Who am I & what am I doing here?

A meandering intro...

Let me take you back for a moment…

It's 2002. I am 25 and walking home from the tube across the windswept South Acton estate in West London, my scarf pulled tightly over my chin and my Discman pumping out the tunes between my ears as I go. It's cold and the balls of my feet ache – this is my peak 'unsuitable high heels at all times' era.

Image / Steve Cadman

I'm an ambitious young researcher making my way in factual TV during those heady days of early noughties reality TV, when Big Brother and Heat magazine are king. I can't wait to get home, kick off my shoes, collapse on the sofa and gossip with my flatmates about our respective days.

But before I get back to the flat, my eyes are drawn, as they so often are these days, especially on colder evenings, to the warm & cosy scene inside the small shop on the estate that's home to the United Anglo Caribbean Society Elderly Luncheon Club. The place is a hive of activity, people eating and playing games inside, the windows misting up.

It looks so inviting and I just can't help but feel curious about who these people are – about their lives now and the experiences that led them to this time and this place. I'd really love to find out...

Image / Smart Set

Fast forward a year or so and I have found out – I've managed to get a small community grant from the local council, introduce myself to the elders at the club and film and edit my first proper independent short documentary film, ‘West Indies, W3’. It's been a great experience and I'm really pleased with what I’ve managed to achieve with zero budget and not much experience - just the drive to get on and do it.

But this is pre-YouTube, there's no real outlet for the film and the tapes will end up gathering dust in the safe hands of my great pal (and later on, flatmate) Dave - who helped me out with the edit back then at the TV production company we both worked at, where we would sneak in and avail ourselves of the fancy post production machines out of hours.

Fast forward another 20 years and my phone pings with a WhatsApp message from the very same Dave. “Hello. I've left your West Indian rushes etc in a box at ITV reception in Brighton for you to collect”. With a photo of said box. It feels like my past is popping up to reassure me I'm on the right path.

Let me try to explain.

A lot has happened in those 20 years (20 years – how the hell can it be that long she thinks, the picture of midlife cliché!) I grew up, progressed my TV career, developed a political conscience, started spending more and more of my free time on activism, met my partner, moved to Brighton (hence the pebbles, in case you were wondering), had a baby and, a few years later, another one.

I also made another, much longer independent documentary - this one about the social and political history of nuclear power.

That project grew out of a gnawing sense of frustration with mid-2000s telly, via a series of self-funded shorts, to become an epic personal and professional journey that would end up taking more than 10 years and see me wrack up over 60 grands-worth of credit card debt on the archive footage alone. Not to mention spending an afternoon at Tony Benn's house.

'The Atom: A Love Affair' was finally finished and had its festival premiere in late 2019 - a moment to crack open the bubbly and no mistake!

Exciting times lay ahead, with the film booked into UK cinemas in May & June 2020. And then, well, you know what happened next – just the small matter of a global pandemic hitting...

My wonderful distributors did an incredible job swiftly pivoting to a digital release in those chaotic early Covid days when everyone was trying to figure out new ways of doing, well, just about everything.

I had also just had my daughter, in March 2020, so I was more than a little distracted and sleep deprived, dealing with a newborn on top of the shock of sudden homeschooling for my older one and the worry of my other half working in the NHS at a time when there was no vaccine, no cure, hundreds of people dying every day.

On the night of my big premiere on Curzon Home Cinema - the online platform run by one of the UK's premier independent cinema chains - I put on a nice frock and some make up, went down into our home office and did the online Q&A alongside the film's narrator, actor & writer Lily Cole. And then I went back upstairs, put my nightie on and breastfed the baby. It wasn't quite the glamorous affair I'd dreamed of for all those long years making the film!

In the three and a half years since then, my pandemic baby has grown up into a rumbunctious pre-schooler and my 'film baby' has made its way out into the world, with international TV sales and private screenings, both virtual and eventually in person again, at universities, conferences, companies, government agencies, community groups and schools.

These screenings and the always-fascinating discussions that have accompanied them, have reaffirmed my interest in nuclear issues more broadly and nuclear history more particularly. I would definitely like to do more documentary work in this area.

But...

Independent documentary in the UK is in crisis. A pair of major reports by a British university a couple of years ago found it to be “under-funded, under-valued and rarely understood even by executives in the wider screen industries” - and that for many people, ‘documentary filmmaker’ is not a viable career due to the "chronic lack of public funding across the board”.

With two young children, a partner working in the also-under-funded public sector, no family money to rely on and those hefty credit card debts accrued on my first film, I've spent a lot of time lately thinking long and hard about how I'm going to support myself financially. What I’m good at. What I enjoy.

And out of all this thinking an idea for a new venture has started to emerge – putting my film-making skills to use in a different way, helping people capture and record life stories and memories for posterity.

When I got that WhatsApp from Dave about the box in the ITV reception, picked it up and delved back into those Caribbean lunch club members' stories I'd filmed two decades earlier, I realised – I've been doing this all along!

It's what I did in 'The Atom : A Love Affair', recording the stories of scientists, engineers, politicians and campaigners involved in the history of 'the peaceful atom'.

And now perhaps I can do it for you, or your mum, or your dad, or your grandma, or your boss...

A new journey begins…

Photo by Leo on Unsplash

As 2024 hoves into view, I'm excited, if also daunted, at the idea of reinventing myself as an entrepreneur in my late 40s. And I'm excited too at trying to document some of that journey, as well as random writings on the things that interest me, including atomic history and documentary films of course, both of which definitely still have my heart.

I never got into writing a blog the first time around – 2005 me was too busy swanning about drinking red wine and being in the 'meeja' – but I've always been an avid reader of other people's blogs.

I'm still new here, but Substack seems like the best of old-school blogging reinvented and reinvigorated for the current moment (and big hat-tip to the wonderful

Susannah Conway

for helping me see that's what it could be).

So welcome to my Substack and I look forward to sharing my musings and connecting with many more wonderful folk round these parts. I think it's gonna be fun.

I’d love to say hello so please do drop any thoughts, suggestions or crack Substack hints and tips in the comments. But be gentle with me eh, it is my first time…

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Watch my film on Netflix (in Europe) or Vimeo

(everywhere else) - or see trailer, reviews & bonus content HERE

Find me on X /Twitter & at LinkedIn

Life stories website – coming soon...

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