Dan Reed

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1:03Hello and welcome to absolutely one of the final episodes of Headliners with Nihal Arthanaik. I know I've been saying that for some time, but we really are getting into the last few now. So thank you over the past year for listening to Headliners. Today's guest is someone that I have spoken to in the past He is responsible for Leaving Neverland Which I believe is the most successful HBO documentary of all time But we weren't here to talk about Leaving Neverland And the accusations against Michael Jackson, no Dan Reid's latest documentary, 4 Channel 4 It's called One Day in Southport It explores the harrowing events of last July where murders took place at a children's Taylor Swift-themed dance party.

1:52And then the aftermath of what happened there, with rioting and violence, a summer that this country will never forget. It is a long, deep dive into not only the documentary itself, but the wider issues, the bigger questions, that we all have to ask ourselves as a society, in the aftermath of the violence that took place on that day, in that place with those little girls, and the violence that took place on the streets, the towns and cities in this country. It is not, of course, going to be an easy listen, and, of course, the details of what took place that day as that 17-year-old boy walked into that dance class.

2:49May trigger you will almost certainly be upsetting. They should be. So it's a warning before Dan and I start our conversation. But even if you don't listen to our conversation, watch the documentary to remind you of what happened and how quickly parts of this country descended into violence. And what started with justifiable anger and frustration at what had happened, disbelief in what had happened, turned very quickly into looting, racism and extreme violence.

3:34Headliners with Nihal Arthamataka. BBC Radio 5 Live. Well, Dan, it is good to see you again. It's been a few years. It's been years, hasn't it? I enjoyed our last interaction Well I very much enjoyed speaking to you I know that this interaction Won't bring with it The kind of social media swarm That our previous interactions have No, I kind of missed the Jackson trolls Yeah, you know what That was such Now I look back on it and I just think about how many groups of people there are now like that. Yeah. I mean, I always think of it's linked to technology. It's technologically, algorithmically accelerated, isn't it?

4:26Because the more circular the conversations are, the more outrage there is, the more engagement there is, and the more advertising revenue there is. Yes. So the business model creates echo chambers and angry people. who don't listen to anyone else. Yeah. So there's a core of those angry people who believe that they have a belief. And then there are other people that swarm around them who monetize their anger and monetize their division. Yeah. I mean, it's worked. It's worked. But I mean, you know, you and I now are conversing over technology that allows us to still have a conversation, but not be in the same room with each other.

5:07But would I be right in thinking that where you are now in the office that you're in now, just to be serious about this, is somewhere that needs to be kept secret because of documentaries you've made? Yeah. So I actually checked the angle of the camera to see whether you could see outside. And I don't think you can because I don't want some nosy troll to figure out where we are. But it's interesting because you say noisy troll, but some of the people that came for you are far more dangerous than just some loner who really has just got too much free time on their hands. And yeah, I mean, you know, I can't spend my days worrying about if some nut job with sort of cult-like love for Michael Jackson's ghost is going to come and try and do us harm here.

6:07But, you know, you're all sort of vigilant. I mean, as I often say, when I'm asked that question, I've come across a lot nastier people in my career as a documentary maker. And, you know, there are some people that I would very much worry about if they took an interest in my whereabouts. But for now, none of the Jackson people have made too much of an appearance, a physical appearance. They did, you know, they came to the office a couple of years back and sort of shouted me at Edinburgh and stuff when I was doing a talk there. But, you know, to be honest, it hasn't been a problem in real life yet.

6:43but I am vigilant and I will deal very harshly with anyone who tries anything funny. I mean, I'm a music fan. You're a music fan. But I've never, ever loved anyone in music quite as much as these guys do. No, and it's interesting for the, I mean, I don't want to digress too much, but for the last, I did a little update to the Jackson film and for that, because the people in the Jackson estate wouldn't talk to us, so I ended up approaching various fans And, you know, they were all ended up interviewing a few of them on camera and they were all sort of nice, but sort of quite shy, delicate people.

7:23And I think the I think Jackson as a sort of as a like a strange man who'd overcome all these obstacles, who who had this who sort of styled himself in a slightly sort of otherworldly, saintly way. I think he appeals to people who feel like marginalised, who feel they don't have a place in society. And when they find their God, their attachment to him is so intense because he's kind of saving them. Yeah, it is messianic. Yeah, it is messianic. It's not just pop stars. What is it, Dan, because there's so much going on in the news, most of it utterly depressing. what does it take do you think looking back over your career for you to say to yourself okay there's something here there's something in this that i need to explore further there's an itch i need to scratch i think it takes two things one is typically an event that all of us have heard about.

