Post by Daveym on Apr 1, 2012 14:05:19 GMT 1
Who's Fred Hamilton you ask?
Well Fred was a very distinguished BBC film cameraman who worked in a wide variety of areas covering everything from current Affairs, Sport, Drama and Documentaries. Oh, and quite a few Doctor Who's!
I'd heard of him, in fact Philip Hinchcliffe talks about his work with him on one of the DVD documentaries (Talons of Weng-Chiang I think...) so given that he worked on quite few Doctor Who stories and comes from a little heard from crewmembers background I managed to find out that the publishers still had a stock of his self authored Biography available.
Now I confess I'm only halfway through it, but I've skimmed it previously and can certainly hold it up as one of the best such biographies to come from the small press publishers in recent years. What makes it a bit special from the crowd of Doctor Who biographies out there is that actually it isn't about Doctor Who. It isn't specifically marketed as Doctor Who, and that's a brave and commendable decision from the publisher.
This is a book about Fred Hamilton, and his carreer at the BBC and beyond. From growing up in South Africa, to where he retires in the Sun at Cyprus. But in between talking about working on Colditz and surviving reporting on the Vietnam war you do get to read his experiences filming Doctor Who - The Enemy of the World is particularly vivid, as is his memories of Jon Pertwee and his clear affection for the man.
But beyond that we get other work, with other Doctor Who legends such as working under Barry Letts later, or with Derrick Sherwin, numerous jobs with Douglas Camfield and Michael Ferguson. The book is heavy on technical terms though and the language of filming technique does lose you after a while. Hamilton does note in the foreword that this is going to be using heavy internal television lingo and Camera terms but even so it gets a bit much...
There are a generous number of B&W photos illustrating the books pages, quite a few are Doctor Who, others feature very famous faces from television and real life, being a globe trotting film cameraman offered Hamilton an unprecedented opportunity to travel the world and at a time when 'abroad' meant something very exotic and mysterious. He was right in the thick of it.
What comes across well is that unlike some other biographies Hamilton is not afraid to to call a spade a spade, there are a short few people he's worked with who he makes clear his dislike for. This isn't some rose tinted view of the BBC either as whilst he clearly has fond memories and a love of the television made he also discusses in brief some of the darker sides of the corporation. The only time I've seen this dark side hinted at is from Ian Scoones in his contributions to Steve Cambdens self-biography. It's something that is generally just not mention in public by those who worked there.
I like Doctor Who related Biographies, what I don't like so much is Biographies that talk only about the subjects Doctor Who contribution (the upcoming Michael E. Briant being a case in point), so unlike others recent efforts like the Barry Letts edition Fred Hamilton's book works well as it takes the Doctor Who chapters as rightly being just one more job the subject worked on, they deserve discussion but they shouldn't ever be the dominant topic and focus of anyones biography.
I can reccomend Fred Hamiltons Biography here on that basis, as it's actually a biography of a man who worked in television during perhaps it's golden age, where thing were there to be discovered and the world was just that bit more unknown and mysterious. It was Cameramen like Fred had to go out there and bring it to us.
