A photograph of BBC film maker Dick Meadows with a swan called Marlon has been on his wall for 40 years. He sees it every day…and it makes him smile.

“He was sick. His head is gently cradled on my shoulder by the man who rescued Marlon, saved his life and completely changed mine,” he says.

It was 1983, Dick was a 30-something-year-old BBC filmmaker. Marlon’s savour was Len Baker, the man who, six years earlier, had founded the Swan Rescue Service in Norfolk.

(Image: Supplied)

The story of The Dying Swan is the first in a series of 20 looking at documentary films made for the BBC in the East by Dick and his team in a new book 20|20 Vision.

And it sets the tone so well for what follows as we turn the pages, meeting the people involved around the world, and read about what went on before, during, and after filming.

It was in the 1970s when Len founded the Swan Rescue Service in Norfolk. “He was a driven, obsessive and outspoken man. I came to believe he loved these great white birds more than life itself,” says Dick.

(Image: Supplied)

“The birds were dying because they had many enemies, often disguised as friends.  Anglers poisoned them with lead, hooked them with steel, entangled them in discarded line. Holidaymakers fed them junk food. Hooligans shot them with guns and crossbows,” he writes.

And he adds: “I have never to this day seen a human being with such empathy for a wild creature. Forty years later it still makes me tearful to think quietly of his tenderness.”

Len argued and lobbied and ranted and raged for lead to be banned and in 1987 weights were finally banned. Everyone else took the credit. Len was largely ignored. He’d made too many enemies.

(Image: David Nobbs)

Three years earlier The Dying Swan, narrated by a man hailed as perhaps the most outstanding Shakespearean actor of his generation Ian Holm, won the Regional Documentary of the Year at the Royal Television National Awards.

Len Baker died in 2017 but his memory and words live on. “If man’s cruelty has broken my heart, it is the swans’ love that has healed it.”

From The Dying Swan Dick writes about 19 more films on a wide range of subjects…many tackling poignant and moving subjects. You may well remember some of them and now we get the opportunity to discover what went on behind the scenes.

To be continued…

*20|20 Vision. Twenty Films Twenty Stories. A Filmmaker’s Memoir by Dick Meadows is on sale in Jarrolds for £9.99.

 

(Image: Alan Howard)

Fabulous memories

That is you grandpa! Granny, you look great.

Our stories and pictures from smash-hit book The Anglian Beat, booking at the bands and artists from the 1950s and 1960s are bringing so many memories back.

(Image: Supplied)

Today the lads and lasses who entertained so well in the clubs and pubs of Norfolk and Suffolk can look back on a great time in their lives…entertaining us so well.

And now we have a picture of one group we missed out on thanks to John Overton…The Midnights from Diss.

They hit the road as an instrumental four-piece outfit influenced at the time by, who else, The Shadows. There was Tony Theobald, Pat Blake, Peter Atkins and Roy Potter.

Tony Campbell joined on vocals with the band playing as Tony C Jay & The Midnights. Wilfred Thompson then came along. He had been fronting the South Norfolk Planets under the stage name of Ricky Moon.

Ricky Moon and the Midnights, so many of these bands had different names over the years, continued on the Diss scene until revamping for the beat era as. The OO7’s.

Talking of midnight and things that go bump in the night…who remembers the Vampires. A popular name for skiffle and rock groups in Dereham, Norwich, Gorleston, Lowestoft, and Snettisham.

All their stories, and many more, are told in the book The Anglian Beat by Kingsley Harris of the East Anglian Music Archive which had sold out but has now been reprinted and is now back on sale at The City Bookshop & The Book Hive in Norwich and Ketts Books at Wymondham.