Martin Parr is a renowned photographer. John Shuttleworth hasn't had a TV
show in years. How did they end up making a film about the Shetland Islands?
And are they still talking to each other? Brian Logan reports.
Thursday April 20, 2006
The Guardian
'A perfect symbol of niceness' ... John Shuttleworth in It's Nice Up North
When artists from different disciplines collaborate, you expect to encounter
a bit of a love-in, lots of talk about how much they admire one another's
work. But it doesn't always pan out that way. "There's one big problem
with this documentary," says the narrator of the film It's Nice Up North,
John Shuttleworth. "You may have spotted it already. It's the cameraman,
Martin Parr." To you and I, Martin Parr is the best known British photographer
of the past two decades. But not to Shuttleworth. "He's not a professional
cameraman - as you can see. He's just a photographer. And he can't be a very
good one. He doesn't even do weddings."
Shuttleworth, of course, is fictional. A retired security guard and amateur
singer-songwriter from Sheffield, he is the creation of character-comedian
Graham Fellows. Parr is the pictorial chronicler of suburban Britain who famously
anthologised Boring Postcards; a retrospective of his work was recently held
at the Barbican in London. The two are friends, who met a decade ago when
Parr took photos of Shuttleworth for the Guardian. In their different ways
- Fellows in comedy, Parr in art - both focus on, as Fellows says, "the
minutiae of life". "There's a lot of empathy," says Parr, "between
my photography of the British and his portrayal of this very simple, naive
English character."
Hold on, is this the love-in starting? Not quite. Because, although Fellows
and Parr are both promoting the spoof documentary, which starts touring next
week, it's not a film on which they exactly see eye to eye. It wasn't just
the fictional John Shuttleworth who found it hard work collaborating with
Martin Parr, was it? "Well, it's confusing," says Fellows, evasively,
"because there was me and Martin, and then there was John and Martin.
And then there's me and John. It's a bit of a triangle. But I do think Martin
found me a little bit difficult ... "
The film was Fellows' idea, provoked, he says, by his "being ignored
by all the TV companies". (Shuttleworth's last major TV series was 500
Bus Stops in 1997; he currently broadcasts on Radio 4.) Parr's participation,
says Fellows half-seriously, "might make the film more saleable to TV.
Because Martin's got a brilliant reputation, whereas John Shuttleworth is
a bit of a has-been."
The film itself was prompted by a visit Fellows made to the Shetland Islands
while touring with the 2003 Shuttleworth show Pillock of the Community. "I
had a fantastic time," he says. "I fell in love with the wind, and
the moonscape, and the barren scenery." And the people. "We went
to this bus shelter in Unst. It's this amazing bus stop that has a sofa and
a budgie in a cage and a computer and a microwave. It's like someone's lounge.
And it struck me this sort of thing wouldn't survive five minutes in mainland
Britain. It would be trashed by disaffected youths." And so an idea for
a film took shape. "It seemed to me a perfect symbol of niceness, the
sort of niceness we'd been experiencing that whole week. I began to think
that, the further north you go, the nicer it gets."
Not everyone agreed. Fellows' wife and children were dragooned to Shetland
in the first flush of dad's excitement, and "didn't like it, because
there was no McDonald's and not many clothes shops". Fortunately, Parr
was more keen. "I persuaded him," says Fellows, "to give up
a week of his time, photographing vegetables or whatever he does, for nothing."
With a producer and a BBC sound man in tow ("we needed good sound because
of the incessant wind"), Fellows and Parr set off for Shetland in December
2003.
The filming didn't go smoothly. "We were on a tight schedule," says
Parr, "and it was winter in Shetland, so our days were very short. We
struggled to finish." So might Fellows have planned the shoot better?
That's not, unsurprisingly, how he sees it. "There was a conflict between
me and Martin, because we had different views about filming schedules. He'd
like everyone to get together every evening for a nice meal, and I'd be working.
