A young BBC trainee was sent, in the late 1970s, to film an Edinburgh dog that was reputed to sing along to his master’s bagpipes. “But,” he recalls, “the film crew set up, the guy in a kilt started playing, and the dog didn’t sing at all. It just sat there.”
The fledging director was Adam Curtis, who recently won his fourth Bafta, for Russia 1985-99: TraumaZone. Back then, he was a junior in the Talented Pets section of That’s Life!, a BBC One series run by Esther Rantzen, a noted perfectionist with total control of a show that was first broadcast 50 years ago this spring and had 15-20 million viewers.
