BBC Two tells The Story of India

The Story of India is Maya Vision International’s contribution to BBC Two’s India and Pakistan season. The six part series, which started on 24 August, follows historian Michael Wood — the show’s writer and presenter — across modern day India in search of its ancient mystical roots.

As associate producer Sally Thomas explains, Maya Vision’s aim was to make the series look “vibrant and amazing” by exploring the past through the festivals and rituals of the present, from the Hindu religious celebrations of the Ardh Kumbh Mela to re-enactments of India’s famous historical soap opera, The Mahabharata. “In India, you can find rituals going on today that have been happening for thousands and thousands of years,” says Thomas. Trips were scheduled around these events and timed where possible to avoid the monsoon rains and the heat of cities such as Delhi, in June.

“One advantage of shooting in India is that it’s the kind of place where it’s hard not to make things look vibrant and amazing,” says Thomas, who hired a Sony HDW-750P for the job. Director/cameraman Jeremy Jeffs adds, “We shot HDCAM at 25P – and it came out looking gorgeous. It can take the extreme contrast that you get in India beautifully, and we got incredible colour saturation and huge warmth out of it.”

Another advantage of the HDW-750P was that it was light yet robust enough to withstand 14 separate trips to the subcontinent without a hitch. Jeffs combined the camcorder with Canon J11 and J21’s ENG lenses. “We found these much easier and faster to use than Cine lenses,” he recalls, adding that he also packed a hand-held HVR-Z1E to shoot unobtrusively.

“I used it for more impressionist stuff, where I might drop the shutter speed to get more light and a different look. Once we were in a temple before dawn, shooting monks chanting in front of a statue of the Buddha. It was black except for a few candles, but the HVR-Z1E read beautifully.”

Local knowledge

Assisting the three-man crew — which consisted of Wood, Jeffs and sound recordist Callum Bulmer — was an experienced team of fixers from Indian production company, Earthcare Films. Headed by company director, Madhurima Sen Bose, Earthcare’s local knowledge proved essential in negotiating India’s nightmarish bureaucracy to access important historical sites.

“Madhurima knows everyone. She’s well respected and when a government ministry is very slow in getting us permission, she knows who to go and talk to,” says Thomas.

But no matter how many permissions have been granted, shooting can still be a bit of a lottery, warns Jeffs. “Once we turned up at a site in Delhi at 6am, with a jib and crew, and a BBC commissioner turning up later to see how the series was going and the guard wouldn’t let us in, despite the fact that we had three pieces of paper granting access. It wasn’t until his boss arrived later that we could get in.”

But Jeffs, Wood and Bulmer faced more serious hazards than Indian red tape. “We went as far north as Peshawar and the Khyber Pass which was pretty hairy,” recalls Jeffs.

“There were two bomb attacks the day before we got there, probably from Islamic militants coming over the border from Afghanistan. The day after we left, there was a gun battle and we heard that 25 people were killed. We were lucky with our timing.”

A visit to Kabul in Afghanistan was scuppered when it was realised that each crew member would cost $25,000 per week to insure. “The budget couldn’t quite stretch to that,” says Jeffs.

It did stretch to aerial shots of the Himalayas, however, with the crew flying to Kathmandu in Nepal and taking a helicopter to 17,000 ft to shoot the famous mountains through its open doors. “Temperatures at times were down to around minus 20ºC. I had to stop filming because my fingers were going numb but the camera just kept on going.”

Extreme conditions

The crew had previously experienced the other end of the temperature scale in Iraq, on a shoot about Alexander the Great and the battle of Guagamela, which decided the fate of the Persian empire. “We had a week there with the British and US army and it was 50ºC – so hot that the camera became too hot to touch. I always wondered why on the news you see people wearing gloves in places like that – now I know. It’s because anything metal becomes too hot to touch with your bare hands.”

Three weeks at a time was the maximum that the crew could endure away from home,” says Jeffs. “In that time we might hit 25 locations, which was physically quite tiring. Plus there’s a limit to how long you want to spend with people cheek by jowl when it’s a really tight team.”

But whatever the frustrations of the working day, the unspoken rule was that everyone turned up for a pre-dinner drink in the evening. “We spent a lot of time seeking out cocktail bars across India. Making sure there’s a martini at the end of the day is quite a good way of bonding.”

6 December 2007