Leonardo Live

Wednesday 9th November 2011

I’ve been counting down the days and, finally, it is done. LEONARDO LIVE has passed. This is the morning after the night before. I don’t think I’ve ever known such a stressful project – not Afghanistan, Nigeria, Angola, Brazil, nowhere. But we made it – on TV and in 41 cinemas across the UK, we had an unbroken 73 minute show live from the National Gallery. It is two years since I first thought it would be nice to share the privilege of being at great exhibitions after-hours with a wider audience, i.e, in this case, a cinema audience. I always recognised that the Leonardo would be a good first show to do but I had no idea at all it would be such a perfect choice.

The press has been utterly extraordinary – ‘the greatest exhibition I’d ever seen’, ‘the most wondrous exhibition ever’ and so on. It really helped achieve a remarkable success – 95% sold out. I had originally thought to do a live screening to kids at midday in cinemas but the cinema chain that I managed to bring on board decided, for them, it had to be for an adult (and paying) audience. Then I had to get a broadcaster interested and the enthusiastic and ambitious SkyArts came on board. It wasn’t quite that straightforward, of course, but suffice to say without Sky there would have been no project. Luckily the National Gallery were open to the idea and I was lucky enough to hook up with the one person with the insight, energy and sheer brilliant person skills to make this happen. Gosh, looking back, there were so many hurdles – access, cabling, lighting, so on and so forth. But we just kept moving forward small step by small step.. It seems that no-one had filmed live from the gallery before (though that seems hard to believe) but certainly from the basement that is the Sainsbury Wing it seemed impossible. We tested with radio frequency cameras (which worked OK) but, in the end, thanks to the advice of the live production team we worked with (Leopard), we went for cabling. I can still remember spending most of my two week holiday in France dealing with that on the phone; it seemed impossible. But, again thanks to our National Gallery colleague, we somehow were able to lay cables into the roof of the gallery space at the same time as they were building the rooms for the exhibition.

When you remember this is the biggest exhibition in years and includes paintings & drawings worth not millions but billions, the fact they let little old us in is a thing of wonder! At the same time as this was on-going, there were satellite links to book, press releases and posters to check, picture clearances to be sought (and that is another massive task). Above all perhaps, there was the creative process to engage in: what is the film going to show? How? What? We decided very early to have two presenters (Tim Marlow and Mariella Frostrup) and a mix of pre-recorded background films as well as live talk with intelligent guests in front of the paintings. That basic premise never changed though maybe too many people were involved in the scripting at different stages – all wanting to do a good job but sometimes you need one clear voice to drive it forwards. This was tricky because the live script had to be pre-written and the pre-recorded script had to work around it. I’d have expected it to be the other way around so that was a long, difficult process. The default of ‘Live’ folk is quick, quick, quick whereas I lean to taking more time to let people look and learn. The best way on a show like this is probably somewhere in-between. Anyway, the day dawned finally and the 70-odd crew made their way to the gallery. A road outside was shut off to allow the trucks to park and set up their satellite links. Mariella and Tim came in and did their make-up, rehearsals, and so on. The minutes ticked by until finally at 6.40 we went live to cinemas with a special 20 minute (cinema-only) intro of fun facts and then at 7pm we went live to both cinemas and on TV. The next 75 minutes were nail-biting. Tim & Mariella were super, as were most of the guests. The technology worked – my word, I can still remember the endless, endless hours spent on discussing the technology to get these signals out live. Hats off & thanks again to Leopard Films for working so hard to get the show up in the air live and bouncing back down again to cinemas and TVs around the country. Along the way, we had an autocue failure and a camera failure but, again, that’s live TV I guess.

The point is what did the folk in the cinemas and front rooms think? And that answer came back to me very quickly – they loved it! They forgave the glitches because they just loved seeing the paintings in huge HD, they enjoyed hearing the background, they enjoyed the guests. Some cinemas immediately rebooked it for a repeat showing. SkyArts’ viewing figures were, for them, huge. And everyone said that this certainly had been a gamble but it had proved to be a gamble that had paid off. The National has already asked me what exhibition should we do next! And I have meetings with four other major London institutions and a couple of international galleries too…This could run and run. If I have anything to do with it, you need never miss a major exhibition again!!