Perseverance and PR played a part in Phil Agland's series on the populous city
THE day had started like many others. Phil Agland and his colleagues were on their way to yet another meeting with the Shanghai police in their struggle to find criminal cases to film when they received a call. 'There is a body in the canal in Baoshan District, are you interested?' Soon after Agland found himself filming the sickening scene of a woman's torso and legs being hauled from the water, the stench of death pervading everything, he felt disgusted with himself. He had waited so long to film criminal cases revealing law and order in today's Shanghai, but he was not looking for this.
The tragic case, though, was part of the mosaic of life and death in Shanghai and had to be included in his extraordinary television series Shanghai Vice, being screened on ATV World (Wednesdays, 10pm). The resulting A Life For A Life was the one-hour episode that ATV chose to show first.
That story was shocking, but the question on anyone's lips who saw this and last week's A Serial Killer must also have been how Agland, the British producer, director and cameraman, gained the access to film such cases. That is another story.
Shanghai Vice was the culmination of 10 years of work in the mainland in which Agland had enjoyed increasing access. He had already won critical world praise for his previous series, Beyond The Clouds, which depicted the lives of the people of Lijiang in Yunnan province. Now he wanted to complete the story of China by filming its urban face. Shanghai, seething with development, was the obvious location.
'I couldn't look at urban China without examining crime and punishment and law and order, which is fundamental to any civilised society,' Agland explains. He wanted nothing less than to get close to the body politic. 'In filming a city like Shanghai it was very important we tackle corruption, the politics of the city and crime and punishment, all the big issues, all the different strata.' He is disappointed that ATV has decided to show only three of the seven one-hour episodes. 'As a suite of seven, the series is not sensationalist. I never set out for it to be. What I had to do was cover serious issues,' he says.
'It is just supposed to be the reality of policing and the reality of life for individuals living in Shanghai, whether you are a rape victim, or whether you are a granny who still wants to love and be loved, or you are a woman fighting against injustice, or a boy who wants a heart operation.' China is a notoriously difficult place to film, with authorities keen to portray a squeaky-clean image and not have the country's warts revealed to the world. Agland's most ambitious project yet would seem near-impossible to pull off.
