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Women’s Work in British Film and Television

Penny Eyles
Script Supervisor

Eyles, Penny (Script Supervisor)

Penny Eyles was born in Buckinghamshire in 1938 and after attending secretarial college worked initially as a secretary for a London-based advertising agency in the 1950s before joining the BBC as a Producer’s Assistant in the early 1960s. Here she worked in a number of different departments and she credits this on-the-job training with teaching her skills of organisation and diplomacy which she brought into her professional career as a script supervisor. From 1967 onwards she worked principally in feature film continuity with a number of directors including Stephen Frears, Sally Potter, Ken Loach, Terry Gilliam, Bill Douglas and Robert Altman, amongst others. She now teaches master classes for film students at a number of UK colleges. In her recording Penny describes her BBC ‘apprenticeship’ and the working hours and culture of feature film production. She reflects on her own practice, discussing the contribution continuity makes to the story-telling process and the importance of visual information. She describes the role of the script supervisor as a ‘referee’, tasked with balancing competing demands and expectations on set, and how working in commercials helped her understand the role played by editing. She also talks about implicit gendered attitudes in the profession towards women and continuity.

©Melanie Bell

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Women’s Work Oral Histories/Oral Histories/Melanie Bell, Women’s Work in British Film and Television, https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/bectu/Oral Histories,Friday 26th April 2024.

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