8:29So Southport, the dreadful knife attack, and then the riots that followed. And we're all sort of aware of it. It's something that impacted everyone. And what that does in my mind is it creates a question. What really happened? What's the connection between those things? How did one thing lead to another? Because what we get with news is this sort of fragmented, You get bits of the story. It's like listening to every fifth word in a sentence. You can't understand the world that way. And so I think my job as a documentary filmmaker with a big canvas. Right. I'm very lucky to have, you know, anything between 47 minutes and four hours to to explore, to tell stories in.

9:14um my job is to try and fill in the missing words and like make make sense of something that happened and remind people how it happened and so the more the bigger the impact of the event that I want to tell a story about and the less we've kind of understood it the less people can explain it except in the most cliche terms then the the bigger the bigger that sort of gap then the more excited I get because it's like I can really I can really astonish people by by unveiling what really happened or giving them an insight into the way things really are you know I think a lot of it goes back to when I was you know when I was a kid I used to be fascinated by war and and conflict and and stuff and then when I had my first experience of that it was so utterly world-changingly different to my imagination of it and what I'd seen in movies that I just felt I wanted to tell the world it's not like it's not like in the movies it's like this and and that's still a big sort of if if you like if I'm being very sort of candid and and and open about it that that's a big part of me what I want to do is to to astonish people with how it really these experiences you've read about and heard about, we all have like an imaginary picture in our head of what war is like, what crime is like, what murder is like, what all these things.

10:39I want to bring to people what it's really like, because I think, you know, we live in these sort of fictional worlds, right? And from time to time, it's great if you can open up. That's what it would be like for me if I experienced that directly. If I lived through that, this is what I would experience. And that's what I want to communicate to people. That gap between what it's really like to use the simplest language and what you imagine it to be like. How has the growth over the last decade of citizen journalism, YouTubers, high quality smartphones changed what you do? well it's given me another window into a world that is becoming more and more hard to understand and hard to hard to see and so what these citizen journalists do these streamers that go to places and just record video continuously and and often broadcast it continuously what they do is they give me an extra window i mean they they they produce all this incredible archive footage.

11:49And for the last five, six years, I've been directly engaging with quite a few of them, getting their rushes. You know, they often like keep like for the assault on the US Capitol. We were in touch with loads of videographers who tended to be to put their work on these right wing sites, but they had the most incredible coverage. Some of them like in 360 60 degree coverage of the Capitol riot. And what's really interesting is that it's part of the breakdown of trust in mainstream media, isn't it? It's part of both the proliferation of so many platforms so that people can just go to whatever platform they want to have their opinions confirmed.

12:31They don't have to go to The Times or the BBC or whatever. But it's also part of a desire to see things unedited, unmediated. And in my, in One Day in Southport, my film for Channel 4, we've got this guy, DJ Media, who's a brilliant vlogger, right? And he turns up and he goes to places because he can make money that way by putting stuff online. And he says, you know, people want to see what's happening in a live stream. They don't want, they don't trust the media. He said, they don't trust edited documentaries. documentaries and I was like okay fair you know um you know that my whole job is editing right I choose bits of reality that I record on camera or bits that other people record and I put them together to to make a story right what he's saying to me is people don't trust the stories that people like you make what they trust is a live video recording which has that sort of feel of unmediated reality but of course it's not because he's pointing his camera in a particular direction he's asking people leading questions that are based on nonsense that he's heard online so it's not really that unmediated unedited pure connection with an unfolding event so it's it's a different kind of editing if you like but what what i love about those people is they're using this great camera technology they're going to where things are happening and they're switching on their camera and they're just sort of pointing it wherever they think, whether they think things are happening.

14:08And I can take that material and I can use it, as I have done in this film, and I can use it to try and tell the story that I think is true. When you investigate your own agenda in shaping a narrative, how confident are you that you are telling the truth? I mean, I remember putting a similar question to Azev Kapadia about his last documentary, and Azev said, I don't have to be impartial. Right. And neither do you, do you? Going deep here, Neil. You know that. You've got previous experience of me. I think the stories I tell on screen have value because of the lengths I've gone to make sure that

14:57the order in which things happened, the people who did those things that all of that has been you know for want of a better word rigorously fact checked but that that i i i believe i for me the truth of my stories is like that's the god that i worship if you like that's an iconic that is the only value that i that I have in my public life, right, as a storyteller on screen. And I often relate it to, you know, I have on many occasions, you know, not so much these days because I'm a family man, I've got kids, but you end up in places where people are having the very worst day of their lives, whether it's a war zone or, you know, the aftermath of some terrible event.

