Hyde Park

💡 Did You Know?

In a 2015 interview with the HistoryProject site, director Jenny Barraclough confessed that a large amount of footage in this edition was pre-planned and staged.

Barraclough recalled: "[...] I was asked to make a film about a day in Hyde Park. Nothing happens when you're there. You see it happening when you're not filming, but how to film? So I had to make things happen to be honest [...] So the assistant editor's wife brings her child who is about six, five. He orders his favourite cake which I think was an eclair or something and then she said would you like to come off to, you know, let's go to the loo; all planned. And they went off to the loo. And of course while they'd gone the bird, two pigeons came down and started eating his eclair. So you had the lovely scene; the little boy coming back to his horror at his bird eating his eclair. So that was typical - I did that all the way through I'm afraid. I mean on the one hand it genuinely happened in front of the camera. But you had to set it in train.

[...] It's a grey area [...] I honestly didn't have much choice. I'm sure you understand that you'd err, have to film for months to get funny things happening in Hyde Park. I mean I saw a little boy. They build houses over themselves when they're fishing, the children in the lake, in the Serpentine. They sit there with their rods and if it's drizzling they'll build a house with deck chairs. But the deck chairs keep falling down. But of course they're not going to fall down when we're filming but they did all the time so I thought it was fair enough to make them fall down. So I attached a little bit of string, invisible... to the side of a deck chair this little boy had set up with a little tug so it fell down while we were filming and he was so fed up and he put it up again, fell down again. And then a lovely scene emerged out of that with a sweet little bossy girl coming and fixing it up for him. And she being better at it than he was you know - so I think it's justified in the end - it was harmless anyway."