"Anybody worth interviewing says no at least three times"

A conversation with multi-award winning documentary maker Norma Percy

Norma Percy with Bill Clinton. Credit: Mick Gold

Norma Percy first came to the UK to study at the LSE and then, after a spell as a researcher at the House of Commons, joined Brian Lapping at Granada TV to work on a documentary about what was wrong with parliament. She was hired for two years but their collaboration lasted more than half a century and led to their distinctive documentaries, often covering major conflicts, in which top participants from all sides, reconstruct key events. These have covered conflicts in the Middle East (Israel and the Arabs: Elusive Peace, 2005), the Balkans (The Death of Yugoslavia, 1995), and Ukraine (Putin vs the West, 2023 and 2024), as well as the fall of the Soviet Union (The Second Russian Revolution, 1991).

Norma has received many awards, including the Orwell Special prize for Lifetime Achievement. She is also an old friend and I have been a consultant on a number of her programmes. I was delighted to persuade her to talk about her documentary-making, explain how the approach developed and share many anecdotes about how she got key players in great events to talk to the camera.

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Lawrence: You now have a distinctive style of documentary making but it didn’t start out in the form we now know it. Perhaps we could start by you taking us through its development?

Norma: The story begins when Brian Lapping and I worked for Granada in that wonderful moment when the ITV companies were licensed to print money, but to get their licenses renewed they had to produce a certain amount of quality. Sir Denis Forman, the exceptional head of Granada Television, hired Brian to find new ways of putting politics on television. And Brian hired me. I had been working in the House of Commons for five years. This was perhaps the happiest time of my life. It was a time of all-night sittings and the MPs used to crowd into the Strangers bar. There I learned more about how politics worked gossiping with MPs than in three years at LSE.

I came to television with a mission - to try to show on television what it's like inside the room when the really big political decisions are taken, the kind of things politicians would never let you in for. The gossip of the House of Commons gives you a ringside seat to government decision-making – and it was that I wanted to recreate for the television viewer.

We had a go at ‘fly on the wall’ filming, but politicians would only let you in for small decisions. For the 1975 referendum [on whether to stay in the European Union] we made a ‘fly on the wall’ of a directive on waste disposal going through a Council of Ministers working group. We had a young Stanley Johnson, who was as charismatic as his son, taking the bill through for the Commission. It was about making waste disposal mandatory and green. But it was only a small decision and for anything really big you would not be allowed in - so you would have to find some scheme, trick, imaginative way of recreating what it was like when the really big decisions were made.

Brian's first idea was something called ‘Hypotheticals’. You would get real practitioners -  ex-ministers, ex-civil servants - to help you write an imaginary case study based on some of the real events they had been through. And they'd be taken through how they made these decisions by a top barrister. It was interesting but nobody really knew what was made up and what was true.

We then went the other way around, and we tried something called ‘journalist reconstructions’ – looking at real decisions with fake participants. The most successful of these was in 1976, the story of when Britain was near to bankrupt and applied for a large loan from the IMF. The Cabinet had to decide in a series of meetings whether or not they should accept the conditions the IMF put on the loan. There was a big row between the chancellor, Denis Healey, and some of the more left-wing members of the cabinet, like Tony Benn. In the end it was the position of some of the questioning moderates, like Foreign Secretary Anthony Crosland and his then-young disciple Roy Hattersley, that mattered the most.

We got the best journalists who had written the best stories to get briefed by their ministers and then to recreate the arguments used in the debate. It worked quite well – but of course the journalists’ briefings from their ministers all had a different spin. It taught us the importance of the multi-sided view: when you put everybody's accounts together you can get closer to the truth. We made quite a few of those, but it was still hard for the viewers to know whether the journalists were making it up.

The last for Grenada was Breakthrough at Reykjavik. Mikhail Gorbachev, newly in office, had a summit with Ronald Reagan in a small house on neutral ground in Reykjavik. After the summit, instead of talking the blah that leaders of the Soviet Union would talk in the press conference afterwards, he started a blow-by-blow account of what had happened inside the room. It was only the two leaders and their foreign ministers, and now Gorbachev told the world who said what to whom. And what he told us was amazing - they had almost agreed to give up all nuclear weapons.

So we thought we'd make a journalist reconstruction. They went off to Russia to find Russian journalists who would put the arguments of Gorbachev. Well, Glasnost hadn't gone that far, so there were no Russian journalists who, first of all, knew, and second, were prepared to stick their necks out and tell Western television what happened inside the room. So we couldn't do it that way. Instead we interviewed all the Americans who were at the summit and got the story, combined with what Gorbachev had told us, and wrote a script.

Along the way I realized that I knew little about nuclear politics. I asked who the biggest expert in this field was and was advised that a young academic at King's College called Lawrence Freedman was the person to ask. So I invited him to a nice lunch in Covent Garden and that is when we met.

