From the Producer
By Halogen TV | January 13, 2012 at 11:19 am
Excerpted from “Art Race” producer Seb Grant’s post at www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk:
Overall, I’m still in awe of the two artists, Ben and Kenny. It was an extraordinary risk both professionally and personally for them, and yet they embraced the challenge in good faith and (mostly) good humour. At times, it was absurdly tough — particularly for Ben on the East Coast and Kenny in the mid-West. An exhausting, endless hustle across 40 days straight — never knowing where they were going to sleep, never knowing how they’d travel and having little notion of where the money for their next meal would come.
Add to those pressures, the continual presence of a television crew and the responsibility to engage with the cameras — never mind completing all their artwork under such scrutiny, and I’m amazed that they made it through to the end.
I’m also in awe of the people we encountered along the way — the folk who helped Ben and Kenny with a bed or a meal or some small change. The crew and I talked endlessly about whether the same format would work in the UK and — time and time again — we rejected the idea. Perhaps I’ve been overly-skewed with metropolitan values but I genuinely don’t know how we compare as a nation to collective America’s curiosity, generosity, enthusiasm and kindness. Maybe my memories are hazy… perhaps our British accents helped… perhaps there’s more excitement about television crews in middle America than the UK — but we left the United States last August humbled by American kindness.
Inevitably, one remembers snapshots of the trip: spending the night in a bowling alley porch (because Kenny had no money), watching Kenny trade doggy-portraits, bargaining for chips in Las Vegas, flying over the Grand Canyon and ballooning in Aspen (the trades became more ambitious as our confidence grew) but it was a sensational experience — waking up each morning and genuinely having no idea about what would happen to us, and where our stories for each day would emerge.
Perhaps the absurdities of last summer are all the more exaggerated now that we are in production of our second major Shakespeare performance piece of the year. A crew of four has become a crew of forty and logistics are nearing terrifying proportions — but I do miss the Art Race’s simplicity and singularity of purpose.
As to the reality TV nature of the series, I have to say that I enjoyed it. We didn’t need to manufacture drama because the drama was there already (the artists needed to eat, travel and sleep). And nor did we need to create any pantomime villains — it’s impossible not to back Ben and Kenny. We didn’t need to cheat and our thoughtful US commissioning editor ensured that we didn’t need to embrace any fast-cut sensibilities. I’m proud it it.
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