The Rory Peck Trust: Award 1998

The 1998 Rory Peck Award Brochure

My year: on the frontline

By Vaughan Smith, Frontline Television Ltd

It has been a strange, varied and lucky year. I have been shot in Kosovo, blessed by the Pope in Cuba, come down with Cairo tummy in Egypt and fleetingly seen my baby daughter in her first year of life.

smith.gif (12706 bytes) In November, I was working for a German magazine programme filming the aftermath of the Luxor massacre. After a gruelling week’s filming we took a morning’s sightseeing at the Pyramids. I saw no sights but instead spent the morning throwing stones to keep mischievous Egyptian children at bay, while seeking tranquillity in the desert to recover from a seriously unpleasant stomach problem.

My next assignment was in Cuba for the Pope’s visit in January, producing and filming features for a Dutch religious channel, where I developed an unaffordable and therefore temporary taste for cigars. On my way back from Cuba I had an amazing stroke of luck. The Albanian taxi driver who drove me home from Heathrow turned out to be an important member of an underground freedom movement - the KLA - and put me on the scent of a story that was to keep me employed for the rest of the year. So when the trouble in Kosovo started in early March, I already had a Yugoslav visa and was ready to go. I rushed out, phoning broadcasters from my mobile in the taxi to Heathrow.

I was hired by the BBC and soon I found myself crawling in and out of a sniper cordon to record what was to be definitive footage of the massacre which sparked the war in Kosovo. Just after I had filmed tanks bulldozing houses in the village of Prekaz, I was spotted by a Serbian paramilitary whose aim was rather too good. I was spared a possibly fatal injury when the bullet embedded itself in my mobile phone having been slowed down by a generous roll of BBC Deutsch Marks that I was carrying in a bum-bag round my waist. I continued working in Kosovo filming material to distribute through Frontline and working for broadcasters as a Video Producer. To my surprise I was asked to produce a 90-minute documentary on Kosovo for Channel Four’s True Stories, which has proved very challenging - the techniques of fly-on-the-wall documentary are a world apart from those of newsgathering.

At the end of September I went back to camerawork, filming pictures of the Obrije massacre that finally led Robin Cook to call an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.

Between all this I was able to help steer the Freelance Insurance and Training Scheme during its pilot year. The Frontline office has seen less of me this year than normal and has been run in my absence by Anna Losse and Susan Ellerbeck. Nevertheless, it has consumed whatever little time I’ve had trying to negotiate the best possible sales for our freelancers.

As for next year, I expect I will spend much of it abroad. I hope I will spend more of it with my family.

The Rory Peck Awards Brochure 1998