From an article about Peter Jackson Camera Man on the Follyfoot Series.
Frost bound - and happy to be so
In these freelance days your typical film crew
perceives itself as a bunch of skilled individuals who band (and bond)
transiently for a specific job the making of a film and then disperse.
There are exceptions. Peter Jackson BSC,
GBCT, and his crew are currently (autumn 1998) shooting the sixth series of
A Touch of Frost, for Yorkshire TV, with no permanent
change of personnel. For this to happen in Yorkshire, where fools are not
suffered gladly, somebody is doing something right. Probably they all are.
Peter and cinematography first came together in his
late teens over a clockwork 9.5 mm Path้. Hooked from then on, it was a few
years later (1958) that he got his start as a trainee assistant editor with a
small documentary company in London's New Bond Street. "I later moved to
another company; one so small that almost immediately you became a
cameraman/director working with a client. This not only gave me the chance to
shoot but also to follow the job through editing and sound-dubbing. It was very
interesting and very good training."
Sufficient training indeed that, on moving
back north, he leaped the loader/focus stages to become a newsreel stringer for
Granada and ABCTV. Then came a spell with a Bradford commercials production
company before, in 1968, he joined Yorkshire TV as they started their film
unit.
. . . the speed
and accuracy with which retakes and reverses were shot emphasised the benefits
. . . of having experienced crews and casts who are well-accustomed to working
together
"I was certainly the first cameraman
there, because I unpacked their three new Arri BL 16s which were all they then
owned. Initially, YTV camera work was news or documentaries. Docs had always
been on film. Alan Whicker also joined YTV in 1968, and I did a couple of trips
with him Hollywood and a European tour and worked a lot with Antony Thomas
(Death of a Princess).
I went with him to the Middle East, to Japan and twice to Africa, doing a
series of personalised travel documentaries.
"YTV Drama then was studio-based and
tape-originated, but we were soon being sent out to shoot taxis drawing up, and
people getting out. Then, when we'd got really good at that, we were allowed to
do taxis drawing up right-to-left. Slowly they got more ambitious and put whole
sequences out to film but these still had to cut back into studio stuff,
usually giving a horrible match because 16mm stock wasn't a patch on what we
have today. Finally, in the early 1970s, they became brave enough to do whole
productions on film and TV drama had arrived."
Since then for Peter, it has
been largely TV drama all the way. "I stayed with YTV until October 1995,
which makes me one of their longest-serving inhabitants. I stuck with them
because they kept offering me assignments which were as good as I could have
got anywhere.