A world-famous documentary maker has settled in a sleepy North Yorkshire market town where he is capturing the drama of the landscape in his atmospheric black and white photographs. Ruth Campbell meets the Indiana Jones of television.

PAUL BERRIFF must be one of the few people in the region who looks out of the window first thing in the morning hoping for storm clouds and force nine gales.

But then, the man who has been dubbed the Indiana Jones of television has always had a taste for drama.

The BAFTA award-winning documentary maker and photographer has cheated death on a regular basis in the course of his work – including surviving the collapse of New York’s Twin Towers, escaping an erupting volcano in Nicaragua and walking away unscathed from a helicopter crash in the Scottish Highlands.

He has lived and worked in exotic, and often stunning, locations all over the world to produce his acclaimed gritty fly-on-the-wall-style films for network TV both here and in the US.

He has rubbed shoulders with major celebrities and recently unearthed a fascinating series of never-beforeseen pictures of The Beatles, which have been hidden in his attic for 45 years.

As a trained firefighter and coastguard, he has also taken part in 850 life-saving rescues, winning the Queen’s Commendation for Brave Conduct and the Royal Humane Society Silver Medal for Bravery.

All of which makes his decision to return to Yorkshire and put down roots in the sleepy little market town of Bedale seem just a little surprising.

When I meet him in his offices, tucked away in a converted railway shed just a short walk from the market square, I can’t help asking if he finds it all a little... quiet.

Leeds-born Berriff, 62, who started his career as a reporter and then photographer on the Yorkshire Evening Post, laughs. It is, he agrees, a stark contrast from downtown Manhattan or the stunning Florida coast, where he used to live.

But it is clear that he loves Bedale.

He loves Yorkshire. And although he could work from anywhere in the world, this is exactly where he wants to be. He and his wife, Hilary, who have two grown-up children, settled here two years ago.

“We wanted to come back to Yorkshire, we love it. It’s a fabulous place to live, great scenery, very nice people. We walk to the shops and people say hello,” he says.

Although he still flies all over the world for his documentary work – he was recently in Los Angeles filming a documentary about criminal girl gangs – he is now seizing the opportunity to return to his first love, stills photography, from his base in North Yorkshire.

His walls are covered in huge, dramatic black and white photographs, capturing the county in all its glory – from railway workers shrouded in steam at Grosmont Station to lifeboat crews struggling to control their vessel on the wild North Sea and gipsies, on their way to Appleby Fair, washing their horses in the river at Bainbridge, near Leyburn.

Berriff, whose father was a Yorkshire Post photographer, was inspired to embark on what he calls his Real Yorkshire project when he noticed upmarket furniture and lifestyle shops in places such as Harrogate and York had cliched pictures of canals in Venice and copies of the Mona Lisa on the walls. “It was all rubbish, nothing that said ‘Yorkshire’. And it is such a great county,” he says. “I thought, why don’t I go out with my camera and start recording images of the Dales, moors, coast and cities? It has got everything here.”

He now travels all over the county with his old Graphic 5x4 1944 original Press camera in his spare time, capturing what he sees.

“It’s the real Yorkshire I’m after, not chocolate box pictures,” he says.

And that is where the weather comes in. “I wait for bad weather. It is the drama of Yorkshire’s wind, rain, sleet and snow that shows the county in all its glory.”

His more recent atmospheric, black and white work has a timeless quality and hangs easily side by side with some of his first pictures from the early Sixties, including vintage shots of the Beatles taken on their first British tour in 1963, and of children playing on back-to-back terraced streets, all discovered among a treasure trove of old negatives that lay forgotten, until recently, in his attic.

He has always considered himself, first and foremost, a photographer.

“That is my real passion. Documentary film is just a series of still pictures linked together.” Like a modernday Frank Sutcliffe – the pioneering photographer who captured the mood of Victorian Whitby – Berriff’s portraits, old and new, have a unique intimacy.

He started taking pictures in the streets of Leeds as a trainee reporter, aged 17. Management soon spotted his flair for photography when he captured a dramatic car crash, which was splashed over the front page. It was at this time he used his press card to get backstage at pop concerts where he took pictures of The Beatles, the Hollies and Roy Orbison.

AT 21, he became the BBC’s youngest-ever cameraman, and went on to work for its flagship current affairs programme, Panorama. His love of drama and search for excitement drove his TV career, leading him to create and produce major award-winning series, including a large number of pioneering reality documentary programmes, over the next 40 years.

It was while making a film about the lifeboat crew at Bridlington that he joined the coastguard and ended up setting up the first coastguard station on the River Humber for 100 years, going out on 850 rescues and working as a lifeboatman for 28 years, in between his TV work.

He filmed the first canoe and raft expedition on the Colorado River, through the Grand Canyon, joined three Canadian expeditions led by Sir Ranulph Fiennes, and filmed and directed a BBC 1 programme about Prince Charles’ Royal Navy helicopter career. He won a BAFTA for his programme on the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster, which featured in his ITV series Rescue.

In New York, while filming one of the programmes he is most proud of – Animal Precinct, about animal cruelty investigators, which contributed to changes in animal welfare laws – Berriff stumbled across the biggest story of his career, and experienced his closest brush with death on 9/11.

After hearing about the first plane crash, Berriff headed straight for the Twin Towers as thousands of people fled in the opposite direction.

He was filming the deputy fire chief organising his units in the street outside, right underneath the towers, when he heard a loud explosion.

“I knew I was making a film about a major disaster and I thought this guy would be the main character. But no one realised the building was in danger of collapse.”

Berriff looked up and saw the debris coming down on top of him. “I kept the camera running, pointing at what was going on. Then everything went totally black.”

He was knocked unconscious for about 20 minutes. Once he came round, he crawled his way through the debris. “I couldn’t see, my mouth was full of cement-like dust, I could hardly breathe. I thought, this is it, I realised I had crossed a line. I had become a casualty myself.”

Ever the professional, he went back to search for his equipment and found the sound mixer lying in the debris.

The camera he had been filming with was about 3ft under the rubble. His dramatic footage was shown on news programmes across the world and was used in his 9/11 The Firefighters’ Story film, in which he spent a year in The Bronx with firefighters he had first met on the day itself.

Of the 27 officers he was with in the street when he started filming, only four, including the deputy fire chief, survived. “I often think about why I survived. It depended on which way you ran down the street. I suppose it has made me more cautious.

“It is the most serious, most overwhelming disaster I have ever been in.

But I just record what happens,” he says. “I still think about it, but I cannot dwell too much on it. I would be a nervous wreck by now if I did. It doesn’t haunt me. I don’t dwell on the past.”

■ paulberriff.com