The Rory Peck Trust: Award 1998

The 1998 Rory Peck Award Brochure

My year: undercover

By Ben Anderson, freelance cameraman

anderson.GIF (27858 bytes) With barely any training and the handling of one corpse to my credit, I found myself driving a hearse through Salisbury. I somehow bluffed my way through that first funeral which marked the start of a very strange eight months. Apart from the image of a post-mortem popping up from time to time when I can’t sleep, I’ve been relatively undisturbed by the experience. "Wait ‘til you’ve walked half a mile in front of an Intercity with a black bag," someone said, "that’s when you’ve seen it all."

I was of course wearing a hidden camera. The Hi-8 recorder is so big that you have to wear a bum-bag to carry it. That doesn’t go too well with an undertaker’s suit and I was nearly caught on a regular basis. I explained the bum-bag by saying that I was diabetic and need to carry emergency medical equipment with me at all times. This worked well until someone said, "Really? My husband is diabetic, what level are you?"

Funeral staff tend to be ex-military or police, and the nature of the job means that there are usually four of them. The shots of me working were filmed by me when no-one was around in the mortuary. Staff were never more than fifteen metres away. I took the camera out of the bum-bag and filmed myself driving hearses and limos, making coffins and handling bodies as well as recording diary pieces wherever possible on a daily basis. On one occasion I found out that a cremation was going to have no mourners present, I lost the other vehicles, stopped the hearse to fit the camera and filmed what became the film’s opening shot, a coffin being carried into the crematorium. I was taking cameras where they had never been before.

The project took more than twice as long as expected and I worked for over four months on an expenses only basis. I ended up in worse debt than when I had started. But the film received critical acclaim, got record viewing figures and is currently being considered by NBC to be shown across America. I’ve also moved out of the squat in Brixton.

The Rory Peck Awards Brochure 1998