I’m Darren Knipe

My father, Ray Knipe, joined ATV in 1958, when the company was barely off the ground. He started in sound, and took over from Bill Nuttall as sound director on Oh Boy! His friends included Eric Morecambe and Spike Milligan, and his best friend was Michael Bentine.

Then he was given colour. It was arriving as he took it on. Driven by David Attenborough, who was Controller of BBC Two at the time, BBC2 was the first to pilot it in 1967; BBC1 and ITV followed in 1969. The question was less whether Britain would have it or not, but whether ours would be any good: the calibration, the frequencies, the business of making a picture look like the thing it was a picture of.

Dad was sent to the United States to see how they were doing it, and came back triumphantly saying we can do better. And so he was handed a team, including a crew borrowed from the BBC, to find the way of doing it here. What came out of it was a standard everyone ended up working to.

He had piercing blue eyes, which I have too, and Lew Grade coined him the name "his blue-eyed boy". Not for the eyes. When Grade had a problem nobody could work out, Dad was who he sent for — which is how one man ends up doing the sound, then the videotape, then the colour.

What she only worked out years later, as we reminisced, was why he had been so encouraging about her endless shoes and handbags and makeup. Dad had a photographic memory and no way of checking his own eyes against anybody else's. So he built himself a reference set out of her wardrobe. "Darling, today we are working on red. Can you describe what you can see?" — and she would tell him it was just like the Chanel lipstick she bought the other week. So he created a picture standard, calibrated against a rainbow of lipsticks, handbags and shoes.

The last time they called him out was for Edward the Seventh. The production had the real regalia on set, insured by the hour, and nobody could make it read on camera — the way diamonds throw light, the depth in the gold, the whole reason for filming it in the first place. Dad was at home in bed with pneumonia. Nobody wanted to make that call. They made it, and he went in. The journey to Elstree Studios, solving the problem nobody else could, and the journey home took two hours in all.

He came home from that job, walked through the door and collapsed. A heart attack, on Remembrance Sunday, 1974. He was 42. I had only turned four that July.

The series won BAFTAs for best drama serial and for its design, and King at Last won a Primetime Emmy for its costumes — awards, in the end, for how it looked. He is not on any of them. But it is what he left us: a diamond made to sparkle and gold made to glisten, and everything that took — frequencies, spectra, a hundred judgements nobody watching would ever think about — resolved into light and carried across the air into the sets in our front rooms. Fifty years on you can still watch it, and it still does exactly what he made it do.

Lew Grade won the contract for The Muppet Show the following year, and the story in our family has always tied the two together: that Jim Henson had set one condition before filming could begin, which was that British colour had to be good enough that Kermit actually looked green. Whether or not that is what put Dad on the job, he never saw it.

Losing a parent that early hands a child a set of things most people learn later or never. Decorating, carpentry, electrics, plumbing, mechanics — all of it simply became a normal thing one did. How to read a room. How to make yourself useful. How to keep going after the plan has gone. Nobody teaches you them. On a wet get-out at two in the morning they stop being biography and start being the job.

My older sister was married to the record producer Gary Lyons — they were together from 1975 to 1983. His discography across those years is a world I had a firsthand glimpse of as a boy.

In 1973 Gary and a fellow engineer, Barry Ainsworth, bought a building in Aldgate and opened Sarm East. They had been running a tape-copying outfit called Sound And Recording Mobiles, and named the studio after its initials.

Two years later Queen took Bohemian Rhapsody there to build the opera section. Producer Roy Thomas Baker later called Sarm's desk "a great board with such a unique sound"; in our family's telling it was the multitrack Gary had put in that Freddie Mercury had heard about, and the reason Queen came.

Gary went on to produce and engineer Foreigner's first album, the one with Cold as Ice on it — the track M.O.P. later built their own Cold as Ice around. I remember Mum and me going to a studio near Richmond one weekend and finding my sister and everyone else crammed into the sound booth, clapping in time, laying down handclaps for a Foreigner track — then Gary showing me around and letting me play with a Moog, a drum kit and guitars. The carpet was so thick. And these excitable young men in skin-tight bright red leather, hair sprayed into manes more impressive than Mum's. I also visited The Manor in Oxfordshire, watching UFO make Mechanix.

My first record collection was pre-release pressings my sister brought home, sometimes a year before they reached the shelves in Woolworths. And the memories that went into our family album alongside the normal holiday snaps grew out of her visits home, sitting me down, excited, describing a world even she could not quite believe.

Somewhere in there is a ski lodge that caught fire, and the two of them going out of a window into the snow in their underwear. Somewhere else is a line of convertible Bentleys and Rolls-Royces on an open road, passing champagne bottles between them. And somewhere behind all of it, as a boy who was paying close attention, were the children of these people, who never seemed to be having anything like the time their parents were, and an overwhelming sadness at how vulnerable they looked.

