The Diary: Andy Harries

Why is the government closing down the UK Film Council?. As I am apparently the last known recipient of a chunk of money before the axe suddenly fell, I am asked this question all the time and did two interviews for US news channels this week alone.

I am currently shooting a film called Rafta Rafta but – like most film producers – struggled to raise all the money and couldn’t find the last 10 per cent of the £4m I needed. Finally, as the film that I had spent nearly three years trying to finance tottered on the edge of total collapse, the UKFC’s newly appointed creative chief Tanya Seghatchian stepped in with a vital £250,000. The result is we are now underway filming in both London and Bolton and employing more than 100 people in the film’s production.

Getting British movies made is what the UKFC does, which is why its sudden abolition is both surprising and stupid. Created 10 years ago it has helped hundreds of British movies into production. These days it has an annual sum of £15m to spend – far less than is spent by France and Italy.

Rafta Rafta began life as a stage play about three years ago and was a huge hit at the National Theatre. It’s a delightful story, written by Ayub Khan-Din (East is East) and starring Meera Syal and Harish Patel, about the agonies of a young newly married working class Asian-British couple forced to live with their in-laws.

The story has universal themes but is also a very British subject, which is what appeals to me. My last two films The Queen and The Damned United were also uniquely British stories. And our director Nigel Cole, whose hit films include the immensely popular Calendar Girls, shares my passion for making strong commercial pictures based on British life. Nigel has just directed the forthcoming Made in Dagenham, the true and very stirring story of a strike by a small group of women working as upholsterers in the Ford car plant at Dagenham in the late 1960s after the factory cut costs by reclassifying the women’s jobs as “unskilled”.

It’s a great footnote in social and political history and a perfect story for cinema, a rousing and emotional Full Monty-type movie. I hope it’s a big success and I also hope that Jeremy Hunt and Ed Vaizey from the Department for Culture will watch it when it opens next month. They need to be reminded of how governments can be persuaded to change their minds when they are faced with simple truths. They should also read the credits at the front of the film because Made in Dagenham is – yes you’ve guessed it – another great British film that has been made this year with the financial and creative support of the UK Film Council.

My company Left Bank Pictures recently completed three films starring Rufus Sewell as an Italian detective, Aurelio Zen, based on a series by the late crime novelist Michael Dibdin. In this case, too, we would have been unable to proceed without help – in the form of a vital tax break – this time from the Italian government’s film commission. The day after the UKFC closure, I was in Rome meeting the the director general of the the Italian ministry of culture. They thought the UK government had gone mad and declared it great news for Italy. The international competition to attract film projects is fierce because film production stimulates such good local business. So the government’s message to the world is interpreted as “we don’t care about film” – which is why it’s such a cock-up.

I am delighted the government has pledged that the £15m of lottery money that is made available to support films will continue but the film industry also needs continuity and stability. We need to know who is going to handle it and we need to know as soon as possible. We need a simple, transparent and effective body who will work with us. And I suggest the government eats humble pie and looks no further than the current creative team at the UKFC, which includes some excellent and dedicated people doing just this. I suspect that the ministers have been caught up in the recent rivalry between the British Film Institute and the UKFC and have been persuaded to favour one body rather than the other. If so, that’s a nonsense and the government needs to listen to what people in the business have to say. Films are intrinsic to our culture and it is hard enough to make them without our future being threatened by politics.

Last week I headed off with my family to the Edinburgh TV festival, where I was asked to appear in a “masterclass”. The sheer amount of culture on offer in the city in August hits you between the eyes. For the most part it’s the comedy fringe that excites me (I managed to see the American YouTube sensation Bo Burnham, who has a precocious talent at just 19!) while the book festival occupies the interest of my wife and 10-year-old daughter.

On Saturday afternoon, the BBC’s Kate Silverton interviewed me before a festival audience and I duly attempted to string together the highlights of my career by way of anecdotes. One story in particular raised a laugh. I showed a clip from a new series for Sky I have been making all summer in Majorca called Mad Dogs, a thriller with a strong streak of black comedy in it. The show has four great stars of the UK small screen – John Simm, Max Beesley, Phil Glenister and Marc Warren. But it also features two Spanish actors. One is the female cop and the other a gangster who likes to gun down his victims while wearing a Tony Blair mask. We imagined that this character, referred to throughout the project simply as “Tony Blair”, would be a big, ugly brute of a man.

We asked our young office intern to write up a summary of each of our Spanish characters and send them to the Spanish casting director in Barcelona in preparation for our visit to meet some actors. So imagine our surprise when the director and producer pitched up in Spain for the casting session to discover there were six midgets outside the door waiting to be interviewed for the role of the gangster! Our intern had mistyped Tony Blair as Tiny Blair.

It was such a wonderful and brilliant mistake that we cast a very short and very clever Argentine actor in the role and the result is both funny and very scary.

More seriously, Mad Dogs is evidence to suggest that, as urged by BBC director-general Mark Thompson in the festival’s keynote MacTaggart lecture, Sky is stepping up its commitment to UK production. Thompson is right to argue this, though it’s worth noting that, unlike the BBC and ITV, Sky is not afraid of ordering long runs – we have also been commissioned to do a second series of an action series called Strikeback, with an increased order from six to 10 hours –and supporting these runs with good licence fees.

From Edinburgh to the Ramada Inn in Bolton, where we are billeted for the week to film the exterior scenes for Rafta Rafta . We have turned in for the night, fleeing from a large and noisy wedding party whose hideous karaoke is echoing around the hotel accompanied by the sound of young male guests throwing up in the toilets.

Who says the life of a film and TV producer is glamorous?

Andy Harries is chief executive of Left Bank Pictures and produces film and TV