St Cuthberts Mill

Behind the scenes:
When the BBC’s One Show came to visit

Think back to June 2020, the UK was gripped in its first lockdown due to the Covid pandemic, and something rather exciting happened when representatives for the BBC called. St Cuthberts Mill regularly gets calls from production companies exploring whether our historic building would be suitable as a film set, but this was rather different, they wanted to see if they could teach us to paint!

Now we are experts in making watercolour papers, but painting on the paper is a whole new experience. Also remember we were gripped in social distancing and only a skeleton crew were actually working on site in the mill, as the virus still held most of us prisoners. In stepped St Cuthberts Mill’s engineering department, these guys work tirelessly maintaining and repairing our old machinery and buildings to keep the mill running. This team had worked on site throughout the lockdown and were really keen to be involved, so chief engineer Neil, along with Jason and Sam joined Kate and Cathy to become students for the day under the expert tutorage of Adebanji Alade.

If you’ve ever been involved with filming before, you’ll be familiar with the enormous amounts of waiting around required whilst everything is set up. We were not disappointed, short bursts of action followed by more setting up.  What felt like millions of takes to get our interviews perfect, as speaking to camera is terrifying. Adebanji was a confident pro and made it seem calm and natural, putting us at ease.  The film crew were just great, they nurtured us to get good shots in a challenging environment with poor (film quality) lighting.

Jason, Sam, Kate and Neil poised ready to paint

Then the scary part happened where Adebanji taught us to draw and paint, whilst being filmed. Not only that, it was painting a portrait of the boss. Phil Staple the General Manager at St Cuthberts Mill kindly stepped in to be the ‘model’ for the novice painters to draw, after a serious amount of arm twisting.

After a bit of expert tutorage and huge quantities of encouragement, Adebanji managed to get us all to produce something we didn’t think we were capable of. All the paintings bore a resemblance to Phil. Not bad for a group of beginners.

Since the filming, Neil has taken up painting as a hobby.

If you wish to see the segment, here’s a link to a catch-up version on the BBC’s iPlayer. Our thanks to the team at One Tribe TV for making this possible.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
(Around the 15 minute mark. Available until 30 June 2021)

Adebanji Alade will be working with St Cuthberts Mill again in 2022, when you can see him painting live, in the St Cuthberts Mill marquee, at the Patchings Art Festival. 
https://www.patchingsartcentre.co.uk/patchings-festival/ 

More about artist Adebanji Alade https://adebanjialade.co.uk/