Documentary Filmmaker Norma Percy On Boris Johnson, Mikhail Gorbachev And Slobodan Milošević
7 min read
To document the story of Brexit a decade after the result, the BBC turned to an 84-year-old American. Ben Gartside meets Norma Percy, a battle-hardened veteran of powerful men and the lies – and occasional truths – they tell
Norma Percy only came to these shores because she lacked foreign languages. As a graduate student at Oberlin College in Ohio, she was sent as one of a select five given the chance to study abroad but, unlike the others, could only speak English. Her choices thus limited, she departed for Britain in 1963.
Percy was already fascinated by British politics. In Ohio, she would stand in the library and read about Harold Macmillan in The Economist. Upon arriving in the UK, she abandoned her fledgling academic career and PhD for a job in Parliament, working for John Mackintosh, a Scottish Labour MP considered one of the leading minds behind devolution.
“I had tried for a job in the House of Commons Library, but you had to be British and born British to work there. While I was still at LSE, I ran out of money and needed a job, and miraculously there was this ad in The Times that said a researcher was needed for a professor writing a book based in Parliament,” Percy recalls.
She remembers spending lots of her time trying to find MPs to take her into Strangers’ bar during all-night sittings. Life as a backbencher was “like being a child in a Victorian family”, she says: “You leaned over the banister and saw what the big guys were doing, and you hoped you’d grow up someday to be a government minister too.”
Before long, her grant money to work for Mackintosh had nearly run out and she was trying to find what to do next.
“I had got as far as looking in The Times Guide to the House of Commons to work out who was married, to pick out somebody to set my eyes on to marry, when Brian Lapping arrived and offered me this dream job in television.”
Lapping had been commissioned by Granada to make state-of-the-nation documentaries on Parliament, one of which was following the progression of a bill through the Commons. For the time, the documentary was unprecedented.
“We got permission to follow two clauses of a bill going through led by Geoffrey Howe, who was minister of consumer affairs and putting through a bill to protect the consumer,” she says.
“The concession we had to give is that they could view the film and make any suggestions they wanted for fact. Howe said, ‘Yes! There’s one thing I have to ask you to change and you’ll say it isn’t a fact, but I promised Elspeth I would stop smoking – and every cut away, there’s somebody smoking!’” His request was granted.
After leaving Granada with Lapping, Percy moved on to international documentaries and developed a trademark format: all the key players in the room interviewed, discussing on record what had happened. The format proved successful.
One of the first international documentaries Percy worked on was The Second Russian Revolution, which followed the collapse of communism and glasnost. The series had been shown secretly in Russia and was hugely popular – so popular, Mikhail Gorbachev himself asked to appear.
In 1995 came The Death of Yugoslavia, which won producer Percy a Bafta. The documentary ended up being cited numerous times at The Hague for incriminating statements Yugoslav politburo members had given while on the programme.
The biggest coup for Percy was securing an interview with Slobodan Milošević himself – far from media-friendly, even at this stage. Milošević was ultimately persuaded to appear on the programme first by David Owen, an old friend of Percy’s who was then leading the peace negotiations, and secondly by his wife Mira.
Mira Marković was a fearsome politician in her own right, with her own political party and influence. Angus Roxburgh, the former BBC and Sunday Times Moscow correspondent who worked on the documentary, played matchmaker. He told Percy that she and Mira had plenty in common; she recalls him saying that “these two socialist ladies would get on”.
When Milošević finally agreed to the interview, he pretended to be a staff member rather than himself over the phone. He spoke for close to an hour, she says, yet it was a struggle to find any truth in his claims. “Ethnic cleansing, moi?!” is how she sums up his attitude. And when at last he was on the record, he spent an hour talking without ever coming close to telling the truth on his role in efforts at ‘ethnic cleansing’.
Worse, Milošević’s team only agreed to the interview on the proviso that a full, uncut version of the tape was published as episode seven. Fortuitously, BBC Two had just moved to 24-hour programming and were desperate for any content whatsoever. The full uncut interview would be shown at 4am, to the frustration of an outfoxed Yugoslav government press office.
“The Second Russian Revolution was so popular, Mikhail Gorbachev himself asked to appear”
In spite of Milošević’s lies, the programme would be a success. Luckily for Percy, Borisav Jović, the former president of Yugoslavia, told the truth throughout, including when it came to Milošević’s role. Percy theorised that he was so honest because he was jealous of the acclaim Milošević received from Serb nationalists. She says similar behaviours were present in her new documentary on Brexit.
“I felt a bit like some of the people in Brexit revelled in what they would call their ‘clever strategy’ that won them the referendum. The fact that it took a lie to persuade people to vote for them is not all that different from Jović,” she says.
In Brexit: A Very British Civil War, Percy again gets all the key insiders in the room to discuss the referendum. The programme has a tightly focused frame, beginning at the 2015 general election and ending on 23 June 2016. Interviewees include David Cameron, Michael Gove and of course Boris Johnson, who Percy had already worked with extensively.
“I’d had three experiences with Boris. The first one was on Putin vs the West,” she says, “and he really was good. He went to the Foreign Office library and looked things up, and it was a really good interview.
“When we did a sequel, it was a bit short notice, but his office said yes right away, because they liked it. Boris turned up this time and said, ‘Oh, I’m really sorry, I meant to go to the Foreign Office library but I forgot.’ He sounded just like my husband when he forgot to collect the laundry.”
When Percy approached Johnson for the new Brexit documentary, she says his face lit up. “He said: ‘Now, that, I could really help you with.’ He promised us 90 minutes, and he gave us closer to three hours.”
Another star of the documentary was Marina Wheeler, Johnson’s ex-wife, who spoke factually and clearly throughout. Such was Wheeler’s recall of the period, Johnson told the crew to follow her version of events over his if there were any differences of opinion.
One person who couldn’t be secured, however, was Dominic Cummings.
“We tried everything,” Percy says. “We tried a lot of people who knew his wife.” When they finally got his number, she adds: “The first time we tried, he picked up and said, ‘I’m on top of a mountain! I can’t possibly talk to you now!’, which made us think he might agree when he came down. He said he wouldn’t do it, because everybody lies but him.”
She even enlisted Lord Gove, Cummings’ former boss, to persuade the former Vote Leave campaign director – but it was to no avail.
For Percy, the return to British politics means she has come full circle to nearly 60 years ago, when she worked as a parliamentary researcher. That said, she does not plan on stopping her work imminently.
“My mother retired when she was 87,” Percy says. “I’m now 84. I’ve got a few years left in me.”
Percy still loves politics, and interviewed Nigel Farage comms manager Andy Wigmore as part of the Brexit documentary, who she describes as a “hoot”.
“I have this controversial view of politicians: I think they’re reasonable people.”
