FIRST Murdoch, now this eight dinner party guests, all with Conservative leanings, plough into the post-prandial wine and get to talking about the issues of the day. Amid the clatter of plates and the clink of glasses come shrill xenophobic statements and the odd grunt of naked prejudice. In vino veritas maybe, but this controversial fly-on-the-wall-style documentary, which is being aired during an election run-up, will hardly please Conservative Central Office, containing as it does the message: Old Tories, Old Dangers.
Made by Paul Watson, a prodigiously-talented programme maker who proved himself too snappy and radical for the BBC, the documentary contains some pretty damning insights into the British upper-middle classes at play. Watson, who believes in television's "responsibility to cause trouble" has caused plenty here by merely monitoring the opinions and attitudes of a sizeable demographic group. "I felt I was looking at a group of people whose time had gone," says Watson of his subjects' behaviour. "They dream of Thatcher, they dream of times past when we (the British) kicked people around in Europe: when you see your power eroding like that, you hit out, and so it's the `blacks', `the gays', `the beggars' the "Asians can be quite delightful when they work hard but the African always has his hand out type of sentiment."
Getting eight people to agree to be filmed by him during a dinner party proved the most difficult part of the exercise, Watson says. He does carry substantial baggage as a documentary maker with him, and not all of it can be universally seen as positive. The real-life participants in his last major work, the Australian-family documentary Sylvana Waters, accused him of setting them up and making them look stupid in front of the cameras. However, other work such as The Factory (about the working class) and The Home (about the elderly) has established him as a master of his craft - unobtrusive, sympathetic (to a point) and non-judgmental. To flush out his High Tories at play, he placed an advertisement in the national papers which read: "Do your dinner parties generate more heat than light? Be unBritish, say what you mean about politics. We would like to film a group of friends at a dinner party." The dinner party guests who appear on screen were the ninth choice: the previous eight all dropped out of the project. Reasons varied; one group withdrew in fear; in another group, one member placed doubts in the others' minds; another group found the entire village protesting about the documentary and rather bizarrely and as something of a testament to Watson's reputation, three other groups pulled out because members had their livelihoods threatened. "Those particular individuals all held senior positions," says Watson, "but their bosses made it clear they would have their positions looked at if they participated."
Having found a group to go the whole four courses, he proceeded to be extra-vigilant in presenting the dinner party and the views expressed therein as dispassionately as possible: "I do not set people up," he says. "They take the rope they need from me. Sometimes they hang themselves with it, sometimes they make a cat's cradle. I will not manipulate them on the ground, I do manipulate them in the cutting room. It's called editing and it's all about interpretation...
I passionately believe documentaries should be socio-politically subversive, they should question the status-quo, represent the familiar." Crucially, he does not believe in protecting his subjects from themselves - "I am not a father confessor, I do not give absolution," he says.
Each of the eight guests was interviewed individually before the dinner party about his or her politics: the individual's views are dubbed over the actual event. While Watson is loath to give his own opinion, on the behaviour and attitude of the guests, he does reveal a lot in the throw-away remark that the education of the guests cost a lot yet none of them is academic
The documentary was scheduled well ahead of the announcement of the British election date and Watson is keen to emphasise that his programme is merely an observation of a group of people and is not politically motivated: "This isn't stereotypical Tory-bashing. These aren't people with vested interests, they don't usually get on television. It's as important to film them as it is to film the poor and the destitute - one has a poverty in finance and access, the other a poverty of intellect and faith ink themselves."
COMMITTED to the point of total absorption to his work, he says he regularly undergoes identity crises - "you have to adapt to the camouflage of the place and you have to be all things to all people and eventually you say `who am I to me?'. I spend more time with the confidence of strangers than I do with my own relationships and that has mucked up quite a bit of my emotional life."
He's Bill fuelled by an absolute belief in the power of television and, moreover, the power of radical television making. "There's too much TV comatoses. You've got to get through the glass, you've got to get through the kids arguing, the telephone, the husband's angry, the wife's pissed off, you've got to get through all that. In the end I want people to be sympathetic to some of their opinions and loathe others, but my partner might think the converse, and we argue because in the end it is about us. And all the films I've tried to make and certainly the sort of films I'm being allowed to make are really about us. This is a film about Britain."
