British Documentary Awards – get your act together!

I watched the British Documentary Awards on BBC Four last night, and they were of course fascinating and as usual made me want to get hold of copies of most of them.

But what continues to fascinate me is how absolutely clueless documentary and film-makers are about the Internet. So here is a very quick rundown of how, through the simple use of the Net, all the people doing great work in the documentary industry can make their lives 20 times easier. Please steal these ideas.

First of all, I would like to note very briefly that presenter Rageh Omar looked like a manly female prostitute going for the repressed businessman market. He was wearing loads of black eyeliner, a beige jacket and a pink tie. Did he not know he was going on the tele?

Anyway, the awards are sponsored by The Grierson Trust – John Grierson was basically the father of the British documentary and the awards were created the year of his death, 1972. There are nine categories:

• Best documentary on a contemporary issue
• Best documentary on the arts
• Best historical documentary
• Best documentary on science or the natural world
• Most entertaining documentary
• Best drama documentary
• Best documentary series
• Best cinema documentary
• Best newcomer award

As ever, I had not seen the vast majority of both the award winners and the nominees. I don’t think documentary makers – who obsessively watch one another’s films – quite understand this. The fact is that there is a very large number of people that relish TV being used to provide interesting and intelligent accounts of the world around us (as opposed to what TV is actually used for these days).

But 99 percent of these people do not scour the listings hoping to find something. As such, most documentaries – even when given heavy advertising – are often caught more by mistake than intention. A good example is Storyville: Darwin’s nightmare which won the Best cinema documentary award but which I caught randomly very late one night about a quarter of the way through. I was incredibly tired but the documentary was so eerily fascinating that I exhausted myself by staying up to catch the end of it.

So what?

Well, as I was watching the awards I thought to myself: I hope to god that all the winners are put on a British Documentary Awards 2006 Winners DVD. I pondered how much I would pay for it and decided £19.99 would be the perfect price but at a push I would pay up to £29.99.

There is, of course, no such DVD. But worse than that, there is no website either that gives you links to where you can buy the films. This is ridiculous. Someone at The Grierson Trust needs to sort this out. For chrissake, the whole point of making these films is to get people to watch them. You even throw a fancy and expensive awards ceremony to try to highlight the best that year and then there is absolutely no help in getting them in front of viewers.

The Grierson Trust website has links only to a pdf and a Word doc of the winners. That is hopeless. They should immediately have a page of winners and nominees with links across the Net to other sites and direct purchasing links as soon as the winners are announced. This page would have taken only an hour or so and would draw massive Google coverage, so in future people looking for any of the documentaries would come across both the awards and the other winners. This is a big, big oversight.

Why can’t I buy these films?

What the Grierson Trust does do is provide a link to MovieMail and its dedicated webpage for the British Documentary Awards winner and nominees. Except this page is also a shambles. Clearly MovieMail, for whatever reason, hasn’t been able to get the selling rights to most of the documentaries as it has only 11 documentaries on its list and of these only three of them are from this year! There were 37 documentaries on the 2006 shortlist – but, incredibly, it appears that there is no way to get hold of a copy of most of them.

Frankly, the Grierson Trust should ditch this link to MovieMail – it is a waste of time – and they should very carefully, very gradually work to the point where they are in a position to bring out a Winners 2007 DVD for between £20 and £30. It is in everyone’s interests to do so. It would get more people watching and it would make economic sense because of the numbers shifted (£5 x 20 = £100; £1 x 500 = £500). And it would give the Grierson Awards more kudos – and who else but the Grierson Awards could pull it off? The Trust’s interest is not money but pushing and encouraging documentaries. If the diplomacy was done right, The Grierson Trust could write into its Ts&Cs that any entry agrees to have their film put on a winners DVD for an agreed per-unit fee, and the proceeds split equally between the films and the Trust who could perhaps then even drop the “Bloomberg” from the “Bloomberg Best Newcomer” and the same with the Frontier Post and the UK Film Council).

In the meantime of course, it would be nice if there was a page where people could actually bloody buy the winners. As such, I will knock one up below. Can The Grierson Trust please steal the code and post it on their site?

Ever heard of the Internet?

Also, while talking about the Internet – I find it incredible that people on the cutting edge of documentary making haven’t seen the tremendous opportunities that exist with the Internet. Especially since one of the nominees, The Road to Guantanamo, started experimenting with downloads *eight months ago*. I know because I downloaded and bought it and wrote up my experience here.

It cost £2.99 to rent and £4.99 to buy and let me assure the British Documentary Awards creators that I would be buying at least one of their winners right now if they got their arse into gear and set up the infrastructure. I can’t believe – especially considering how difficult it is to get documentaries made and how much enormous time and effort is put into them – that people aren’t crawling all over this technology. Maybe they simply aren’t aware of it.