15:50And you're there with a camera. And that's always a very uncomfortable feeling because you are filming people who are often helpless, who are having a terrible time, who are in the midst of chaos and catastrophe. And the only reason I think I have a right to stand there and the only reason that they tolerate my presence is because they trust me to tell their story. And as to the best of my ability, but to tell. The truth of that situation, and I've sort of that's my kind of talisman, that's like all the times I've stood there filming, you know, the baby in the mother's arms standing next to the smoking ruins of their home and wherever it was or you know the people then standing over the bodies of their relatives the only way I have to justify being there not just doing horror footage for no reason my only justification is that I was there to tell their story honestly and as brutally honestly as I can to translate between that world and our world of people sitting on the couch in Stoke Newington or something.

17:07That's what I've carried with me. I don't want to sound too pious about this, but if I started tweaking my stories so they were just a little bit sexier and a little bit more zhuzhi and a little bit less true, then I would feel terrible in retrospect about all the times that I'd looked someone in the eye and said, trust me, I'm, you know, I will honestly carry your truth back to, back, back, back home, back to my audience. And so there's that, there's a sort of moral dimension. The other, the other thing is I, I, you know, I've spent my career going in and out of edits and often you'll find when people are making a documentary or especially editors, cause they're locked in a dark room with the material and they haven't been to the place, right where the things are happening that they are telling stories about and often they will and i'm not maligning editors because they're my favorite people in filmmaking they're brilliant and then you know collaborators on an equal footing with me but they will often like tweak things or or make make things a little bit more dramatic by you know inverting the order in which things happen or whatever and i'm like you can't do that and there's two reasons why why you can't do that and and then you know a reason why you shouldn't do it even if you want to tell your viewers an exciting story you can't do it because you know i'm i'm dan and i'm i have this sort of manic obsession with getting things right and you can't do it because it's just professionally wrong but also you don't need to do it because actually the truth and the drama if you've chosen your story well the truth is far more dramatic the real way things happen is far more dramatic and And also far more impactful because it has meaning than anything you can concoct.

18:51You know, so I think if you do your research properly and you understand the drama of the story that you're telling, you don't need to edit things misleadingly. You know, you don't need to zhuzh it up. You don't need to spice it up. You don't need to sex up the dossier, you know. So I'm going to say two things here that may well depress you, but you know them to be true. One is that people like Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who's known to his acolytes as, of course, Tommy Robinson, has his own channel, which he will distribute his own information on. Then secondly, it feels certainly from speaking to people who make documentary films that the industry itself is maligned, underfunded and in the most parlous state that many people can remember it being in.

19:47So on one end, you have people like Yaxley Lennon making their own films and documentary, in fact, he made. And if you want to know the truth, and you mentioned the word truth, he has his own version of the truth and it's out there. And then secondly, the mainstream broadcasters who could actually create a counterbalance to that aren't investing in it. yeah i think i think that's broadly true now yeah i confirm you know there is a proliferation everyone has their own platform and we find that increasingly when we're approaching people for access hi now um listen i think what you do is fascinating do you want to be in a i've got this channel 4 documentary about you know people like you and and do you want to be in it and you're like well no because i've got my own youtube channel um how much are you going to pay me so that's another big thing is that the sort of netflixization of documentary and i'm not maligning netflix i i've made it you know my company's made a documentary for netflix and i hope to make many more and they're great but um there is when you approach people the two things happen.

21:06One is they say, I've already got my own channel, or they've already got their own echo chamber somewhere, right? So the old line of like, do you want to share your story with millions of people? They're like, yeah, I am already. Do you want to subscribe to it? And secondly, it's like, oh, you want me to be in your documentary? How much are you going to pay me? Did you approach Hexley Lennon? I have in the past I didn't on this occasion firstly because he was in prison for most of the time he made the documentary but also because what I'm interested in is his public persona I'm interested in his public statements the videos in which he directly comments on the Southport murder as does Andrew Tate who also features in A Day in Southport Yes.

21:59And we actually made a documentary about Andrew Tate called I am Andrew Tate for Channel 4, which was which was which was great because we managed to film for one day and then he was arrested. And the rest of the film is just archive of him telling his own life story in his own words, which is which is interesting. So there's so much material of Andrew Tate out there already. But but yeah, he still felt the need to agree to be in the documentary, which I think, you know, and obviously we weren't paying him anything. So I think that would have been great had he not been arrested. So the two things you mentioned, one is everyone's got a platform, and two is the people that, if you like, the mainstream documentary makers who are supposed to be like the sort of fair-minded, impartial, public-minded intermediaries in telling long-form stories are underfunded.

