Denis Mitchell (11 August 1911 – 1990) was a British documentary filmmaker, renowned for his innovative radio and television documentaries. His radio and television career can broadly be characterised by the constant interest Mitchell displayed in "giving voice to the voiceless" and in the rhythms and prosody of everyday vernacular speech.
Early life in Britain and South Africa
The son of a Congregationalist minister, Mitchell was born in Cheshire, and his family moved from one church community to another throughout his childhood. After some time spent at
RADA
The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA; ) is a drama school in London, England, that provides vocational conservatoire training for theatre, film, television, and radio. It is based in the Bloomsbury area of Central London, close to the Se ...
pursuing an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to become an actor, at the age of 18 he moved to South Africa, the country his parents had emigrated to several years previously. At the outbreak of war he joined the South African Army, first in the artillery, and later in Cairo, where he attained the rank of captain, and organising entertainment for the troops from visiting celebrities such as
Bob Hope
Leslie Townes "Bob" Hope (May 29, 1903 – July 27, 2003) was a British-American comedian, vaudevillian, actor, singer and dancer. With a career that spanned nearly 80 years, Hope appeared in Bob Hope filmography, more than 70 short and ...
and
Noël Coward.
Leonard Miall
Rowland Leonard Miall (6 November 1914 – 24 February 2005) was a broadcaster and administrator at the BBC for 35 years, from 1939 to 1974. In retirement, he became a research historian, studying the history of broadcasting.
Early life
Miall ...
"Obituary: Denis Mitchell", ''The Independent
''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publish ...
'', 4 October 1990
On demobilisation, he gained a job with the
South African Broadcasting Corporation
The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) is the public broadcaster in South Africa, and provides 19 radio stations ( AM/ FM) as well as six television broadcasts to the general public. It is one of the largest of South Africa's state ...
(SABC) as a writer-producer. Mitchell began to develop an interest in recording equipment, after experimenting with
wire-recorders which had been left by the American army. He used the equipment to record interviews with agricultural workers, and this led him to the revelation that entire radio programmes could be based on recorded speech, and that "the ability to record people talking at their jobs and in their homes was not a mere novelty but a most important new means of communication."
BBC Radio career
In 1949, the SABC invited the radio producer D.G. Bridson to spend a year in South Africa. He befriended Mitchell and suggested to him that he should come back to Britain to work in Laurence Gilliam's Features Department, alongside such poetic talent as
Louis MacNeice and
Dylan Thomas.
After a brief period in the Features Department in London, Mitchell joined the BBC North Region in Manchester in 1950, becoming a Features Producer in succession to Norman Swallow, who would later become Mitchell's close friend and collaborator. After producing several radio series' based on British and American folk, blues and jazz music (including ''Ballads and Blues'') with musicians including
Alan Lomax,
Ewan MacColl and
Big Bill Broonzy
Big Bill Broonzy (born Lee Conley Bradley; June 26, 1903 – August 14, 1958) was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. His career began in the 1920s, when he played country music to mostly African American audiences. In the 1930s ...
, Mitchell initiated the occasional series, ''People Talking'', which ran between 1953 and 1958. These programmes were based on the lives and words of ordinary people, forsaking narration and commentary. The routine manner by which the working classes were then represented was usually subject to heavy mediation, in scripting and programme presentation. Mitchell took the portable tape recorder, which had just come 'on stream' in the BBC, out to the streets, pubs, clubs, hostels and boarding-houses of the North, recording many hours of unscripted and spontaneous speech, which he then edited into radio features.
Television documentaries
In 1955, Mitchell was sent on a training attachment to the BBC's
Lime Grove Studios, where he worked on his first television documentary, a 15-minute contribution to an edition of the pioneering current affairs ''Special Enquiry'', about teenagers. His idea was to combine extracts from tape-recordings as the basis of the film's soundtrack (a style known as
wild track Wild track, also known as wild sound and wild lines, is an audio recording intended to be synchronized with film or video but recorded separately. Generally, the term "wild track" refers to sound recorded on the set or location of a film, such as di ...
), for which he then found accompanying non-synchronous images. This was the basis of 'the Mitchell style', which he would refine during the rest of his work for the BBC. The 'Teenagers' film was enthusiastically received (not least by filmmaker
Karel Reisz
Karel Reisz (21 July 1926 – 25 November 2002) was a Czech-born British filmmaker, one of the pioneers of the new realist strain in British cinema during the 1950s and 1960s. Two of the best-known films he directed are '' Saturday Night and S ...