Lawrence: I was intrigued. I'd seen some of the previous programmes you’d done. With regard to Reykjavik I was sceptical whether, even if they reached an agreement, it would ever have been implemented.

Norma: I remember that you were throwing a bit of cold water on the headline.

Lawrence: But as a historian this seems to be a pretty good way of getting at the story. in fact I used the programme for teaching. I'd play it to students, both to show how decisions were made, but also because it illuminated a lot of the issues. In particular, as you will recall, there was the impact of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, which was not going anywhere except for the fact that Gorbachev kept on complaining about it. The more he did so the more opponents of the SDI would say, well, if it's so rubbish why is Gorbachev so worried?

Norma: In those days we could afford to take advice. What you did for us then was to give us confidence that what we were doing was credible. If you found it believable, then it's worth pushing.

But even so we had to convince our viewers that it wasn't just the ramblings of some actors who'd been written a play. What I hated is that instead of telling us how wonderfully our programme explained and dramatized serious issues, all the reviewers looked at what a great look-alike the actor who played Reagan was [Robert Beatty]. He was brilliant. He looked like Reagan, and he kept forgetting his lines, just the way Reagan was known to do in those meetings. It drove Timothy West, who played Gorbachev, absolutely mad in rehearsals.

But it seemed like the technical thing about making the play got more attention than the story. So when we had a press show in Washington we had a panel of participants afterwards, which we filmed. So we had stuck on the end these interviews with real people who were there, which somehow justified our work. Evidence kept piling up that if you want people to believe you, you have to go and interview the people that were there.

We’d had one example of that, with a series that was finally broadcast in 1985 called ‘End of Empire’. This was Brian’s dream as he’d been Commonwealth correspondent of The Guardian. It told how Britain left each of its major colonies. We started with India and ended with Rhodesia becoming Zimbabwe. It was an ideal time to interview key participants, because their attitudes to each other changed once the flag came down – terrorists became Presidents and politicians and the British civil servants were ready to tell their war stories.

My first programme was on Cyprus. I was in luck, because both Greeks and Turks were wonderful storytellers. We realised the most important thing was to give a level playing field to both sides. And we found the member of [Greek Cypriot nationalist militia] EOKA who had also been an undercover butler in the governor's house, and had planted a bomb in the governor's bed. Now a retired police chief in Nicosia, he told, with no compunction, the whole story of how he planted the bomb – and even moved the governor’s bed closer to his wife’s, ‘so that she would not have to cry after him.’ Fortunately, the bomb didn't go off, and he lived to tell the tale, as did the governor and his delightful wife. So we had seen that when events were over you could get people on both sides to talk.

Then Mrs. Thatcher removed the requirement for ITV companies to do serious programmes. So Brian decided to set up as an independent company. We then looked for commissions to the BBC. Brian's first idea was an amusing news quiz, but they took one look at Brian and gave that to ‘Have I Got News For You’.

As a consolation the BBC 2 commissioner said, why don't you look at Gorbachev? So we started on our first series, the Second Russian Revolution, which was really lucky. One of the things that Brian contributed to our partnership was a complete belief that if you had a good idea it's going to work and everything will be fine. And what I contribute is I always think it's going to be a disaster until the first good review, which kept me in the office late at night.

I decided to try a trick that went down a treat with British cabinet ministers. When I sat in front of my first Politburo member, I said ‘Tell me what happened in Politburo the night you selected Gorbachev. Tell it to me just like you told your wife when you got home that night.’  And a look of such complete horror spread across his face at the very  idea of telling anyone, most certainly not his wife, about what happened in Politburo, almost, almost made me abandon it just then. But we kept on, Gorbachev's Glasnost really took hold. As we did our research, we had time and money to talk to people off the record. The Soviet Union was crumbling, still intact, but crumbling. And people started telling you things. The usual Western rules which tell you what politicians can and can’t talk about weren't in place yet, and they were telling us stories about what happened inside the Soviet Union like you'd never get in Britain or America.

Lawrence: As I recall I came back in when you were doing the Death of Yugoslavia.

Norma: What happened here was that the Austrians had seen the series on Gorbachev, and they wanted to something on wars in Yugoslavia. Brian said you can't do these things while the war is on, but I said, we're a new, independent company, and the Austrians have asked us to do it. The fighting was between the Serbs and Croats at this point, and the Austrians said we're very close to the Croats, and can get the inside story from them, but the real people you want to get inside are the Serbs. We sent Angus MacQueen there, and he found some extraordinary people.

Slobodan Milosevic, who I was beginning to learn more about, had a sidekick called Bora Jovic, who obviously was worried that Milosevic was getting all the credit for what they were getting up to. Jovic gave us an “off the record” interview, which told us things that we would never expect to be told by anyone. Then we met Ivan Stambolic, Milosevic’s predecessor. Milosevic had been his protégé and the first episode was the story of how he stabbed Stambolic in the back. Stambolic almost cried when he told us the story of what happened. The BBC commissioned six programmes, which were almost entirely in subtitles and in Serbo-Croat, which told the inside story of the war.

