© Eric Harwood Photograph by Robin Mills
was sold to Carlton Television, so I found myself on the board of Central Television PLC, overseeing £12million of TV production from the Midlands as its new Controller of Programmes. Within four years, I fell on my sword, escaping the claustrophobia of the corporate world for ever. In August 2003, Emma and I uprooted our family from London and settled in Charmouth. We knew no-one: everything slowed, I took 6 months off, spent time with the girls (now 3, 5 and 7) and rediscovered the person trapped within the corporate carapace. Perhaps like many who recently dropped off the working hamster-wheel after lock-down, I pressed my life’s re-set button and felt re-born: walking, seaswimming and living a present-tense life with my kids. We discovered a wonderful close-knit community of families around Charmouth Primary School and created the “Charmouth Fat Dads”—an unofficial men’s group of 40-somethings who playfully
organised fun, outdoor events for families, the kids and each other. Now I realised there was another way to live. The only work I undertook in that first year in Dorset was to help a young Geordie lad make his first film about an extraordinary character called Jonny Kennedy. The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off was shown on Channel 4 in 2004 to a stunned audience of five million. It raised almost £500,000 for charity, won 17 awards including a BAFTA, Grierson, RTS and International Emmy and was voted by Channel 4 as “the sixth best documentary ever”. Proof that returning to powerful, meaningful, human film-making was where I belonged. Over 16 years, I’ve made many films remotely from my Dorset haven. After producing the BBC feature dramadoc Wainwright: The Man Who Loved The Lakes, it rekindled my childhood memories of The Lake District. With TV presenter Julia Bradbury, this led to eight BBC walking series including
Wainwright Walks and Coast To Coast, as well as two ITV series of Britain’s Best Walks—including the Colmer’s Hill & Golden Cap walk—still repeated now. With my current company, Heart & Soul Films, we shot the Ming Dynasty Great Wall of China from the Yellow Sea to the Gobi Desert for our BBC4 film—A Slow Odyssey: The Great Wall of China. I feel privileged to walk this wonderful land, travel the globe and come back to Dorset to edit my adventures. But what I’ve learnt is that my family is my best production ever… it’s them I am most proud of: Ella, 24, working in Paris fashion; Holly, 22, getting a First at LSE in Politics & International Relations and Rosie, 20, studying Politics at King’s College Cambridge and my ever-patient, clever wife Emma, an accomplished therapist, tutor and counsellor for young people in West Dorset. As the song says… “I’m a lucky man”.
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