There were only four of us and I was doing about 10 people's jobs."
The film itself is a batty Shetland travelogue, which bears charming witness
to its homespun means of production. Fellows recruited a co-star, a tour guide
called Elma Johnson, who duly introduced him to her next-door neighbour, who
went on to provide the film's fiddle soundtrack. (Fellows recorded the violin
solos down the phone from Lerwick to Lincolnshire.) In the final feature,
Shuttleworth potters around the islands interviewing the locals to roadtest
his theory about latitude and likableness.
One of the most seductive, and unsettling, aspects of the enterprise is that
you're never sure to what extent it's a joke, and whether the Shetlanders
are in on it. The same uncertainty applies to the disintegrating relationship
between Shuttleworth/Fellows and Parr, which the film hilariously chronicles.
Shuttleworth's voiceover is forever carping at Parr for pointing his camera
away from the action, for shooting "arty" sequences of binbags flapping
in the wind. At one point, we hear Parr's voice say "Got it!" in
reference to a desired shot. And Shuttleworth responds: "No, Martin,
you didn't get it. And I don't get you. Why did you come on the trip, Martin?"
It's a very funny running joke - all the more so because there is, it seems,
truth in it. "Having done a bit of filming myself," says Fellows,
"and certainly more than Martin has, I know there are rules you observe,
like saying, 'Action!' But he didn't seem to want to go along with that. The
other wonderful thing was that he kept leaving the camera running, because
he didn't know how to work it. So we've got all these shots of the car interior,
of the stitching on the back seat." And the case for the defence? "Filming
is always a challenge because I'm not used to it," admits Parr, cheerfully.
"But I approach it head-on. I'm not technically brilliant, but it's the
spirit that counts. So I just dived in."
Likewise, there were artistic differences. Fellows wanted the film to follow
closely his own script, full of interludes in which Shuttleworth speaks to
his wife and his agent on the phone. "This was an area of friction,"
says Fellows, "because Martin wanted to ignore my brilliant plotlines.
I sound like I'm patronising him, but I don't think he really gets stories."
Over to Parr: "Graham's very keen on plot. I would be much more casual
and say, 'Let's go up and let things happen.' I think the unscripted bits
turned out to be the strongest parts of the film."
He's on to something: the film comes alive when Shuttleworth and the Shetland
public are interacting on the hoof. You can sense Parr enjoying these moments
from behind the lens. His camerawork becomes more alert, more spontaneous.
This, after all, is where he and Fellows' interests overlap, in real people
and their unpredictable, unscriptable behaviour. Fellows admits as much: "We'd
be walking along and we'd see a street cleaner up an alleyway, and we'd just
go and chat to him. And you'd end up talking about the fact that some paint
was flaking off a drainpipe. And that becomes quite riveting. It's what I
love doing and Martin Parr loves doing, which is honing in on nothing, and
making it dramatic."
The final disagreement came when, contrary to Parr's advice, Fellows opted
to edit the film himself, on his laptop. It took two years. "I couldn't
work the software," says Fellows. "Or the computer." Now he's
off on tour, presenting the film at arts centres and cinemas in England, Scotland
- and Shetland. "It's brilliant," he says, "because I'm just
taking a projector, a DVD and my own screen, sticking it up in the venue and
giving a chat. It's like someone going to the library and giving a talk about
their holiday. Or about butterflies."
And are the two best of friends again? "When I got into the cutting room,"
says Fellows, "I realised lots of the shots he'd got, we'd been thinking
along the same lines all the time. I often wondered, why's he pointing the
camera there? And suddenly a little old lady pops into the frame, and he pans
with her and he's on to something else. He really is remarkable in the stuff
he latches on to." How satisfying that a film about people being nice
needn't, after all, provoke nastiness between its two creators. "Oh,
but it's not really a film about niceness," says Fellows. "That's
a red herring. People are people, and there are nice people and nasty people
wherever you go"