After completing a degree in economics at Aberystwyth, I stayed and immersed myself in the most incredible community. The rave scene was just starting to spread its wings, and I began collaborating with friends, putting on parties — and before long I was a promoter, the first ever to take over the whole of Aberystwyth Arts Centre and turn it into a mini indoor weekend festival, called Module 8 — an alternative look into sustainable lifestyle.

From 1998 to 2000 I designed and ran an event management course at Pembrokeshire College, built deliberately for people the industry does not usually reach. It was successful enough that the college entered it for the Association of Colleges' Beacon Awards, where in 2001 it came second in the Times Educational Supplement award for widening participation.

From 2000 to 2002 I ended up taking over The Palace in Swansea, an old Victorian music hall whose past included Charlie Chaplin dancing there at the age of ten, Lillie Langtry, and the stage where Anthony Hopkins made his first professional appearance in 1960. Running a venue teaches you things no production course covers: that a licence is a living document rather than a certificate, that a crowd has a mood you can feel turn, and that the difference between a good night and an incident is almost always a decision somebody made three hours earlier.

I have since designed and toured a solar-powered cinema, stage and bar venue I named Star Bar — off-grid long before off-grid was a selling point. Sailing a venue under the power of the sun teaches you the arithmetic of a battery in a way no spreadsheet does, and it is where the thinking came from that I later applied to the logistical costs of an outdoor theatre season at Grosvenor Park in Chester, where it cut generator running from twenty-four hours a day to five. That same thinking went into consulting on the outdoor cinema Moonlight Flicks.

Through the years of Chester Performs — the company that founded Grosvenor Park Open Air Theatre in 2010 and became Storyhouse in 2017 — I was production manager on the majority of its productions.

This is where I honed my skills in working with sensitive heritage sites. I was given the keys to the city: every padlocked turret, tunnel and tower to explore, the back corridors of the cathedral to wander, the impact of a Roman road just thirty centimetres beneath the surface to understand. And in deep conversations with clergy and staff, I came to appreciate that the archaeological discoveries of the future could be destroyed simply by banging a stake too far into the ground.

My curiosity about community, and wanting to truly understand the mechanisms behind how decisions are made, became realised when a part-time position as Clerk to the Community Council was advertised in Llandegla, the tiny village where I was living at the time. It is an unglamorous line on a producer's biography and one of the most useful I have. I have now sat on both sides of the table where a public event is permitted or refused, which means I know what the officer reading your risk assessment is actually looking for, and how long it will take them to find it.

Part of my degree was law, and I have taken to government legislation like a duck to water: understanding it, applying it, and educating my council on what powers they have and how to use them. In recent years I have continued that interest, taking on the role of Town Clerk to Clun Town Council, and then becoming a councillor myself as well as chairman of my local parish.

My degree in economics, and my real subject within it, socio-economic history, keeps asking the same question: how communities build themselves, through education and through coming together. It is why the work keeps returning to participation — rooms people help make, rather than rooms they are admitted to.

I am a father of four. Two of my children are diagnosed with autism, and living that has shaped how I design an event more than any course I have taught.

Neurodivergent people are not an access box to tick at the end of a plan. They are part of every audience there has ever been. And the things that make an event bearable for them — a sequence you can predict, somewhere to withdraw to, honest information in advance about what will happen and how loud it is going to be — turn out to make it better for everyone else too. We are working with Lottery funding to explore a quality mark for neuro-friendly events.

There is a version of this industry that runs on wanting to be a star. Talent shows sell an unreachable position to people who will not reach it, and when somebody who did reach it comes apart, we consume the collapse and file it under legend. It is a strange thing to have grown comfortable with.

I witnessed the underside of that reality at close range as a child, and what stayed with me was never the parties. It was the households, and the children in them.

The events industry is heavily regulated in most directions and close to silent in one.

There is health and safety law. There is food hygiene. There is the Purple Guide, which is thorough, and which is guidance rather than a certifiable standard. There is ISO 20121 for running an event sustainably.

There is nothing at all that sets out what an organisation owes the artist standing in the middle of it.

That gap matters more than it sounds. Performing tends to draw people who feel things strongly, who trust easily, who run on the response of a room — and the industry understands that perfectly well while writing contracts as though it does not.

When everybody around a person can see what is happening and no standard obliges anyone to act, everybody is free to do nothing.

So my position is a plain one. Artists are not products. Any piece of work that puts a person at risk in front of an audience, with no duty of care attached, is helping something along whether it means to or not.

That is what the quality mark work is really about, and it has become the foundation under everything we are now developing at Dark Olive: it should be free to give, and never free to take.

None of it is a straight line, and that is rather the point. Events are not a straight line either. What carries across from a nightclub floor to a walled garden to a council chamber is the same set of instincts: read the room, respect the place, tell people the truth about what is going to happen, and leave it exactly as you found it.

My father was the one Lew Grade sent for when something could not be done. That part, at least, runs in a straight line.