AFTER LESS THAN three years at Lime Grove I was promoted (without a competition) to the rank of full producer. This meant an upgrade to the coveted B category in the BBC's byzantine grading system. The change was caused by the withdrawal of Monitor's producer, Peter Newington. He went, I think, because he could no longer tolerate being part of the establishment. He resigned, directed freelance for a time and ended up teaching film and television at the Royal College of Art. He taught me more about art than anybody else did and I’ll never forget that nervous laugh. The rest of the team remained close-knit and I spent the next two Monitor seasons doing much the same mixture of films and studio work as before, but now for a better salary. My first contribution to the season was a profile of Gian Carlo Menotti filmed in Spoleto, 100 miles north of Rome. Menotti's operas were impressive, particularly his Grand Guignol essay The Medium and the political music drama The Consul, which ran at the Palace Theatre in London for many months; his television operas The Saint of Bleecker Street and Amahl and the Night Visitors were big hits on BBC Television. Huw and I wrote to him out of the blue, proposing a conversation embedded in a portrait of his annual Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto. To our surprise he accepted. Only when we arrived did I learn that the previous year the festival had been disrupted by a low-flying aviator hired by thugs who scattered odious leaflets over the city bearing the message: ‘We salute the pederasts of Spoleto’. So Menotti was happy to have some positive publicity from the BBC about what was assuredly a splendid Italian-American festival, on a par with Edinburgh and with the added benefits of sunshine, impressive outdoor locations, a grand opera house and a resident genius. In the course of a fortnight I was able to dip with my cameras into a marvellous cultural mix: the great Luchino Visconti was directing Elektra while Menotti himself was mounting the first European production of the opera Vanessa composed by his dear friend Samuel Barber. Jerome Robbins was in town with an experimental dance company led by the brilliant Arthur Mitchell, who later founded Dance Theatre of Harlem.