Sleevenotes: The Producer's Perspective
Read Ben Whalley's account of how he and his team went about tracking the evolution of six decades of British pop music and condensing it into three hours.
Pop Britannia is the fourth in BBC Music Entertainment and BBC Four's Britannia trilogies including Soul, Folk and (the original) Jazz Britannia. The aim was to tell the story of British popular music and its place in British culture since the 1950s.
The challenge with this Britannia series was threefold. Compared to previous Britannias the subject matter was relatively broad: 'pop' is a word that can describe pretty much anything. Secondly, we only had three hours in which to deal with 60 years of music. And finally we were dealing with material that, by its very nature, could be very familiar to the audience - so we needed to work extra hard in making it exciting and informative. A tall task!
The whole series was made in 34 weeks, loosely divided into three parts; research, filming and editing. The series began with the team sifting through a huge mass of viewing material and literature and talking to hundreds of potential contributors. Once treatments for each of the three films had been written, we started shooting around the ideas and subjects - the fun phase of any project! In late spring we began putting the films together in the edit - often the most challenging, but ultimately the most rewarding part of any production.
The Britannia series are concept-driven projects where no single contributor or character can be regarded as the main protagonist. The challenge is to fit a host of interesting characters and subjects into an over-arching narrative. Much of that burden is carried by each episode's script and we were very fortunate to have the exceptional skills of actor Anne-Marie Duff to guide the viewer through sixty years of pop.
I hope we have managed to create an exciting, informative and, above all, entertaining series. Given the high level of access, collaboration and permissions required to make a project of this ambition, the BBC, due to its unique position, is perhaps one of the few places in the world that can attempt to create content of this scope and I hope this will long continue.
I would therefore like to thank all those who took part in Pop Britannia, especially all the contributors from Cliff Richard to Damon Albarn. Finally I would like to thank the people who put in so much energy, hard work and talent into making it: Alan, Little Ben, Bradley, Guy, Holly, Jo, John, Kal, Laura, Lucy, Mark, Sam, Steph, Steve, Tim and Yvonne.
Producer, Ben Whalley
