ABSTRACT
In 1977 I was given the opportunity to participate, as consultant and co-researcher, in making a television documentary about regional character. Entitled A Sense of Place: The Fens, it was intended as a pilot programme for a series of regional films to be shown by BBC Television at peak evening viewing. It represented a departure from the traditional format of regional documentaries that were made for television during the 1970s. Such films as The Making of the English Landscape, A Bird’s Eye View and A Writer’s Notebook: The Pennines had depended on an expert commentator, either literary or academic, to make the necessary interpretations about the landscape and to give credence to the subject matter. 1 The Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, eulogised from the cockpit of a helicopter, while W. G. Hoskins extemporised from Lake District mountainside or Norfolk marsh. By contrast, our film was made without any reliance on an expert reading a commentary or appearing in front of the camera, the intention being to explore and elucidate by means of film those values that the inhabitants of a region themselves attribute to their landscape, and to capture the particular, special and significant features of the place as local people experience them. ‘Reading the landscape is a humane art, unrestricted to any profession, unbounded by any field, unlimited in its challenges and pleasures.’ 2 In this essay I want to describe some of the challenges and pleasures as well as the difficulties that were encountered in capturing the sense of place.
