Hugh Thomson

.

.

Before we went, Pakistan had always looked like it was going to be difficult. It took three months just to get the filming visas even though what we were making was not on a politically sensitive subject; we were there to explore the sometimes forgotten ancient history of the country.

.

.

.

Security was to be paramount. The mosque where we filmed sufi musicians had been suicide bombed in 2010 by the Taliban with the death of 42 worshippers. A few weeks after we had planned to film the border crossing at Wagah, where Pakistani and Indian guards try to compete with each other for the most militaristic display, it too was suicide bombed. While filming at several remote old Buddhist monasteries, we were interrupted courteously but firmly by security questioning our right to film.

The key to filming in Pakistan was, as ever, finding a fixer who could deliver – in our case Khalid Waseem, based in Rawalpindi, who came recommended by several other productions. This meant that most of the cultural institutions where we wanted to film did not charge a fee. In Lahore, they let us light up some of the Mughal palaces at night for some spectacular sequences and turned on all the disused fountains in the pleasure gardens. We were able to use drone cameras and satellite phones and, with an immensely experienced cameraman, Spike Geilinger, the drone cameras proved invaluable for getting an overview of large archaeological remains like the ancient Indus city of Harappa.

.

For one memorable sequence, we took boats across a remote lake in the Buddhist heartland around Gandhara – a fascinating area, which still shows the influence of Alexander the Great and the Greeks when they arrived and took this new religion to their heart.  Sadly, many of the old Buddhist sites have now been mutilated, but some of the small remote ones still survive.

.

Our presenter, Sona Datta, who has worked as a curator at the British Museum, knows Pakistan well. The dramas played out by the vanished cultures of the Indus – the battle with climate change, the clash of civilisations – are still being played out today and Sona and I both wanted to ensure the series addressed this; so we interviewed political commentator Ahmed Rashid as well as contemporary artists like the Biennale–exhibiting star of Pakistani art, Rashid Rana.

Lahore is one of those cities of the subcontinent like Old Delhi or Varanasi where a shot presents itself almost in every direction – particularly after dark, when what Kipling called ‘the city of dreadful night’ comes alive in smoke-filled narrow alleyways lit up by the Badshahi Mosque beyond.  For Eid, we filmed from rickshaws down those alleys as camels and all the streetlife of Pakistani crowded around us, before eating goat’s brain curry washed down with iced drinks of mint, cumin and salt in the havelis of the walled city.

.

For the other important role of any good fixer is to know how to schedule the last shot of each day near a decent restaurant.

Hugh Thomson is the Series Producer and Director of Treasures of the Indus, a 3-part series beginning on Monday August 31^st on BBC 4 at 9.00 pm.  Catch it on iPlayer

Enjoyably daft new theory about Stonehenge from Julian Spalding, which has prompted a classic archaeologist putdown from Sir Barry Cunliffe, emeritus professor of European archaeology at Oxford, “He could be right, but I know of no evidence to support it.”

The idea that Stonehenge might have been built as the base for a higher structure is initially attractive, but doesn’t bear much thinking about.

If you want to construct a high building, everyone from Egypt to Mesoamerica did so by creating a wide and stable mass – like a pyramid – so that you could erect upper storries.

Having a thin wide circle as the base for a higher walkway or superstructure seems deeply illogical, as the late Leonard Nimoy would say.

That there was an element of procession, both to and around Stonehenge, seems very probable, not least because of the evidence provided by the nearby oval Cursus, the Avenue to Stonehenge, and from what we know of prehistoric man’s instincts around the world.  But the idea that they walked around on top of the stones may be seductive, but is highly unlikely.

More consistent is the idea of a concealed place, like Bronze Age mortuary circles:  that the outer ring  delineated a private space within, which may have been only accessible to the privileged or theocratic, as discussed in The Green Road into the Trees when talking about Seahenge.

To see Ryan Adams at the Hammersmith Apollo, scene of many a great concert in the past when it was the Odeon.  When I first went in 1974 (the year Adams was born), there was a new support band called Queen who no one had ever heard of and we thought a bit much, while we waited for the main band – Mott the Hoople and ‘All the Young Dudes’…  Years later I interviewed Mick Ronson there just before he died, for my Dancing in the Street series, and he reminisced about Bowie’s ‘Ziggy retirement concert’, and played solo for us.

Ryan Adams has turned into a singer of real stature (although not in actual height – he looks like a shaggier version of Frodo) – after many a wayward twist and turn since the days of Gold and ‘New York, New York’ which first brought him fame.  His new album, just called Ryan Adams, although about his 14th (give or take a record company reject), feels like he’s found his voice – and guitar – again.

