They were in the Ferghana Valley on the borders of China, when Gill suddenly "felt an overwhelming urge to come home," wrote Georgina, who was nine months pregnant with their daughter, Chloe. He managed to get back in time for the birth, although he had no ticket and no Russian.Gill's next major film was Paul Gauguin: the savage dream (1988), then came a 13-part series with Hugh Johnson, Vintage: a history of wine (1991), which Gill very much enjoyed making; about this time he, Georgina and I cooked up a 10-part history of food and, although it never got made, he was invaluable when Georgina and I made The Feast of Christmas for Channel 4 in 1992.In April that year, Carlos Fuentes wrote and presented The Buried Mirror: reflections on Spain and the New World, on the Hispanic heritage, the first major international series to be conceived and made in two languages Nature Perfected: the story of the garden followed in 1995. In 1997, for the American Public Broadcasting Service, he directed Beyond Wall Street, about global finance; and for PBS the next year produced The Face of Russia.In October 1998 Gill's younger son, Nicholas, a talented chef who at one time had a Michelin star at Hambledon Hall, disappeared and has never been seen again. For the ITV network, Gill made Highlanders (1995), a docu-drama for the 250th anniversary of the return of Bonnie Prince Charlie, written by Fitzroy Maclean and narrated by Sean Connery; and, for Melvyn Bragg's South Bank Show, to coincide with the great exhibition, Vermeer: light, love and silence (1997). To make his first independent series, The Commanding Sea (1981), Gill sailed with Clare Francis and the film unit on a replica of Sir Francis Drake's The Golden Hinde through the South China Sea, where the hazard was not weather but pirates.He had also been working in 1981 on a series on Russia with Sir Fitzroy Maclean, whom he had met while working on Royal Heritage. But despite the fact that many critics said it was the best TV series ever made, there was difficulty in selling it to an American outlet. At a showing at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, there were seats for 300; on the first day 24,000 people were in the queue to see it, including Jackie Onassis and half of President Richard Nixon's cabinet.Gill realised he had invented a new form of broadcasting.
He followed up Civilisation with the popular Alistair Cooke's America (1972); a pair of films the next year which were the first to be made independently in China since the Cultural Revolution; and in 1976, for the Queen's Silver Jubilee, he made Royal Heritage, as a result of which Gill would sometimes come home with a brace of pheasants from Sandringham, and entertain Georgina (whom he married in 1978) with an account of the Queen's gift for mimicry.Gill and Malone were by now the BBC's two top director/producers, and in 1977 they took the leap and left to form their own company, Malone Gill. David Sylvester advised against working with "K": "When you are looking over a script together, he will make you aware that he has noticed that your fingernails are dirty." "A pipe-smoker, my fingernails were always dirty," Gill wrote.Clark himself waspishly suggested that Gill might be happier with "a younger, more radical figure, like John Berger". Burton suggested that Gill show Clark a film he had made on Francis Bacon. Gill was surprised that it won over Clark, "with its staccato cutting and harsh slaughterhouse scenes", but it did. Burton later wrote that he felt as though he had brought about the mating of Chi Chi and An An (the giant pandas whose fruitless coupling that summer was followed breathlessly by the world's press).The filming of Civilisation ran into every imaginable difficulty, such as the large fee, to be paid in cash, demanded by the Vatican, although they had agreed months earlier to the filming of the Sistine Chapel, or being gassed by riot police while filming in Paris in 1968; and some that could not have been imagined, such as the flooding of Florence in 1966, when the Arno burst its banks.Clark turned out to be a quick and good scriptwriter, which went some way to make up for the almost day-long delay while Gill and the lighting cameraman Tubby Englander found a camera angle for filming Clark in front of Michelangelo's David that would not further exaggerate David's "already well-developed manhood" or Clark's "uneven top teeth and the beginning of middle-aged flab around his jowls" and his "unfortunate tendency to look down his nose".The series began in February 1969 and, by the end of three months of weekly broadcasts, there were decent-sized audiences and The Times had praised it in a leader Clark was soon afterwards awarded a peerage.
Gill found that, in the event, the three "had little to say to each other".Gill was so convinced it would be a flop (it was) that, despite his misgivings about Clark, he responded to Burton's proposition with "energetic enthusiasm. something heads of departments responded to gratefully, in a world full of difficult, self-regarding geniuses". His idea of a good arts film was something much more risky, such as the one he was then working on, in which he got "three bright young foreign journalists - a Frenchman, an Australian and a Zulu" (Olivier Todd, Robert Hughes and Lewis Nkosi) to wander "through the swinging London scene, both participating and commenting". Humphrey Burton, Head of BBC Music and Arts, asked Gill to produce and direct the series.At first, Gill was not enthusiastic about the commission.
