Kirkham Jackson: Silvering-up

Whilst researching The Pylon People Kirkham happened to come across a gang of men climbing up and down the pylons. These men (about half a dozen of them) were dressed in regular overalls and hard hats but had old t-shirts pulled up over their heads like balaclavas, with just their faces poking out of the neck.

Kirkham got talking to them and learnt that basically from spring till autumn they went up and down the country painting the pylons - or towers, to give them their proper name. Every tower in the country has to be regularly given an undercoat and a top coat (which is called 'silvering-up') and the gangs of men who do this can be away from home for weeks at a time.

Jackson originally planned to have these men appear in his short documentary, but following the advice of his producer John Davie, decided to develop the idea separately and presented it to Peter Symes at BBC Bristol. It's worth mentioning here that Peter Symes is something of a legend in the world of British documentary. He's a prime mover in the Sheffield Documentary Festival and the series he oversaw at BBC Bristol, Picture This, was often the first national platform for the country's younger and more idiosyncratic directors.

To cut a long story short, Jackson received a little seed money, to help him develop the project, which basically involved him hanging out with a pylon painting crew with a camcorder for a few days here and there. When a second proposal was made in 1997 Peter Symes finally commissioned the film.

It was shot - as it turns out, with a different crew than originally planned - in the countryside just north of Hastings over a period of about five or six days. The cameraman, who'd attended a weekend safety session in pylon-climbing, got some wonderful footage of the men slapping paint onto the girders a hundred feet up and the pylon painters themselves proved to be amazingly relaxed in front of the camera.

If his memory serves him right, Kirkham ended up with over twenty hours of footage, which is pretty unmanageable for what was essentially a half-hour slot and he spent an exhausting month in Soho with the editor, David Richards, trying to make some sense of it.

The programme was broadcast on BBC 2 as a Gwynhelek Production.