About the Film

This film was made for The Auckland Project to mark the completion of The Spanish Gallery in Bishop Auckland. As heritage documentary filmmaker on the project, I was asked to film a conversation between Michael Portillo, the broadcaster and former politician, and Jonathan Ruffer, the philanthropist behind The Auckland Project’s transformation of the town. The two men walked through the gallery together, moving between rooms to talk about the Spanish Golden Age paintings now on display, and about what the gallery means for Bishop Auckland.

The day began in the throne room at Auckland Castle, where the bishops of Durham once sat, before moving into the rooms holding the castle’s Zurbaran paintings, and finally across to the new gallery itself. It gave the conversation a natural shape, moving from the castle’s own history into the collection that The Spanish Gallery was built to house.

A Heritage Documentary Filmmaker on Completion Day

The gallery was not quite finished when we filmed. Rather than attempt a full walkthrough, we chose the rooms and displays that were furthest along, and built the conversation around them. Plans changed more than once during the day as we worked out which spaces would read well on camera, which is often the reality of heritage documentary filmmaker work on a live building project rather than a finished, static one.

Filming a conversation like this needed a crew of six rather than a single camera operator: a second camera to catch reactions and cutaways, a sound recordist, a lighting operator and a runner, alongside careful pre-production planning to work out how six of us would move through several rooms and two separate buildings without getting in each other’s way. We arrived very early to set up before Portillo and Ruffer arrived, since each location needed its own lighting and sound treatment, and there was no time to reset once filming began.

One Filmmaker, Scaled Up When It’s Needed

Most of my documentary work is a one man operation: I plan, film, record sound and edit alone, which keeps things simple and keeps me close to the people and places I’m filming. Some projects call for more hands, though, and knowing when to bring them in, and how to run them well, comes from experience. A shoot like this one, working across two historic buildings in a single day with a presenter working to a hard deadline, needed a full crew and careful pre-production to match. I’ve built and led crews at that scale before, including for Invented In The North East, a documentary I made for BBC North East. Whether I’m working alone or leading a crew of six, the approach stays the same: clear roles, a realistic schedule, and enough experience of how shoots like this go to keep things calm when the day gets complicated.

A Conversation on Spanish Art

Portillo’s own family background in Spain gave the conversation a personal edge alongside the historical one. He and Ruffer moved easily between the paintings themselves, the collectors and craftsmen who made them, and the wider story of how Spanish Golden Age art came to be gathered in a small County Durham town. Ruffer, who has spent decades building the collections behind The Auckland Project, talked about the paintings with the kind of detail that only comes from years of close attention: what drew him to a particular work, how a piece was sourced, and why it belonged in Bishop Auckland rather than a national gallery in London or Madrid.

A Presenter’s Discipline

Michael Portillo had a hard deadline. He needed to catch a train at four o’clock, and we finished filming with a minute to spare. Working with a presenter of his experience made a real difference to how the day went. He knew how to keep a conversation moving, how to draw out a fuller answer, and how to help Ruffer talk naturally about Spain, Spanish art, and his own connection to the collection, all without the conversation ever feeling rushed on camera, despite how tight the schedule was off it.

What the Film Shows

The finished film sits alongside my longer documentary on the making of The Spanish Gallery, but tells a smaller, more human story of its own: two knowledgeable people talking about art they clearly love, in a building that had only just come back to life after years of restoration work led by The Auckland Project. For a heritage documentary filmmaker, days like this are a reminder that the building work and the conversations it makes possible are part of the same story, and that both deserve careful, patient filming.