BBC Four: How did this documentary come about?
Margaret Kinmonth: It was down to Roger Graef, who directed three of the original Secret Policeman's Ball shows 25 years ago. I've known him for years so we did it together. I had a fresh approach to the material and he gave me an insight into how it had all come about. It's amazing, looking at that list of names now, and they're all big heavyweights. At the time it was all very easy going and people just rang each other up.
BBC Four: Was this spontaneous feel what made Secret Policeman so special?
MK: The overriding thing I came away with was the relationship between comics and musicians and the Amnesty issue. The charity seemed perfectly placed for the type of people who were mouthy. I think that all the people who took part had this feeling that they were able to say things on behalf of people who weren't - who were locked up for their beliefs.
BBC Four: How much impact did it have at the time and what would you say its legacy has been?
MK: If you think of the audience awareness, it was an audience of a few thousand every night, in a theatre and they raised a piffling amount of money in comparison to what they do now for, say, Comic Relief. Television, in a very light entertainment way, has taken those shows over. They reach huge audiences, but it's not the same when you've got the Formica floors and all the lighting and the studio audience; it doesn't have the same charm as a little theatre.
BBC Four: And Amnesty wasn't that well-known a charity at that point, was it?
MK: No, Amnesty was tiny, as you can see from that shot in the office -they just had one little room. Talking to Alexei Sayle was interesting because he was very political. When he came to the interview he'd checked his journal to see what he was doing that week, and seen that he was doing different sorts of political benefits quite often. Amnesty remains very famous partly because of the films, but in those days people were far more motivated politically to go out in the streets and demonstrate. There were a lot more agitprop issues in those days - anti-apartheid, Greenham Common and others. Amnesty was just the one that exploded.
BBC Four: You've got great archive from behind the scenes of the shows and sometimes what's going on there is funnier than what's on stage...
MK: I know, I love the clip of Barry Humphries, I could watch that a million times. Usually you can't bear to watch something you've made, but this film still makes me laugh. I wish that we'd managed to interview Barry Humphries now for this but he was touring and I couldn't reach him. It was the same with Billy Connolly - he was in Australia too and I just couldn't fly there to do interviews.
BBC Four: Was actually getting hold of people the most difficult part of putting the programme together?
MK: Getting people to agree took a huge amount of phone calls, but another great difficulty was actually getting them to remember stuff. Stephen Fry has an incredible memory and an amazing ability to put things in context. He and Lenny Henry talk really well about comedy. We had to show most people the tapes, but some couldn't bear to look at footage of themselves - the rock stars mainly. They were so beautiful in those days that you can't blame them. Rock stars are so different to comedians because comedians are far more cerebral. With rock stars it's all emotion and spiritual energy.
BBC Four: Something that comes across very strongly in the film is the sense of the changes going on in Britain from the mid-1970s to the late-80s...
MK: Political awareness was a big factor. I don't know what happened, but people were so much more politically aware then, or perhaps they felt they could change things. So the singers and the acts were far more political in a way that seemed to disappear. I think that something's happened to those stars actually, they'd be very clever if they could be immune to it, but then they were younger and hungrier and just starting out. Their comedy had a roughness and immediacy and a connection with their own lives. Now they're in limos. Jennifer Saunders is very funny talking about that, and Stephen Fry as well.
BBC Four: At one point in the film Sir Bob Geldof is talking about Amnesty's work over footage from various regimes and at the end you include some shots of Guantanamo Bay. Was this something you felt you had to address?
MK: Originally the film hadn't been conceived with its own contemporary political context but as I made it I became really convinced that I shouldn't let the Western leaders get off unscathed. I didn't want the film to just be pure nostalgia, so the current issues became part of the story.
