“What! You won a BAFTA?! How come I didn’t know about that?!”

It was about two weeks before my father died and I was sitting with him in his lounge in England, drinking our favourite Macallan whisky and chatting about his life. He was suffering from late-stage cancer and knew his time was now very limited. I was due to return to Australia a few days later so this would be our last ever evening together.


During that evening, he’d been telling me about being a child growing up during the war years and the childhood japes he got up to with his older brother. He then told me about his journey to becoming a BBC documentary film editor and about working with David Attenborough on his first “Zoo” series. I then learned about favourite documentary series that he worked on and how he eventually left the BBC to start his own editing business to produce his TV documentaries with a director friend of his, Adrian Cowell.


Together, they started a company called Pantel Films and their first collaboration became a slice of anthropological history called “The Tribe That Hides From Man” about an Indianist in Brazil who goes deep into the Amazon jungle to try and make contact with the elusive and hostile Kreen-Akrore tribe.


Now, I was intimately aware of the film as I’d spent many hours as a young child sitting in my dad’s edit suite during school holidays and on weekends being allowed to pull the offcuts of film out of the edit suite bins and cutting them together into my own sequences. I’d loved it.


When “The Tribe That Hides From Man” went to air in the UK in 1970, it caused a sensation. I remember it won lots of awards and I also remember that my father was given an honorary doctorate by a Brazilian university as we used to joke about him now being “Dr Miller”!


But when that night he said “…and when we won the BAFTA for best documentary in 1971” and then shortly followed it up with “…the film inspired Paul McCartney to write a song!” I felt these were two parts of my dad’s history that I really should have known about already!


In my defence, I do remember my mum and dad getting dressed up in very fancy outfits for a big awards night in London. I also remember them both being very hung-over and excited the next morning at having won an award.


But at the age of seven, I don’t think the word “BAFTA” meant a thing to me. However, Paul McCartney and Wings I was a fan of, even at that age, so how come I never knew before this moment that my dad’s film had inspired a Beatle to write a song?! Now that would have been bragging rights in any school playground!


At the end of a fascinating night, my dad finished the evening with the comment “I hope you can remember everything we’ve talked about as I’d love you to include some of it in my eulogy!” 


Great!!! I wish he’d mentioned that little detail earlier in the evening!


And, now, I wish I’d had a camera to hand, especially my 360 3D camera, to formally record the evening and archive everything I learnt that night about our family history so that my daughter, who was only seven months at the time, could now enjoy a fascinating evening with her Grandpa listening to his stories as if she were there in the room with us!