VSO, working gap year type stuff. That’s when I hit on WWOOFing, I could go to Canada or New Zealand and work on farms, traveling and doing something foodie. Only 30 seconds after thinking this the thought that flying to New Zealand to pick apples that could even end up being sent back to the UK wasn’t exactly good for the planet.

And the more I looked into it, the more I wanted to travel in the UK, to see the producers here. To explore our regional specialties and varieties. To find the new growers, the people doing interesting things with produce and food. This isn’t just about working on farms; it’s about finding the food stories for each region and telling that story. As a photographer I’m in awe of Capa and the war photographers, knowing I’m too much of a coward and not good enough to ever embed with a unit in Afghanistan or Iraq and bring back that story. But I’m thinking of this as embedding with farmers and food producers, I’m not only there as a journalist, I’m there to work and be part of the team. And if one of you reads this blog and is inspired to spend a long weekend in the countryside leisurely picking apples in Somerset or mending walls in Cumbria rather than fly squeezy-Jet to a Western European city that looks like every other Western European city then it’ll be worth it. And so now I say to people, ‘I’m going travelling’ and they say ‘really where to’, to which I reply ‘guess’. ‘Hmm, Thailand, South America, Russia, …Africa?’. ‘Nope, Britain’. ‘BRITAIN!?’ is always the reply.

So, looooooong post, but lots off the chest, and in a full disclosure way, I hope I’ve shown you some of the failures that have lead to this success. You don’t just wake up one morning and decided to change you life, it’s the result of a millions tiny trajectory knocks. Ideas come about in the same way. You can’t battery farm ideas like chickens, you have to grow them, nurture them, and let them roam. And this one’s been growing in one-way or another for over two years already…