Lawrence: It is also important to note that the research interviews you got and the actual interviews on camera, including with Milosevic, which is unique in terms of what he said, were all deposited in the archives at King's College, where they still studied by students. There is only a certain amount of what you can show on screen. It’s the tip of the iceberg. And you have continued to deposit materials from your other series.

Norma: Let me say that you taking the transcripts for the Liddell Hart archive at King’s has been an advantage for us as well. First of all, they keep them far better and make them more available than we ever could do as a little company with limited resources. And secondly, we can say to people we want to interview that this isn't just for a programme that's going to be broadcast once, it will become part of the historical archive. When I worked on World in Action, after six weeks of working night and day, a programme would go out and I’d run to a pub in Manchester to see that it actually was broadcast. But everybody in the pub was drinking and not paying much attention to it, and that was it. It was gone. And now the transcripts go to King’s and there are things like the wonderful BBC iPlayer. And they've even started repeating our old series on BBC Four for significant anniversaries decades later. (Our two series on the Arab-Israeli conflict, 50 Years War (1998) and Elusive Peace (2005) were rebroadcast after 7 October and sparked a commission to bring the story up to date, which we are working on now.

Lawrence: One of the thing that's remarkable in your programmes is the range of people that you get. How do you manage to persuade them?

Norma: I always say, anybody worth interviewing says no at least three times. We tell people, everybody gets an equal opportunity to tell their tale. These programmes are not just ordinary news interviews, but attempts to be genuinely multi-sided with no editorialising and no commentators pointing fingers. We ask only one question – ‘what happened? What did you say and how did he reply?’  And we put the answers together in a way that tries not to make our interviewees look like liars. Because so much of our programme is made up of their testimony you have to find them credible. In my mythical example, somebody says, ‘I opened the meeting. I made a long and eloquent speech. They sat spellbound.’ And someone else says, ‘He opened the meeting, he made a long and boring speech, and we were all stupefied into silence.’ The facts are the same but the spin is different.

Someone can appear in one series and be really good and you go complacently to them for the next and something has changed. Jimmy Carter was absolutely great in the 50 Years War, when he talked about bringing peace between Israel and Egypt in Camp David. But when we wanted to talk about Iran, which was what cost him his second term of presidency, we were told ‘sorry, he's not taking any interview requests on that.’

When they say no, you can ask them again but you can't keep going back. Persistence very soon becomes annoying. What I do is find somebody who has had a good experience of our work, who they also trust, and get them to put the case for you. My favourite example was on the Iraq War when we absolutely had to get Dick Cheney, who was the ‘genius’ behind George Bush's war. He hadn't given a long retrospective interview of the war. He said no. He was retired to Texas and wanted to be left to fish in peace.

So I got Charles Powell who had worked for Mrs. Thatcher, and Cheney and Mrs. Thatcher were very close. As he admired Charles Powell he agreed to do it. But five days before the interview, when we'd actually bought the tickets to go to Texas, he cancelled. I was afraid that he had somehow decided that we were a bunch of lefty journalists and that we'd give him a hard time but he wouldn't tell Charles that.

So I went to Paul Wolfowitz, then at the World Bank, and he said he would get them off to the bottom of it. And he spoke to Liz Cheney, who has subsequently shown what a very sensible woman she is. She spoke to her father and reported that when another television company had been given access to Cheney to follow him for a week in retirement, he caught his biggest fish ever. He was so excited that he invited his friends in to watch the broadcast. Disaster. The programme ended – no ginormous fish. He was furious and decided he would have nothing to do with television companies ever again. So Liz said, Dad, don’t be silly, that’s nothing to do with them. This is your chance to explain your position on the war to a worldwide audience. So at 24 hours’ notice we all went to Texas, and he opened the door to his guest house, where we filmed him in a huge Stetson hat.

Lawrence: The nature of your method requires that you have both sides, if possible, talking about the same set of experiences. In your latest on the Russo-Ukraine War you had the Belarusian ambassador to the UN and the Russian ambassador to London talking. And questions were raised about whether you really want to give these people airtime.

Norma: Denis Forman, our mentor at Granada, used to say never overestimate your viewers’ knowledge - but never underestimate their intelligence. You've got to tell them what they need to know to understand the story and rely on their good sense to tell the difference between truth and lies. This Belarusian example was a good one. He said a lot of things that were interesting and true about what it was like at the UN the first night of the war. But then when it came to the massacre at Bucha, he said of the dead bodies that a lot of them got up afterwards and smoked cigarettes. When we showed a rough cut there was some talk of laying that off. We fought hard against it because anyone who believed it would believe everything that Putin said anyway. We also had shots of Bucha and an interview with a Ukrainian who told a very different story. But we didn't come in as BBC News might have done and said he is an ally of President Putin, and you shouldn't believe it all.

