Jack Hargreaves tries out Richard Hill’s patent ‘exploding’ bait box from Simon Baddeley on Vimeo.
Warning – there are only stills until 01.57 on this clip.
This film is from an archive of Jack Hargreaves’ ‘Out of Town’ series on Southern Television made in the early 1970s, and prepared, in May 2010, by Jennie Constable and colleagues at the South West Film and Television Archive (SWFTA) in Plymouth. JH, my stepfather, met Richard Hill who had invented an ‘exploding’ bait box for delivering ground bait more efficiently than the conventional rubbi-dubbi bag normally slid down the anchor chain when sea-angling – in this case for Black Bream off Littlehampton on the south coast of England. The boat is owned by Charlie Fox. Also on the boat is Eddie Woods and Jack’s cameraman Stan Bréhaut who never lets his shadow, on this sunny day at sea, appear in the picture. Stan’s work for ‘Out of Town’ – was one side of a superlative partnership of cameraman and commentator which ran over twenty years. His filming is to be recognised by the slight movement that shows even when out a sea since Stan worked with an old handheld Arri, which, by the way, limited him to 100ft rolls of film – just over two minutes – a restriction making it trickier to catch some of the moments that are a part of the character of these episodes. The novelist Graham Hurley who as a younger man worked for Jack, wrote ‘but this kind of discipline bred a fiercely economic shooting style and meant that rarely a shot was ever wasted. Nowadays, of course, most video cameraman graduate straight from the Fire Brigade school of location work and simply hose the thing around on the assumption that post-production might salvage a shot of two from the wreckage.’
