Kirkham Jackson: Shorts

Mick, sorry Kirkham, has written and directed a handful of short films. Namely:

Pieces of the Moon (1994)

with: Rob Swinton, Katherine Tolley, Daniel Girling

When Jackson first announced that he was leaving the bands to take up writing, a friend, Adam Keelan, said that if he (Jackson) ever came up with an idea for a short screenplay, then he (Keelan) would be prepared to try and raise the funds for it. A year or two later they agreed on a script, which involved lots of panning shots over ivy-strewn graves in Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington and a telephone engineer fiddling with the wires in a box outside the cemetery gates. The idea was... well, you can probably work out what the idea was. Let's just say that it involved a great many voices slowly culminating in a rather mournful cacophony.

The crew consisted largely of Keelan's friends from the BBC who worked for nothing, but sadly the film was never edited / mixed. No doubt if it had been it would have been a huge hit

Pieces of the Moon was the first completed Jackson-Keelan collaboration. The idea - of a young boy on a lonely caravanning holiday and his fixation with the astronauts who were landing on the moon - was inspired by cine footage taken by Jackson's father and photographs of the Jackson clan and friends sitting on a beach reading newspapers with 'Man Walks on the Moon' headlines. The film was funded by Anglia TVs 'First Take' series and Eastern Arts.

It was shot on Super 16 but before a foot of film went through the camera the driver of the car that was pulling the caravan lost control and the vintage car (which had been hired from someone who'd painstakingly restored it) and the caravan (which had been carefully dressed for the interiors) were both wrecked. The only consolation was that none of the three actors or Adam Keelan, who was crouched in the back with a walkie-talkie strapped to his face, were injured.

Amazingly, Jackson and the crew managed to work on other scenes whilst an alternative car was located and a second caravan was acquired and the film wrapped within the allotted five or six days. The short went on to win prizes at various film festivals, including Chicago, Brest and San Francisco.

The Pylon People (1994)

When Jackson was at Dartington College of Arts in the early '80s he happened to be footling about in the countryside when he came across a vast electricity sub-station, full of all sorts of futuristic-looking installations, with great lines of pylons stretching up and down the surrounding valleys. Incredibly, the local electricity board granted Jackson access to the site and even allowed him to stage a one-man show there. The audience was shipped in by transit van to the sub-station at night when the whole place was lit up like Crystal Palace. The monologue was based on a local character who lived right next to the station but refused to have electricity in his house.

Anyway, about ten years later Jackson saw an advert in The Guardian asking for ideas for short documentaries set in the Westcountry and decided to try and utilize this rather weird location. Without putting too fine a point on it he used the address of a friend who still lived in Devon as a means of qualifying for the series. The short film ended up consisting of a collection of interviews with local people, talking about what it was like living so close to the pylons, which included a couple of toddlers talking animatedly (but not entirely coherently) and a new-age couple explaining how all the car hubcaps they hung from the trees in their garden deflected the negative energy away from their house. It was shot in a day and broadcast by Westcountry TV.

The Walberswick Detectives (1996)

with James Ryland, Mark White, Peter Stark

The idea for this short came to Jackson when he was walking on the beach in Hastings and saw two middle-aged heavy metal fans paddling in the sea with their toddlers. This image of aging rockers / devoted fathers rather stayed with Jackson and was developed into a story about two friends out in the sticks who are obsessed with TV cop shows (such as NYPD Blue) and take their metal detector out onto the beach on Saturday mornings. The original title was 'The Metal Detectives' or even 'The Heavy Metal Detectives'. The narrative veers off in a somewhat surreal direction when the two characters discover a (live) foreigner under the shingle.

The same cinematographer, designer and composer were used as in Pieces of the Moon, Adam Keelan produced and all three performances are great, but for some reason the whole thing doesn't hang together quite as well as it should do, due, Jackson suspects, to him not giving himself enough options (the shoot being so tight) and some strange little quirks in the screenplay (for which Jackson must accept full responsibility).

The film was funded by First Take and British Screen.

The Three Bears (1998)

with Edna Dore, Richard Attlee, Mike Sarne,Yuri Stepanov

What could be considered the final short in a kind of East Anglian trilogy. Jackson wrote the script and planned to direct it himself - the story of three Cold War Russian submariners whose mini-sub gets lost and winds up in the middle of the Fens - but commitments to his second novel prevented this. So Stephen Kemp was brought in to direct it and did what is generally considered to be an admirable job.

Jackson's only regret is that the budget for this project was substantially bigger than the previous two and he would have liked to have tried working on a slightly grander scale. In fact, if he had that kind of budget these days he'd probably try and shoot a cheap feature with it. Ah well.