And they most certainly aren’t aware that some of these documentaries are available for download from Bittorrent sites for free (check out TorrentSpy.com for example), and others have split them into a large number of different parts and posted them on YouTube. Anyone that has ever had to deal with producing a film as a downloadable format will know that it takes some know-how – so the fact they exist at all means there is a big demand for these things.

Anyway, here is the list of winners and nominees, with links to where you can get them from – if you can get them at all:

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Best documentary on a contemporary issue

WINNER:

• Asylum, BBC Four
  (not on sale)

NOMINEES:

• Gaza: The Fight for Israel, Channel 4
  (not on sale)
• Women on the Edge: The Truth About Styal Prison, BBC Two
  (story and clip on BBC website; not on sale)
• A World Without Water, Channel 4
  (page/clip from TrueVision; ‘microsite’ from Channel 4; not on sale)

——————————————————————————-

Best documentary on the arts

WINNER:

• Take That For The Record, ITV 1
  (Amazon, £7.99)

NOMINEES:

• Imagine: Andy Warhol Denied, BBC One
  (in seven parts on YouTube; not on sale)
• The Photographer, His Wife, Her Lover, BBC Four
  (lots of reviews; not on sale)
• Sinatra: Dark Star, BBC One
  (not on sale)

——————————————————————————-

Best historical documentary

WINNER:

• How Vietnam Was Lost (Two Days In October), BBC One
  (BBC Four microsite; not on sale)

NOMINEES:

• Elusive Peace – Israel and the Arabs, BBC Two
  (BBC microsite; Amazon, from £9.75)
• Timewatch: Pol Pot – Journey to the Killing Fields, BBC Two
  (BBC active for £195!!!, EnhanceTV for Au$38.45 (£15.60))
• Tory! Tory! Tory!, BBC Four
  (Bittorent file (free), BBC webpage; not on sale)

——————————————————————————-

Best documentary on science or the natural world

WINNER:

• The Natural World: The Queen of Trees, BBC Two
  (PBS microsite; ShopThirteen, $19.95

NOMINEES:

• Horizon: Ghost in your Genes, BBC Two
  (Bittorent page (free); BBC webpage; not on sale)
• Life in the Undergrowth: Invasion of the Land, BBC One
  (Amazon, £16.47; BBC microsite)
• Monkey Love, More4
  (Channel 4 microsite; not on sale)

——————————————————————————-

Most entertaining documentary

WINNER:

• Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares: Prog 3 – Momma Cherri’s, Channel 4
  (Channel 4 microsite; BBC America microsite; not on sale (as yet))

NOMINEES:

• Censored At The Seaside: The Saucy Postcards of Donald McGill, BBC Two
  (BBC microsite; Production company microsite; not on sale)
• Live 8: Programme One: Twenty Years Ago Today, BBC One
  (Amazon, £24.99)
• Taxidermy: Stuff The World, BBC Two
  (Production company webpage; not on sale)

——————————————————————————-

Best drama documentary

WINNER:

• The Year London Blew Up, Channel 4
  (Channel 4 microsite; not on sale)

NOMINEES:

• Elizabeth David – A Life in Recipes, BBC Two
  (Production company microsite; BBC microsite; not on sale)
• Kenneth Williams: Fantabulosa!, BBC One
  (BBC Four microsite; not on sale)
• Hiroshima, BBC One
  (Amazon from £14.08)

——————————————————————————-

Best documentary series

WINNER:

• Russian Godfathers, BBC Two
  (CBC webpage; Bittorent files; not on sale)

NOMINEES:

• 49 Up, ITV 1
  (Amazon, from £11.33; Production company microsite)
• Cult of the Suicide Bomber, Channel 4
  (Amazon, from £6.21; Channel 4 microsite)
• My Life as a Child, BBC Two
  (BBC webpage with clips; not on sale)

——————————————————————————-

Best cinema documentary

WINNER:

• Storyville: Darwin’s Nightmare, BBC Four
  (Amazon, from £17.99; Official documentary website; BBC Four webpage)

NOMINEES:

• Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, HD Net Films
  (Amazon, from £13.97; Official documentary website)
• The Road to Guantanamo, Channel 4
  (Tiscali download for £4.99; Amazon from £10.97; Official documentary website)
• Unknown White Male, More4
  (Amazon from £11.97; Official documentary website)

——————————————————————————-

Best newcomer award

WINNER:

• Clare Richards for Disabled and Looking for Love
  (Google video clip; doc webpage; production company clip)

NOMINEES:

• Astrid Bussink for Angelmakers
  (Official documentary website;not on sale)
• Vaughan Pilikian for Hammer and Flame
  (not on sale)
• Nicki Stoker for Show Me the Money
  (not on sale)
• Sadik Ahmed for Tanju Miah
  (NFTS webpage)

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