The biggest problem with lying was Milosevic. Usually when people lie, you don't use it. His interview was one of the hardest things to get. It took a long time. I interviewed his wife and got on very well. I pushed my time in the House of Commons. She had been a member of the Yugoslav Socialist Party. We were two ex-socialist groupies. We would ring the house every week about the interview. And she would say, well, he's agreed in principle but it’s just like going to the dentist. He says ‘Yes, yes I know I need to do it – but not this week.’

And finally we were almost to the end of our edit when we called the house one more time. This time a man answered. He said ‘How long have you got?’ We said ‘Less than a week.’ He said ‘Okay, ring President Milosevic’s office in the morning.’ The visas magically appeared. Everything was set, but there was still a snag. Just as we're walking in, his press guy said, ‘By the way, Norma, there's just one condition we're setting. You can use it throughout all the programmes of the series, but the whole interview has to be broadcast on its own as the last programme in the series’. I said, ‘Sure.’ He could have asked me to murder my mother at that point, and I probably would have agreed to it, because we needed this interview. So we did the interview, and Milosevic was very economical with the truth. ‘Ethnic cleansing? How could you ask me such a thing?’

So we had an hour interview with our star, virtually all lies, and we had to use it. I’d promised his advisor that it would go out uncut on the BBC, something I had absolutely no power to ensure. And Milosevic had a security service that certainly reached to London. I really was scared for the first time in my life. When I got home I rang Michael Jackson, the controller of BBC Two, and he surprised me by saying, ‘Broadcast the whole interview with Milosevic? Sure. BBC Two has just gone 24 hours a day, and we're desperate for content to fill it in the middle of the night, so you smack on some subtitles and we'll put out the whole thing at two o'clock in the morning after the whole series’. And so he did. Milosevic’s press advisor was furious but we’d followed the agreed deal – and the gunmen didn’t follow.

But what do we do with these with this hour of lies? Well, it turned out when we cut him together with Bora Jovic it just worked. You got the impression that it was Milosevic himself, supported by his closest advisor, telling the story. And everybody remembers that we got a frank interview with Milosevic. I think our lack of scruples about giving him airtime did not win him a single supporter that he didn't have already but made the programme special. I’m hoping they’ll repeat the Death of Yugoslavia next year for the 30^th anniversary of the Dayton Agreement.

Lawrence: One question, which bothers me as a historian, is, how do you convey stuff for which there's nobody around to talk to? You're great on the drama and humanizing events. These real people talking about what they were doing. But how do you convey the stuff that nobody can talk about or will talk about, but it's crucial to the actual story?

Norma: We have to find a way, it might be interesting but is it crucial? When we were making the first Putin series, the first person to have a summit with Putin was Tony Blair. And we never got an interview with Tony Blair, so it looked like Hamlet without the prince. We dropped the story. It turned out that Putin’s first summit with George Bush, which came soon after, was really the interesting event with more consequence. And so I'm afraid Tony Blair got written out of that particular history.

If it's really important we have to deal with it just in narration and with other film of the event. In our first Arab-Israeli series we had trouble with Suez because all the main characters were gone, but then we discovered that the young Shimon Peres had been witness to the first conversation about the deal between Israel, France and Britain and he could tell the story of how the conspiracy began. We ended our programme there.

But it is a disadvantage of our method. You have to have people to tell the story. The other thing, of course, is archive newsreel, and archive interviews.

For example, Yasser Arafat escaped us for our first series on the Arab-Israeli conflict. We finally met him for our second one, Elusive Peace. We did a wonderful off the record research interview with him, in which he fed me broccoli with his hands and told me about all the great men of the 20^th century who had paid him homage. And we had permission to film him, but unfortunately, he died in between the research interview and the time when we were to film him. But we found an Israeli archive interview, and the guys who’d done it had been our disciples, and tried to follow our style of interview. So we bought the rushes and were able to use them in our programme.

But we also say that we're not making a comprehensive account. We're looking for the high points. And there are always too many high points to get into an hour of television.  But I maintain that the thing about television is you can see the man, you can judge him while he's talking, and you can decide whether to believe him or not. And books can't do that for you.

Lawrence: As a final question. What was your favourite programme of all the things you've done?

Norma: The short answer is, the last one I finished that just had a good review is my favourite and my worst is the one I'm working on now. At the moment the Arab-Israeli conflict seems to be as difficult to make a programme about than it is to solve. We’re aiming for broadcast early next year – so you’ll get a chance to judge for yourself.

Lawrence: That's absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much.

This video contains extracts from some of the interviews referred to in our conversation.