Oral history: Simon Nicholas

This collection is uncatalogued. The following is an interim description which may be altered when detailed cataloguing takes place in future.

An interview with Dr Simon Nicholas, the former proprietor and filmmaker of the London-based film and video production company Little King Productions. Interview conducted 7 July 2022 by Gabrielle Duboux, University of Lausanne, Switzerland. The interview was conducted as part of Gabrielle Duboux's thesis on the audiovisual policies of Basel's chemical and pharmaceutical companies between 1945 and c.1975. Her thesis explores CIBA; Geigy; Ciba-Geigy (1970-1996) and Hoffmann-La Roche and the way in which the latter made technical, educational and promotional investments in the audiovisual field.

2022

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Simon Nicholas was a GP who worked at Little King as owner, editor and writer for twenty years between 1980 and the company's closure in the early 2000s.

Little King & Partners was a small independent film production company established c.1950 by three naval officers, Commander Gordon Little, Robert King and Norman Manley-Cooper of the Fleet air arm. The aim of the company was to produce commercial advertisements for the cinema and emerging television industry. In the mid 1960s, the company shifted its focus to medical productions, a strategic move as profits were dipping following the ban on cigarette advertising on television. This was facilitated by co-founder Norman Manley-Cooper, who was working for pharmaceutical company, Smith Kline & French, and in a position to commission publicity material. This led to the company working more closely with other pharmaceutical companies and the medical profession, developing educational film projects alongside more commerical advertisements.

Between 1976 and 1977, Simon Nicholas took on the role of Editor for the "Video Journal of Medicine", a monthly journal of medical topics for general practitioners. In 1980, the founders of Little King & Partners decided to stop the film production part of the company and handed this over to Simon Nicholas, who renamed the company Little King Communications. Over the years, Little King produced films on a range of topics from antibiotics and stoma care, to the use of the ventouse suction to aid chilbirth, and arterial grafting.

The Clinico-Pathological Conference (‘CPC’) series of programmes started in 1975 and was designed to provide the pharmaceutical industry who sponsored their production with educational material to promote discussion with the medical profession. In this series, actors played the roles of patients presenting with various symptoms and the medical viewer of the video was then asked to select their diagnosis from a selection of follow-on videos. The impact on the patient of choosing each wrong diagnosis was explained.

Over the years, Little King won a number of awards from the BMA as part of the British Medical Association's Film Competition.

After fifty years of creative film production, changing technology in the twenty first century led to dwindling demand for Little King's services, with many clients now able to easily produce their own films or productions in-house. As a result of this changing landscape and diminishing profits, Little King closed down.

None expected.

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