DVD: Death of Yugoslavia 1

Very Good DVD !, 16. oct 2007.
author: benoitnieru
It is an interesting document relating the last years of the
("former") Yugoslavia .It is Very good to have thought to do it...!BN.France.
3 out of 3 customers found this useful.

Obligatory Balkan history, 28. nov 2007.
author: bjornar.solberg
If you want to know what happened during the collapse of Yugoslavia this is the best way to get to know it.


Interview - The matter of facts., 27. oct 2009.
author: jufor
Brook Lapping Productions director Brian Lapping is a class act - churning out quality factual against the grain. But is time running out for the veteran documentary maker?

As he would no doubt put it himself in his highly polished and unmistakably (to quote BBC chairman Gavyn Davies) 'white, educated, southern, middle class' vernacular, Brian Lapping has had a bloody good innings. Since his first foray into television with Granada in 1970, after being plucked from a career in print journalism (Daily Mirror, The Guardian, Financial Times and the weekly New Society), the director of Brook Lapping Productions - the headline act at this week's Mip-TV warm-up, Mipdoc - has clocked up over 100 programmes.

Covering topics as diverse as war in Vietnam, European monetary union, the UK's Child Support Agency and white supremacists in the US, the former World In Action chief's heavyweight oeuvre is enough to make John Pilger feel inadequate.

But as City University sociology professor Jeremy Tunstall, who is currently writing a book about the 64-year-old producer, puts it Lapping is 'part of a dying breed - an eccentric because he's rather intellectual to be a TV producer'.

In short - and in spite of 'recent world events' - with the proliferation of cheap, populist, factual entertainment shows elbowing almost anything with the slightest modicum of respectability off the schedules, Lapping's days would appear to be painfully numbered. A shrewd blunt individual who cloaks himself with a (slightly unconvincing) blanket of self-deprecation, Lapping is philosophical. 'Of course the market will dominate and people will get the programmes they want,' he concedes. 'If more people want TV programmes like The Sun rather than like The Guardian or the FT then programmes will go that way.'One goes along to these (broadcaster) open days and increasingly the need to compete for ratings is emphasised and my hearts sinks. Lively, singing, sexy (programmes) - that's what they want. Logically we should get squeezed out and nobody should commission us to make our sort of programmes anymore.

'Brook Lapping's sort of programmes are incredibly ambitious. Employing a painstakingly forensic approach, they attempt to retell events of huge significance - The Death Of Yugoslavia, Endgame In Ireland, Watergate - by travelling the globe enticing the people who sparked it all off to speak out, be they peasant or president.

'I, and the core people who work here, are obsessed with how decisions get made - decisions that affect millions of people,' says Lapping. 'We've been able to do a form of history that is unique and we've got more and more tightly specialised.

'Needless to say, such a time-consuming approach is very expensive. Fortunately Lapping says he has secured a number of long-term international partners to help shore up the growing budget deficits. 'The number of countries keen on taking our next programmes has grown bit by bit,' Lapping reveals.

'Usually with our next series we can say Scandinavia, Holland, France will buy the programmes.

'The foreign cash is vital. For Lapping, cutting corners by using cheaper techniques and smaller crews is simply not an option. 'When you get an interview with Bill Clinton you need to have sound, camera and lighting operatives so that the people asking the questions can think exclusively about content. I don't think cutting out those extra people would do us much good,' he maintains.

It is a dogma that has defined Brook Lapping - formed five years ago out of a merger between Brian Lapping Associates and his wife's outfit Brook Associates. Indeed, while the company's headquarters in London's Kentish Town is brimming with young producers, little effort has been made to bring the indie into the 21st century. It is an office in which you are more likely to find a yellowed copy of the Herald Tribune from the 1970s than a lightweight DV camera.

While Lapping suggests his indie 'should be embracing' what he describes as the young folk's 'new kind of documentary that uses the camera as though it were a pencil' he remains non-committal. 'Come January I won't have any business and I'll have to ask myself if I should try to persuade some of these young people to come and work with us. The question is, then, what we would bring to the party. I don't think I'd be that helpful to them.

'Yet, while he seems curiously loath to admit it, he is taking steps to future-proof the company.

First off, he established a new production unit last October to specialise in cheaper factual entertainment. It has already garnered orders from Animal Planet and BBC 4 - although he admits the department has little else on the horizon.

The indie has also, over the past few years, cracked ITV with more populist output - National Disaster, To Kill and Kill Again and Diana: Story of a Princess. Currently it is producing a three-part documentary about Margaret Thatcher and talks are ongoing for another series of To Kill and Kill Again.

But perhaps his most important step is a move to bring in a '(RDF director of programmes) Stephen Lambert type' to run the company's production side.

Someone with a more diverse background who can help push Brook Lapping into uncharted territory and beef up the low-cost unit that Lapping is so dismissive of. Ultimately someone to do what Lapping cannot bring himself to do.

'I carry on doing what I love because people keep on commissioning me,' he says. 'If they stopped, I would have to face the decision of whether to stop trying to make TV programmes and go away and write books or retire, or whether to adapt. I suspect I would go away and retire.

'BRIAN LAPPINGPOSITION: Director, Brook Lapping Productions

ON MERGING WITH BROOK ASSOCIATES: 'It's not actually a very convenient process. When you talk about mergers, the truth is that we aren't a kind of business in which the economies and benefits of mergers really apply

'ON COMMISSIONING EDITORS: 'The truth is that the people who actually run the channels genuinely seem to like (serious documentaries) and the circles close to them say they like them so they carry on commissioning them

'ON THE DECLINE OF DOCUMENTARY SERIES: 'The tendency now is to turn things into a 90-minute or two-hour piece. People say, just tell the most interesting story and you can put some of the other stuff in while you're doing it. It has affected us'