A Fez & A Camel

“I first met Keith 20 years ago. He was wearing a red fez and manhandling a camel with a waterfall inside it…” Alex Prior, Managing Director, Screen Hub (Australia)

Keith Barclay, Editor of Screen Hub New Zealand, has spent most of his working life in the art department for film, television, and theatre, after training as a designer at Leeds University.

He started in the UK, designing and building theatre sets and props for touring companies, with occasional work on TVCs. Discovering he could also write drama and organise other artists, he co-created twelve children’s shows in seven years for Interplay Theatre Company in Leeds, England – a company funded by the UK Arts Council to provide work for audiences normally ignored by the theatre. In total, he wound up with “more than twenty” children's shows to his credit.

The shows were highly driven by innovative props, and very interactive – and very, very safe. The safety factor was frequently tested. The company's musical director at the time, Kim Baston, fondly recalls the sight of Keith wearing a large electronic tortoise shell “sort of splayed” under the weight of a 16-stone, intellectually disabled girl who'd decided to express her love of his character by sitting on it. The shell survived intact.

Keith first came south to Australia in 1992, with “Ships of the Desert”, a touring show with four camels containing waterfalls! Only one classroom was flooded during the tour. He also first met a (much younger) Alex Prior, who was working for the Queensland Performing Arts Trust at the time.

The pair stayed in contact as Alex moved to England and married the musical director; while Keith moved to New Zealand in 1994, having been tempted out of Leeds by the memory of places where the sun actually shone and the water temperature was above freezing. As a surfer, that suited him fine; but with far less work in theatre here than in the UK, he shifted to film and television.

It took him “a good few months to get a good understanding of who the players were in the industry”. Soon, he was helping Upstage with the rebuild of the TVNZ newsroom. Since then, he has worked in the Art Department on a diverse range of productions in TVCs, film and drama, including Shortland Street.

He worked for WETA on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, initially as a standby, and subsequently running the dressing system for the vast collection of actors, extras, stunt players, and horse people. Keith describes his time on Lord of the Rings as “a wonderful opportunity to work on a large-scale production with a lot of Kiwi and international crew and a cheap way to tour the country.”

Since then, he’s been working as a designer for an Auckland-based company, The Wow Factory, involved in a broad range of work, including lots of TVCs.

While Keith was designing and wrangling monkeys for NZ television on one side of the Tasman, Alex Prior (originally trained as a journalist) found himself increasingly working with producers on the other, running conferences and large events for the industry.

This experience eventually led to the creation of a small news site called Screen Hub, which set out with the idea of using the web to create a daily newspaper for the screen industry in Australia.

The idea was that there were about 50,000 people working in Australian film and television – about the number that were in a good-sized regional city. And if a good-sized regional city could have a daily newspaper – then why couldn't the industry have one?

The answer – as it turned out – was that it could; and by 2008 Screen Hub had established itself as the main publication for the Australian industry, with several hundred New Zealand subscribers as well.

Being shy and retiring types, the New Zealand subscribers started complaining that there wasn't enough local coverage – and Alex remembered the man who could wrangle camels, armour dwarves, and write a sentence. He hired Keith to cover the Documentary NZ Summit in 2007, and as a regular contributor, Keith began combining writing with freelance design work.

Funnily enough, not only did the Kiwi subscribers like the local coverage – so did the Australians; so six months later Alex took the decision to start a dedicated New Zealand version of Screen Hub.

“Increasing amounts of work are being done on both sides of the Tasman,” he said, “so there was a satisfaction element, but also the knowledge that people are working in both countries – not just in one.”

“In other industries, having the news fast is a luxury, something you might be interested in knowing. But in film and television, having the news fast is about finding work – it's about knowing what's coming, and who's already on the production whom you might have worked with in the past. Fast daily news isn't a luxury, it's a necessity.”

In August 2009, Keith became the Editor of Screen Hub New Zealand. When asked why, he laughed and said that after so much short-term work, “the idea of a regular wage intrigued me.” Besides, he no longer wanted to spend 14-hour days on set or in workshops. But he did grudgingly admit that he is excited by the opportunity.

Which is a longer version of the reason Alex Prior gives for abandoning production in favour of a journalist's desk.

“My knees hurt,” he said.

Fortunately, industry knowledge doesn't wear out as fast as old blokes' bodies.