From two pennyworth to the Mediterranean

Stuart Prebble, Executive Producer, StoryVault Films explains how the series My Mediterranean with Adrian Chiles came into being.

One of the reasons I still like working in telly after forty years is that my colleague Southan Morris is the most talented director I’ve ever met. So last summer I was at his birthday party and found myself chatting, as you do, to Adrian Chiles. Obviously I knew Adrian well from the screen, but I hadn’t met him before and he seemed a nice enough chap. However after I had ascertained that he doesn’t know much about boats, and he had ascertained that I don’t know much about West Bromwich Albion, I began to wonder whether we might soon run out of small talk.

Then he mentioned that recently over the course of 46 days he had attended mass 46 times and had written an article about it for the Telegraph.

“What?” I said to him. “You did what?”

I hadn’t misheard. It turned out that ten years ago, Adrian Chiles became a catholic.

“It’s not unusual for someone to get religion,” I opined, “especially if it’s a mid-life crisis, but why catholicism?”

“Well, it’s a long story but I went into a catholic church with a mate, to Mass, and felt sort of at home there, partly because I found it was full of blokes I wanted to go for a drink with, and women I quite fancied.” So sound theological stuff then.

No fellow producer will need to be told exactly what I was thinking.

“That’s a documentary, right there.” I said. Eventually, after a few more drinks, Adrian went on to tell me what it’s like when one minute you can do nothing wrong in television, and the next minute you can do nothing right. Having worked in broadcasting for four decades without ever having had a day off, I quite frequently find myself in the role of dispensing wisdom, and so I offered Adrian my two pennyworth. “It’ll all blow over”, I said to him. (To be fair, I did say it was only two pennyworth.)

So anyway, it turned out to be very good value for Adrian’s tuppence, because a few weeks later he contacted us to say that the Controller of BBC Two Kim Shillinglaw had shown an interest in the article he had written about the 46 masses, and her commissioners had asked him to develop a couple of programmes. They had to be colourful and sunny to brighten up the dark winter evenings, they had to have something worthwhile to say about religion, and they had to help us to get under Adrian’s skin. Oh, and they had to be ready for TX in January. Were we interested?

Well you know what it’s like… you work your tail off for months developing dozens of ideas which are never going to get anywhere, and just once in a blue moon the perfect opportunity lands on your doorstep. So we all got together with the terrific Fatima Salaria who works for Martin Davidson, and developed an idea which we hoped would fulfil the brief.

The concept was that Adrian believes in one true God, but chose catholicism more or less as an accident of geography and culture. If he had been born in Istanbul, say, or Jerusalem, would he have been just as comfortable as a muslim or a jew? And by the way, do all the Abrahamic faiths pray to the same God? Adrian was especially keen to circumvent the fanatics if he could - on the basis that they get enough publicity already, and instead he wanted to seek out ordinary believers who just choose to live a good life and follow their religion.

Anyway, what followed was a reminder of why telly in still such great fun for me. We brought together some people from our brilliant in-house team - led by Southan Morris and Danielle Graham, Ali Brodie, Dave Buckley and Sam Richards. We brought in our friends and regular colleagues Stuart Strickson and Marina Fonseca, and we got some further help from Ben Morse and Melanie Gerry.

The resulting two programmes My Mediterranean, with Adrian Chiles take us from Adrian’s mum’s house in Croatia (there you are - that’s the second thing you didn’t know), to Istanbul, Jerusalem, Rome, Marseilles, Barcelona and Monserrat. Adrian met his moderates (as well as an accidental couple of, erm, extremists), he witnessed ritual sacrifice, he broke bread with Jews and Muslims, he delayed a cardinal with his first confession in eight years, and finally decided... well, needless to say you have tune in to find out what Adrian concluded. All I can say is that it’s well worth the beautiful journey around his Mediterranean.

My Mediterranean with Adrian Chiles is on BBC Two on 3 and 10 January.

Stuart Prebble is Executive Producer, StoryVault Films