Four members of the Today in Focus team – presenter Anushka Asthana, producer Josh Kelly, executive producer Phil Maynard, and composer and sound designer Axel Kacoutié – talk about the success of our audio miniseries. You can listen to the Freshwater Five series here.
What was it about this story that made you think it would work for Today in Focus?
JK We were looking for stories that we might be able to turn into our first miniseries. I was reading the Observer on a Sunday afternoon last autumn and spotted an article by Mark Townsend on the Freshwater case. And I immediately thought: this story has it all. £53m of cocaine allegedly being handed over in high seas, in the dark, in the middle of a huge storm. Midnight phone calls from satellite phones. Questions over the significance of fishing knots. Police observation logs being amended. Evidence found on floppy disks in the back of a safe. And a group of men who have always said that they are innocent, and who have now spent a decade in prison.
For a story to work for Today in Focus, though, there has to be something deeper to explore. We didn’t want to make just another true crime series, for its own sake. Anushka Asthana, Phil Maynard and I called Emily Bolton, the solicitor for the Freshwater Five.
Emily is an English lawyer who spent much of her career working in New Orleans on death row cases, before returning to the UK. She told us that, over the years, and particularly as she has worked on the Freshwater case, she has come to believe that she would rather be wrongfully convicted of a crime in Louisiana than in England and Wales. Because, she says, the system here is designed in a way that makes it nearly impossible to access the evidence that is needed to uncover miscarriages of justice. After Emily told us this, we really knew we were on to something.
PM As Josh says, there were several irresistible elements, not least the setting of the fishing community in the Isle of Wight. But we had this force of nature of a lawyer in Emily who had almost singlehandedly dug up new evidence, immersed herself in maritime navigation technology and fostered this real sense of hope among the families of the convicted men. And then there were the devastating twists and turns in the conflicting stories of that fateful weekend out at sea – it gripped all of us and we knew if we told it the right way, it could be something special.
AA As well as having everything that Josh has set out – the other thing we discovered as we went through the interviews was that it was full of “characters” who were incredibly engaging, funny, warm and extremely passionate. That is so often the key to good audio.
How much work was it to pull it off?
JK The first time we talked about Freshwater as a possible series was in November 2020. Production began at the start of January this year. So it took about eight weeks to make – which, in hindsight, is probably too little time to make a series like this, and which therefore involved a lot of very long working days, and seven-day weeks. We also had to deal with a number of additional challenges. I tested positive for Covid in the early stages of production. Thankfully it was a pretty mild case! And then later, we had to overcome the challenge of recording in the Isle of Wight in the middle of a lockdown. Which involved a great deal of risk assessment, a very long boom pole, and some creative thinking to make sure we recorded in a Covid-safe way.
PM It was a huge amount of work and at a couple of points we did seriously wonder whether it would be possible to pull it off. Each episode was the product of hours of taped interviews, background discussions with experts, storyboarding and re-editing. At every stage we wanted to be sure we weren’t overwhelming the listener with information while also answering the questions that they’d naturally be asking. We had a hard deadline of the appeal date itself, which gave us an at-times-terrifying sense of urgency.
AK It was definitely a tight turnaround when it came to sound-designing each episode, but what made the difference was having the preliminary chats around the overall mood of the series. I remember Josh pitching the series as “nautical noir” and, no word of a lie, I immediately got the texture of it. The sea was its own character and so was the data, the radar, the boats, as well as the mystery and motivations of the people involved. This all had to be reflected in the theme song I remixed as well as the music cues written throughout.
AA The final week was so intense and stressful I think all of us wondered if it would get over the line. Not only did we have huge legal questions that we had to answer at every point of the process (and I really can’t overstate how important that part of the production was) but also we had to check, double check and triple check every single line in scripts that were incredibly long.
Why do you think it’s been so popular?
JK I think it’s been popular for the same reasons that we found it so rewarding to work on. First, the characters are so strong. Not only Emily Bolton, but all of the convicted men and their families. This has been the defining event in all of their lives. And they were so open and generous with us in telling their stories.
Second, the story itself is so gripping. Partly because it is full of surprises, but also because it’s ambiguous. Anushka, Phil and I spent as much time talking among ourselves about whether they might be innocent as we did actually making the series. People don’t tend to be convicted of crimes in the UK without some strong evidence against them. And a lot of the series lives in the grey areas between obvious guilt and a crystal-clear miscarriage of justice. Our minds were always changing on what we thought about different elements of the case. Hopefully people have had a similar experience as they’ve listened.
Third, I hope that people have enjoyed looking behind the curtain with us at how the post-conviction appeals process works (or doesn’t always work) in this country. This is an area of the criminal justice system that isn’t often talked about, but that seems to have a lot of problems that aren’t being addressed.
And finally, I’m sure people have been blown away by Axel’s sound design, which has been an integral part of the storytelling. He’s always a genius, but he’s taken it to the next level with this. I found out this morning that he sampled the cry of a gull in the process of composing the music for the series. Wow.
AK Being at almost 600 episodes does mean that the listeners have developed a familiarity and attachment to the way the theme song is used. Being able to rewrite what to hear and expect naturally makes things more exciting. It excited me!
AA I don’t think I realised until it was out (because I was so close to it by then!) how brilliantly Josh in particular had created a structure that got people to care straight away and then was incredibly gripping because of the unexpected twists and turns. And, needless to say, the sound design was sensational.
What were the greatest challenges you faced when bringing this story to life?
PM There were several challenges, not least the time we had given ourselves to make the series. We made the whole thing over the period of the second national lockdown, and aside from a short visit to the Isle of Wight, it all needed to be recorded remotely. Where usually we’d have done a lot more on-location and in-person interviews, we had to use script and sound design to inject pace and a sense of place. The case itself rested on some extremely complex maritime navigational evidence and we had to satisfy ourselves that we all fully understood it in order to bring it to life.
AK All ears were set on how we’d be able to pull off the sonic reconstruction of the vessels in episode four. In fact, episode four was the most talked about episode when it came to the sound design. I knew creating distinctive enough sounds for both vessels was crucial, but accurately depicting movement? That was the biggest technical conundrum.
Will you run more miniseries in future?
PM We definitely have the ambition to do more miniseries.
AA One of the hardest things about this was the fact that it left all of us as emotional (probably more so!) as our listeners. Through the entire process we debated and argued over innocence and guilt repeatedly, because we really cared about what had happened, and why it had happened, and what it meant for all the characters involved. Plus there is an ethical side to it, as well, for us as journalists. Ultimately it is what makes potential miscarriage of justice cases so compelling – juries tend to convict only with persuasive evidence, so where mistakes are made – they are thorny to unravel and bring natural suspense and drama along the way.