22:59Yeah, I mean, I think that's also right. I think, you know, documentaries getting sucked into entertainment. And I think that's the bigger danger rather than sort of people not wanting to fund things. I think people need to fund what's, you know, what's marketable and what's sellable. And even the public service broadcasters have a duty to make things that people want to watch. And, you know, yes, that has undermined the creation of these sort of sober truth telling documentaries. But maybe that's a genre that's sort of going out of fashion completely. I mean, maybe no one's ever going to maybe in 10 years time, no one's going to watch any of the kind of documentaries that I make.

23:48Because, you know, they contain sort of sometimes contradictory truths or there are complexities. It's not like black and white. Or maybe there are some things that you don't want to hear. Like maybe somebody you thought was really bad, in fact, is half bad and half good. Or someone you thought was really great is actually not that great. Do you know what I mean? And you don't want to hear that. You just actually want to hear something closer to what they would tell you themselves. So I think the whole notion of this sort of truth in documentary is maybe something that perhaps has no more value or will have no more value soon.

24:29Maybe people just want to have just a longer version of what they get online, which is their own opinions reflected back at them. Do you know what I mean? I mean, I'm being a bit, you know, I passionately believe that the kind of films I make and other people make, too, in this sort of niche of documentary making are going to, you know, people are going to want to watch them. And I get great feedback from people. But yeah, I think the whole idea of inform, educate and entertain and all of that is just awkward, isn't it? I mean, who wants to be disturbed by that, by like too much truth? We can't handle it.

25:10The more complicated the world gets, the more gnarly, complex information you need to digest. And it's just too much, isn't it? It's just like overload. You read the New York Times and you come away from it with your head exploding, you know. And potentially none the wiser, but you have to slow down. Maybe that's just because we're men of a certain age and we just understand that we're not really going to understand the world unless we pause, actually ration the amount of media that we consume.

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26:46It's weird though, isn't it? Because, you know, I don't... I've got a finite amount of time on this life, of this life, and I don't know how much of that time I want to spend watching Stephen Yaxley-Lennon videos, right? Like, you know, I just don't think... Not because I'm diametrically opposed to everything that he stands for. It's more to do with the fact that I don't trust him. I don't feel that he is a trusted actor, and I certainly feel that he's very good at monetising division. Yeah. And I mean, look, A Day in Southport, he's in it, Andrew Tate's in it, But also, you know, there are anti-racist campaigners who are in it.

27:31But it begins with the murderer himself in the banality of the opening minutes of this in a taxi. Was that always going to be the start of this documentary for you? The moment that this. He was 17 years old at the time. Yeah. who is now serving 52 years in prison. I won't name him because I don't feel I need to, but was that always the start? I think the minute I saw that footage of him pacing around and then getting in a taxi and the sort of weird conversation in the taxi, I thought, yeah, this has to be, this is kind of where it all started, literally where it started. A man wearing a green hoodie and a face mask gets in a taxi in the town of Banks in Lancashire and travels to Southport and then gets out of the taxi, doesn't pay his fare and walks into this sort of business park and then goes on to do what he did.

28:31That's literally the beginning of the story. That's where the story starts. And so I thought, well, I'll start there, being quite a simple kind of storyteller. I couldn't have, I don't know whether I would have used it if I hadn't got the interview with the family, with the family and the teenager who was there during the attack. And I was praying that we would get that, and we didn't get that until quite late in the day. How do you negotiate that? What is the conversation that you have with people who are never, ever not going to be traumatised by what they saw and experienced that day, and you are making a documentary for Channel 4 and you need them to relive that for you.

29:22I have a deep belief that just on a human level, everyone kind of wants their story to be told. That's a sort of banal thing to say, really. But it kind of is true. So there is that inner urge to be seen and to be acknowledged, right? obviously there are many situations that make that not a good idea and there are court orders by judges that mean that you're not allowed to be seen so that's one thing the second thing is often that when something happens like this there is a version that's put out in in the media right and there are people who disagree with that version and they say that's not the way i experienced it that's not what happened to me and therefore they they look for a different forum in which to tell their version of the story and it's sort of combination of the two is what happened in in our case and that the the the girl who was in the room when the killer came in and attacked these six mainly six seven year old girls in the at the at the taylor swift dance workshop what she saw on television was uh and this is you know her version of it but but what she saw is is people getting recognition for having saved the girls in that in that dance workshop who who actually she thought were not part of actually rescuing them and getting them out of that that horror that situation saving their lives and and that you know the i suppose all media but the british media always creates sort of heroes and you've got the hard and here's the heroic person who came along and she said to me those girls got themselves out they got themselves out that's the truth and I said okay if you if that's the story you want to tell I'm very very happy to have you tell that story and obviously I've spoken to other families and we did our fact-checking and it is that it is the case that there was very little help from adults for those those girls as they fled the killer's knife right which is a very different narrative only recently we've seen three police officers win an award and we're not doubting police officers you know so let me be really clear no one's saying that the cops the police didn't come and do their job and arrest the guy but once the police had arrived he'd already you know basically wounded three three people and and stabbed and you know it was several minutes into the incident by which time pretty much all of the girls had left right um and so what the the girl i interviewed is talking about is those first, those seconds.