) for its technical experimentation and impressionist portraiture of everyday life. This led to Mitchell's first television feature for the BBC in 1957, ''In Prison''. This was the first film to be shot inside a prison in Britain – Manchester's
Strangeways – during the making of which Mitchell spent a month in a prison cell.
''In Prison'' was the first of several adaptations for television of radio features from the ''People Talking'' series. Others included ''Night in the City'' (1957), ''On Tour'' (1958), ''
Morning in the Streets'' (1959) and ''Soho Story'' (1959). For ''Morning in the Streets'', made by the BBC's Northern Film Unit, Mitchell and his 'camera team' (Roy Harris and Gerry Pullen) used the lightweight
16mm
16 mm film is a historically popular and economical gauge of film. 16 mm refers to the width of the film (about inch); other common film gauges include 8 and 35 mm. It is generally used for non-theatrical (e.g., industrial, ed ...
camera, which afforded greater mobility, allowing the film to get closer to the 'texture' of everyday life. This film, which won the
Prix Italia
The Prix Italia is an international Television, Radio-broadcasting and Web award. It was established in 1948 by RAI – Radiotelevisione Italiana (in 1948, RAI had the denomination RAI – Radio Audizioni Italiane) in Capri and is honoured with the ...
, was an atmospheric impression of life and opinion in the back streets of an unnamed Northern city during the morning hours, and featured amusing and moving vignettes of working-class life (shot in Liverpool, Manchester, Salford and Stockport).
After travelling abroad to make the award-winning and controversial ''Chicago'' (1961, researched by
Studs Terkel) and his South-African trilogy (1960), Denis Mitchell tutored recent Oxford graduate
Dennis Potter
Dennis Christopher George Potter (17 May 1935 – 7 June 1994) was an English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist. He is best known for his BBC television serials '' Pennies from Heaven'' (1978), ''The Singing Detective'' (198 ...
in documentary filmmaking, resulting in the 1960 documentary ''Between Two Rivers'', which Potter wrote and appeared in.
Mitchell then left the BBC to form the first independent production company, Denis Mitchell Films, with friend and colleague Norman Swallow. Mitchell made films for
ATV and
Rediffusion
Rediffusion was a business that distributed radio and TV signals through wired relay networks. The business gave rise to a number of other companies, including Associated-Rediffusion, later known as Rediffusion London, the first ITV ( commer ...
, and then in 1964 he and Swallow joined
Granada Television. For Granada they made the first documentaries to be shot on videotape, which represented a challenge, as it necessitated bulky equipment and was difficult to edit.
[Robinson, David "Shooting on Tape", ''Contrast'', 3, 1, Autumn 1963] Nevertheless, in 1964 they made ''The Entertainers'', temporarily banned by the
ITA for a brief shot of a topless dancer, and ''A Wedding on A Saturday'', a memorable evocation of a Northern mining community, which won the Prix Italia that year. As part of their contract at Granada, Mitchell and Swallow executive-produced the series ''This England''. The series, which documented various aspects of regional English culture, ran from 1965 to 1967, and provided essential training for new directors, such as
Dick Fontaine,
Mike Grisgby,
Michael Apted
Michael David Apted, (10 February 1941 – 7 January 2021) was a British television and film director and producer.
Apted began working in television and directed the '' Up'' documentary series (1964–2019). He later directed '' Coal Miner's ...
and
Mike Newell.
After ''This England'' Mitchell's reputation for innovation began to wane (he was by that time in his late fifties), yet he continued to make documentary films on a wide variety of themes for all the major television companies. In 1977, he made his final major work, ''Never and Always'', a study of rural life in Norfolk, with its seasonal, cyclical changes.
Recent revivals
After his death in 1990, there were retrospectives both on BBC TV, and at the National Film Theatre. ''
Morning in the Streets'' was screened in 2007 to mark Liverpool's status as 'Capital of Culture'.
On 25 March 2009, the exact 50th anniversary of the transmission of ''
Morning in the Streets'', a one-day retrospective was held at Lighthouse, Poole's Centre for the Arts.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mitchell, Denis
1911 births
1990 deaths
British documentary filmmakers
People educated at Caterham School