In the past, his very facility for writing songs – he turns the heckles of one punter into an instant song, a neat party trick I’ve heard him play before but one that exemplifies this weakness – means that he produces too much;  but these song feel heartfelt.  I suspect he’s this generation’s Neil Young – prolific, occasionally brilliant, sometimes infuriating and veering between acoustic and electric to great effect.

He’s joined by his support act Natalie Prass for a couple of well matched duets, including a showstopping ‘Oh My Sweet Carolina’, and gets even the most jaded of London’s spoilt-for-choice rock audience singing along to ‘When the Stars Go Blue’.  Oh, and he keeps talking about ‘dudes’ on stage.  Which no one else has done since Ian Hunter.

NB – The footage of Mick Ronson playing solo for us in the stalls at Hammersmith Odeon was played back at the memorial concert held at the Odeon for him when he died in 1993, shortly after the interview was recorded:  a strange and ghostly moment.  Ronson was a charming and honest man, and still undervalued.  Quite apart from his transformative work with Bowie and Lou Reed, he had also just reinvigorated Morrissey’s career with the excellent Your Arsenal album that for the first time made the petulant one a star in the States.

At the end of a year with even more travel than usual – Hawaii to Tahiti, out down the mouth of the Amazon, round the Mediterranean with my son Leo, and films on India and Pakistan in the autumn, let alone a great deal of time spent in Glasgow and Scotland – good to catch up on myself and the best things I came across that sustained me on the journeys:

Best films:  In June, I stumbled into a small art-house cinema in New England on the off chance and saw the only movie that looked promising, although I’d never heard of it – Ida, by some way my film of the year for its unflinching honesty, beauty and rigour, despite what seems the unpromising scenario:  Polish girl in a 1950s convent has to decide whether she stays or she goes, not necessarily helped by her hard-drinking, hard-living aunt. A luminous film in the spirit of Bresson, and the first Paweł Pawlikowski has made in Poland rather than Britain.

It’s been a great year for strong female performances.  The best things about Mr Turner and The Theory Of Everything were not the technically accomplished portraits of their heroes by Timothy Spall and Eddie Redmayne, but the life given to the films by their screen wives, Marion Welsh and Felicity Jones, who were both superb.  Likewise, Scarlett Johansson pulled off some bold strokes in first the very enjoyable and slightly bonkers Lucy, and then the less enjoyable, but equally bonkers Under The Skin, ludicrously overrated by the Guardian as their #1 film of the year.

Both Wes Anderson and Christopher Nolan produced fine films in The Grand Budapest Hotel and Interstellar, even if neither was their best, and the less said about the execrable Wolf on Wall Street the better – Scorsese been running on empty so long, the car should surely just be left in the garage.

But along with Ida, the other knockout film of the year was Boyhood, for letting us feel the director’s surprise at how lives unfold and people age.

Best books were Arundhati Roy’s rage against caste, The Doctor And The Saint;  Adam Nicolson’s passionate advocacy of Homer and the Bronze Age in The Mighty Dead;  and two work of popular history told with verve and flair – Charles Spencer on how The Killers Of The King (Charles I) were hunted down after the Restoration, and Boris Johnson on The Churchill Factor without the boring 3-volume life bits or indeed bothering with much chronology at all.

In my own field of travel books, amongst some increasingly austere and dull nature writing, one book shone out for its unaffected simplicity and grace:  Meadowland: The Private Life Of An English Field by John Lewis-Stempel.

Best exhibitions:  the British Museum’s ‘Mummy: The Inside Story’,  where they revealed the faces of those inside the mummies by using CT Scans;  ‘Matisse: The Cut-Outs’ at the Tate which proved that a big blockbuster show can still be thoughtful.

Best albums were the eponymous Ryan Adams, his best for many years and all the better for being guitar driven;  and Mark Kozalek’s remarkable Benji, in which his talent for long narrative songs about the American mid-west made him a sort of aural equivalent of Boyhood.  Kozalek (aka ‘Sun Kil Moon’) also gave the most audacious concert I saw in which he had to hire a drummer from the audience as his own had failed to turn up (and paid the replacement in cash on stage), and then asked if any women in the audience would come up and sing a duet with him on ‘I’ve Got You Babe’, at which the audience collectively sucked in their teeth at the humiliation to come, but Joanne from Glasgow gave a knockout performance.