It was when Kirk Docker and Josh Schmidt were making You Can’t Ask That that the idea for their next show was born.
“We did an episode on disaster survivors on You Can’t Ask That,” Docker tells TV Tonight.
“We had a woman who was at Port Arthur, and I thought ‘I’ve never really heard your take.’ If I was sitting next to her at a dinner party, I’d want to ask her all about it.
“We realised there was something in moments, in unpacking the story.”
The result is I Was Actually There, a 6 part series hearing from the people with firsthand experiences of significant events including the Port Arthur massacre, Boxing Day Tsunami to The Beatles’ world record-breaking visit to Adelaide.
Episodes hear from participants, by-standers, first responders, media who were witness to events usually through circumstance.
“It’s a range of characters, not just the victims,” Docker explains.
“The first 10 minutes (of the Port Arthur episode) is at the site, then it moves away from that to the journalist who speaks to him and passes the police. It moves to the negotiator… then it moves to the aftermath. It’s not just a ‘tragedy porn’ episode.
“We don’t mention the shooter’s name because they don’t know who the shooter is. It’s a confusing experience and some of them don’t really know what’s going on. So it’s about being in this experience in the midst of something. There’s also a humour in it that you wouldn’t expect, because that’s how humans deal with stuff.
“We like to think that this show is cut from the same cloth as You Can’t Ask That, taking the things that we loved about the previous show … a first person account, an intimate story, weird details, and humour mixed in with tragedy, showing the full range of human emotion. I feel like sometimes that gets missed when this sort of content is made.
“We wanted to show the full range, faces you don’t normally get to see, who no-one really talks to about these things, aside from the main players.”
The first episode, on the 1996 massacre at Port Arthur does not hold back. Were there any concerns in opening the series with such a confronting news topic?
“It’s tricky when you make a new first season of anything where people don’t know the format or the show. We wanted to go with things that people recognised, so that if you watched them, you would realise pretty quickly that this show is very different from other stuff you’ve seen on these sorts of programmes. It’s very personal. It’s not how it’s done on 60 Minutes, or on a reunion-sombre note. This is really about the experience, what it felt like to be there, how it impacted them (then) and over time,” he continues.
“We were discussing things like opening with something like The Beatles, but we thought it’s better to start with something that’s a bit more dynamic initially… it opens with two big ones, and we thought we’d soften it with the others.”
Episode two looks to the 2004 tsunami hearing from mostly Australians who were at Phuket, Phi-Phi and Khao Lak. The doco focusses on the emotions of those who were there rather than getting overwhelmed with historical facts, or even where each eye witness was at the time the tsunami struck.
“Ultimately it doesn’t really matter where they are, because the experience is the same. One of the reasons we didn’t ‘super’ people is we didn’t want to say, ‘You’re important because you’re a police officer, or you’re less important because you’re just this person.’ You’re all in it together, all the voices are valid, and it ultimately doesn’t matter where you are too much,” Docke insists.
“(Tourist) Rebecca Giles said, ‘I was expecting the choppers to arrive. …I couldn’t understand why more help didn’t come.’ Because when they’re in it they didn’t know what was going on. (Thai restaurateur) Pim Boonyarattana said she didn’t realise that this wasn’t happening over the whole world. They didn’t realise this was something happening just to them, or happening in this region.
“But if you want to watch a documentary where they lay it all out and tell you how many people died, it’s not this documentary. This documentary is a series of people talking about what is it like to be at something -that’s as complex as it gets, in a way. ”
Other episodes include 2002’s Woomera detention centre breakout, Nicky Winmar’s 1993 stand against racism and the 2006 Beaconsfield Mine rescue.
“Beaconsfield, which is our closing episode, fits 15 days into into one 30 minute episode,” Docker explains.
“For the Nicky Winmar episode there’s contrasting perspectives and opinions about how it unfolded. At Woomera there’s people who felt like they did the right thing, but others who feel they didn’t do the right thing. Not everyone’s unified in their summary of how things happened.
“What we’re trying to show is that human experience is more messy and complex, than often it gets credited to in historical moments.”
I Was Actually There 8pm Tuesday on ABC.
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