London

Bob Stanley

After we showed our last film – ‘What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day?’ – at the Barbican in 2005, we met up with Jude Kelly, artistic director at what was then called the South Bank Centre. She asked if we wanted to be artists in residence. Of course we did… erm, what did that mean exactly?

Eighteen months later I’m still not exactly sure. It has involved working in and around the freshly renamed Southbank Centre (two words, no definite article, please), putting on the monthly Turntable Café events, and, finally, working up a film – called ‘This Is Tomorrow’ – about the history of the site, especially the Festival Hall.
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Initially, this seemed like a cinch. The four members of the Saint Etienne production team (Pete Wiggs and I, along with director Paul Kelly and producer Andrew Hinton) were all inordinately fond of the old eggbox, and getting to meet surviving legends like architect Trevor Dannatt and furniture designer Robin Day could only be a pleasure.

Sunset over Southbank, Christmas Eve 2006, in a still from Saint Etienne's 'This Is Tomorrow'

Yet obscurant enthusiasm could have proved the film’s downfall – after all, we wanted to make something that would promote the glories of the Festival Hall internationally. I thought of this just yesterday as I was walking towards Victoria Station and saw the Wilton Snack Bar – a perfect, untouched ’60s caff – being ripped asunder. It broke my heart, and I quickly snapped the soon-to-be destroyed signage. At the same time I was aware that any shared heartache and anger would be super-localised; it would mean nothing outside of a few streets in Pimlico and to a handful of fellow café culture obsessives.

Nostalgia aside, there was also the danger of ‘This Is Tomorrow’ coming across like an Open University programme. While we had no illusions of multiplex glory, a parade of octogenarian talking heads was not an option, either.

We got around these problems by inventing ‘Andy’, our central character, who just happens to be an artist in residence on the South Bank. Andy is fictional enough to get away with bare-faced cheek in his narrative, but close enough to our own South Bank adventure to make ‘This Is Tomorrow’ pretty much a documentary.

As in any institution – there are 400 employees at Southbank Centre – you’ll never get to know everyone intimately, but a clutch of people have bent over backwards to help us throughout the year. Into the latter camp falls Jane Beese, who stuck her head above the parapet when all around were asking ‘who are this Sanatogen lot, anyway?’ Then there’s Kenelm Robert who has been working on the site for 35 years.

When he turned 50, Kenelm decided it was about time he learnt how to swim; three years later he was swimming for the Grenadan national team. In the Learning And Participation department, Shan McLennan and Neill Quinton were avenging angels, and arranged a coalition of rival schools to provide an orchestra for our live-soundtrack premiere at exceedingly short notice. (We had naively thought that one of the four resident orchestras could back us, without realising we’d still have to pay the musicians to perform.) It’s a good feeling to give some 60-odd teenagers from Lambeth, Lewisham and Southwark the chance to play on the Festival Hall stage. Makes you feel like a cross between Simon Rattle and Jimmy Savile.

Jude Kelly, having got us the gig in the first place, has unsurprisingly had a considerable impact; her idea of reviving the site by reintroducing the Festival of Britain’s ‘bright primary colours’ underpins the movie. Also, her workload kept our feet on the ground whenever we got stressed: as well as organising the reopening programme this month, her production of ‘On the Town’ has just been revived at the Coliseum, and she is casting and directing Southbank Centre’s ‘Carmen Jones’, as well as bringing up teenage kids and, for all we know, drawing up the autumn timetable for South West Trains.

A year in a riverside residence. How did it all turn out? Come along to the premiere on June 29 and see for yourself.