Moving pictures

KEITH Massey is a born storyteller. For 35 years as an award-winning TV cameraman, he has been telling his stories through pictures. Prise him away from behind his camera and he is equally eloquent - rattling off party tales gleaned from his life as a newsman.

An encounter with a very drunken Jayne Mansfield; getting a rollicking off Kate Adie for failing to capture on camera the rocket attack which nearly took his life during the first Gulf War; meeting a mole-catching vicar from Lincolnshire; flying upside down in a Red Arrow jet as the rest of the formation flying team hurtled up towards him from below.

There is one event the 60-year-old from Acaster Malbis still finds it difficult to talk about even now, however. The Flixborough disaster of June 1, 1974 (pictured below).

The explosion that day - one of the biggest ever in peacetime Britain - left 28 people dead, the chemical plant itself shattered, and nearby houses badly damaged.

As a young freelance TV cameraman, Keith was sent up in a helicopter to film the site of the explosion from above for BBC Look North. Then he and his crew landed and approached the scene on foot.

"I've never seen anything like it," he says. "It was horrific. Like a scene from the holocaust, or as though an atom bomb had gone off. There were feet and legs in boots. Jeremy (the reporter with him) had only been with Look North for two days. I said "just say what you're feeling, Jeremy", and he did. He found the right words at the right time."

The news film they shot earned Keith and his team a Royal Television Society award - the first of five he was to win throughout his career. But the memory still haunts him.

How do you keep doing your job in the midst of scenes like that? "I was numbed by it," he says. "Most photographers are kind of protected behind the lens. You have to separate yourself from what's around you, feel removed." It's that ability that enables war photographers to keep filming even as they themselves are about to be shot, he says.

It is the mark of the genuine news man - and there is no doubting Keith is that. But there is more to him too. Down the years, he has made his name as much for gentler, magazine-style features as for his hard news coverage - gardening programmes with Geoffrey Smith, coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show, an award-winning documentary about cricket umpire Dickie Bird. And that mole-catching vicar from Lincolnshire.

"This guy took a double-barrelled shotgun and would go around, trying to feel the mole under his feet, and blast off," Keith recalls. "It was amazing TV!"

It is his unerring instinct for what makes great TV - and the fact that his lifetime behind a camera reads almost like a history of regional TV - that made him the perfect subject for a new documentary which premiered recently at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television.

Bob Geoghegan's film The Men With Their Movie Cameras focuses on the careers of Keith and fellow award-winning BBC cameraman David Brierley. "Television is no longer the newest of the news media," says Bob. "It's already old enough to have a history of its own. The film is a revealing record of two men and their cameras, observing the North's part in that history."

Keith's part in that history began as an apprentice photographer with the Evening Press at the beginning of the 1960s. He spent six years with the paper, steadily learning his trade and covering events such as the marriage of Katharine Worsley at York Minster. It was while still with the Press that he had that encounter with Jayne Mansfield. She had come to attend a press ball and present prizes, but was very much the worse for drink. The 17-year-old Keith had to take her backstage and ply her with coffee so she would be in a fit state to make the presentations. "I was a bit awestruck," he says. "But a bit surprised too about her condition."

He left the Evening Press to join a regional news agency, where he began to experiment with moving cameras: and by the beginning of the 1970s was working as a freelance TV cameraman for Look North.

It was all a bit hit and miss, he says. Yorkshire TV was where the money was - they had a new studio in Leeds, while the Beeb made do with a converted church hall.

Keith recalls being sent to cover the St Ledger with his trusty Bolex, which could only film for 25 seconds at a stretch. It required some careful calculations about when to begin filming to ensure he didn't miss the climax of the race. "I went around the Doncaster racecourse timing horses coming in so I knew from how far back I would have to start filming!" he says.

For all their limitations, he misses those early TV days. It was pioneering stuff, he says - TV opened up a new world to millions as Britain threw off the years of post-war austerity. Now, he worries the medium is beginning to lose its soul.

When he started with Look North there was never enough news to go around, he says.

Magazine-style pieces were needed to fill the allotted 20 minutes - and it made for some creative camerawork. Now, he feels much TV news is very one-dimensional, and filled with doom and gloom. "Hard news is important," he says. "But there are a lot of good things in life as well as all the awful things. We have to keep things in balance, which I don't think we do now."

It is part of a more general disillusion he feels with TV. "In the early days, you were on people's side. TV was for the family, whereas now, If I had young children I may think twice about having a TV in the house. In the early days I wanted to get a TV for the uplifting things, like David Attenborough. But I find that so much on TV now is garbage."

All the more reason for cameramen like Keith to keep on carrying the torch.

Bob Geoghegan is hoping his film about Keith and David Brierley will get a screening on BBC TV. In the meantime, it can be seen by going to the archive section of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television at Bradford

Updated: 11:28 Tuesday, March 29, 2005