Piece to Camera | The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog

We were supposed to be in Kunming for lunch time, but a rockslide in the mountains caused us to take a four-hour detour, and we didn’t reach our hotel until 20:00. So, no chance for my plans to see the Flying Tigers Museum in town. Our final stop on the road trip was a ramshackle yellow hut, stuck behind a new shopping mall. Its paint was peeling and its plaster falling off, it was being used as a shed, but it is one of a handful of surviving French station-houses from a century ago.

My PTC (piece to camera) went as follows: “The French didn’t have a toehold in the Chinese hinterland, but they did have a colony in what is now Vietnam, and built this railroad from there to the capital of Yunnan, to exploit the local resources. This is one of only a handful of surviving station-houses, but it’s practically inaccessible, and largely forgotten.” I had three chances to say it, although one was blown by the arrival of a train. The director has two cuts to work with – hopefully the light is right on one of them, and there is no noise pollution.

I earn my money not by saying these words, but through the hundreds of little arguments I have with the director about the order the words come in. Each PTC is written on the spot, but I have to fight over tiny nuances of meaning, so that we don’t get into trouble with Standards & Practices for saying something unverifiable, or waste our footage by saying something on camera that turns out to be wrong.

So I’m there saying we have to say “Chinese hinterland”, because the French did have a toehold in Fujian and Shanghai. We have to say “what is now Vietnam” because Vietnam did not exist as a political entity at the time, and if we say Indochine, some viewers won’t know what that is. We have to say “capital of Yunnan” because nobody has heard of Kunming, but we will have already explained where Yunnan is in the episode. We have to say “the local resources” because we can’t remember what they are, except for tin, and we know there was more than tin. We say a “handful” because we only have one source that names them as three stations, and S&P insist on two sources or we can’t state any facts at all.

And we say “largely forgotten” because the Chinese will moan if we tell the truth, which is that they have left it entirely derelict because the achievements of the colonial era mean nothing to them, even as they reinvent the wheel, with a new railway line running parallel to the one that has already been there for a hundred years. Maybe I earn my money after all, because I had less than five minutes to thrash all of the above out, and less than five more to get it on camera before we were back in the bus.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events appeared in Route Awakening S02E01 (2016).