According to Dibb, Berger considered his scripts merely a “beginning”, and wanted the series to be a “50:50 collaboration”. Much of its power derives from images and sequences that Dibb, guided by Berger’s persuasive propositions, came up with and shot by himself. The success of the accompanying book, which is still in print, also ensured longevity for the series.
Still, there’s no denying the charisma of Berger, who always considered himself a “storyteller”, rather than a critic. (Not long after Ways of Seeing, in 1974, he moved to a small village in the foothills of the French Alps, and started writing about Savoyard peasant life.)
Speaking in 1993, the writer Marina Warner emphasised Berger’s “faun-like energy” and the “fierceness” of his eyes, buttonholing the viewer with the “look” of a “seducer”. At the time, television was associated with statesmanlike decorum, she observed, “and suddenly there was this figure who had decided not to wear a suit. This was not somebody on a platform or a rostrum pontificating.”
In fact, though, Berger’s look-at-me striped shirt, which has often been “interpreted”, according to Dibb, “as being conceptually very important”, was a happy accident. The sequences with Berger were mostly shot on the cheap inside a warehouse in Ealing, surrounded by gas cookers and washing machines.
The original idea was to overlay images of paintings during post-production onto a blue screen behind him – although, in the end, this proved technically impossible. So, when Berger turned up on set wearing a shirt that was also blue, Dibb had to send him off to buy a replacement – and the best he could find nearby was that cream-and-brown number.
Still, what Dibb calls “a pragmatic solution to a problem” was also their good fortune, for Berger’s flamboyant shirt – the sort of thing, as Dyer puts it, which “a first-division footballer” might have donned “for a night on the town” – became emblematic of a series renowned for its invigorating approach.
Viewfinders: Ways of Seeing at 50 begins on BBC Radio 4 today at 9.45am; John Berger: The Art of Looking will be broadcast on BBC Four on Jan 10
