David Thompson
David wins a BAFTA
Hurst’s David Thompson, who has lived in the village for nine years, has won a coveted BAFTA award for his editing on the documentary Ellie Simmonds: Finding my secret family. “I wasn’t expecting it at all, so it all felt surreal to actually win it; we were all in a bit of a daze going up on the stage.” In fact, he almost deleted the email telling him he had been nominated, thinking it was spam, until he saw he had a missed call from the director.
At first the project was very secretive, because only a few people knew Ellie Simmonds was adopted. When he was finally told what the documentary was going to be about, he knew it had the potential to be powerful. “It seemed likely that Ellie would discover she’d been put up for adoption because of her dwarfism: something that was viewed as a disability but has been central to her success as a Paralympic athlete. That felt like an emotional story to explore.”
His favourite part of the documentary was when Ellie phones up the children of the foster mother who cared for her for a few months when she was just a baby. The foster mother had recently died but her daughter said that when the mother had seen Ellie in the Olympics in 2012, she recognised her as the baby she’d taken in, and wanted to get in touch but didn’t want to intrude. “That is the first time in the film where Ellie really cries. She is not just crying about missing the chance to connect with her foster mother; there are a lot of other emotions going on underneath and this is the first time she lets them out, so that was very moving.”
David, who on most Saturdays can be found running the line for the Hurst Colts U13s, has been interested in editing since he was a teenager, when using two VHS players joined by a SCART cable, pressing play on one and recording on the other. “At university I learnt to edit with celluloid film - slicing it with razor blades and taping it back together. Then one of my flatmates got a Mac with actual editing software and I borrowed it to learn and cut films for local charities.” A chance followed to help cut a documentary that was running behind schedule, with only a week before it was due to broadcast. With another editor, he worked almost every hour, day and night, for four days. “We got it done, it got decent viewing figures, so suddenly I was a freelance documentary editor.”
The ceremony itself was hugely exciting, but also bittersweet. “The television industry is in the midst of a crisis, and the mood reflected that. There’s a perfect storm of falling advertising revenue, license fee freezes and cuts to streamer budgets, and what it means is that programmes aren’t being made. Reports say 68% of the freelance workforce are unemployed.”