32:21As he came in, as he came into the room. And she wanted to say, she wanted to pay tribute to the presence of mind and initiative and courage of the little girls that she was surrounded by who got out and who got themselves out. And then the police came and arrested the guy. She's not claiming that, you know, the little girl's arrested the killer. No, she's not saying that. So I thought that was important. That was an important thing that she was passionate about about saying it was an element of the story that had been overlooked and and I was able to record her account of what happened including that emphasis um and I was you know and so that that that was part of I suppose persuading the family to take part um that we would we would hear that this girl would be heard the third part of it is sort of personal it's like how you're sitting in front of someone and you're asking for to talk about this thing that is you know the worst the very worst day of their life and the thing that they probably would least want to talk about in there you know ever and how do you how do you become someone who who is a recipient of that who can who can how do you how How do you become the person who can listen in a way that will elicit those words from that young girl and her mother and father?

33:47I think I'm not good at many things, but I'm good at listening. And when I listen to you, you have my absolute full attention. And nothing is more important than in that moment, me listening to you and you speaking to me. And I think maybe that's one of the things that makes me over the years, you know, I've had to learn a lot. And I've still got lots to learn about telling stories on screen. but it makes me, you know, it gives me the basis for being a decent documentary maker is I naturally am absolutely captivated by people telling me things about themselves. And so I think a combination of those, the sort of politics of it, the personal urge to tell, to illuminate a facet of the story.

34:29And also, I think the setting, having someone who can listen and having someone who, you know, deals with you respectfully as well. And why was it the case that three of the people that you spoke to who were directly involved with these terrible attacks that took place, that we only see their eyes? That wasn't an artistic decision on my part. That is because there is a court order. The court order is that no one's allowed to broadcast images of these people. Even if they wish to be seen. Yeah, so that's what kind of got me is like you guys, my understanding is, and I don't want to speak for the family, but my understanding is that, you know, well, I mean, clearly they wanted to go on, they wanted to be heard in the documentary.

35:17And my understanding is that, you know, they, at times, and they hadn't reached the final resolution about it, but at times they were uncomfortable with the court order and may have, you know, and may have wanted to be identified. but they have no choice they must be anonymous and so we we're not allowed to broadcast images of them so by you know eventually if it's just two eyes and we've tweaked the voices and we've tweaked the eye color and you know we've done various things to really really disguise any any scrap of sort of identifying material you know a picture of of two big eyes is not a picture of that person right so we are not defying the court order and so that's why it wasn't a bit as it happens i think it's quite powerful i don't know what you know it is it is very powerful but i also strangely thought of that's what those girls saw right the eyes was a boy with a mask and just eyes.

36:20I didn't think of that. Yeah. Okay. So from the very start, did you know that the story wasn't going to be about why this young man did what he did to explore isolation? And this is, by the way, none of these reasons are so often it's the case accusations of people who don't think very deeply justifying what he did. It's trying to understand it. So issues around misogyny, isolation, where the state failed to pick up on the violence that was brewing within this young man. That wasn't the story for you. No, I mean, the story, the brief was like, what the hell happened last summer? Like, how come the country blew up after these terrible murders?

37:10The brief was not to find out why the murders happened. And that was your brief or brief from Channel 4? That was from Channel 4 that I accepted. There is a separate and very, very intriguing film to be made about why that boy did what he did and how he was able to and the many failings that accompanied him on his path to mass murder. But that's not the film that I was making. It's not the film that I was commissioned to make. I think it's very important to have a focus and to do something. The whole point of having an hour on screen is to go into something in some depth, not just to sort of, you know, recite what's already been said.

37:53And right now, I don't think we have enough insights into that young man's life or his journey or his parents to make a film that would satisfy me. You know, I think it might be someone else's job in the future, but I think there are so many unanswered questions. That wasn't my mission. My mission was to find out how that, what he did, was connected to the eruption of violence in 50 towns and cities around the UK over a period of 10 days. Dan, I'd like to just tell you how profoundly unsettling what happened last summer was for me and my family. And then I'd like to get your own sense of that.