Coffee with Peter Oxley from documentary filmmaker to history teacher.
Peter Oxley
From documentary filmmaker to history teacher.
Age: 57
Introduction:
The quote from a Goethe poem hangs above Peter's desk - it’s a reminder that we move forward by getting out of our heads and staying open to new possibilities. It seems obvious but only in hindsight - when in the moment – doing nothing can feel safer than risking failure.
For Peter, the turning point came when he found the confidence to push past his own internal barriers and realise that it wasn’t too late to make a change.
Read his story of moving from documentary film-making to teaching and why this shift was less of a pivot and more of a continuation of the work that he’s always loved doing…
The Interview:
Describe your career path in two or three sentences including any twist or turns ending with where you are now.
I've done several jobs, starting as an actor in my early 20s, which I aborted not long after.
Then for 30 years, I worked as a documentary filmmaker, first with the BBC, from the early 2000s as a freelancer. I primarily made history, science, and archaeology programmes – a genre known as specialist factual. It was a career I loved and felt very lucky to do.
I'm currently training to become a secondary school teacher of history. I'm doing a PGCE at Middlesex University, the course is a mixture of academic assessment and hands-on experience in secondary schools, it finishes in early July, so I'm nearing the end.
What decision and/or experience proved to be the most helpful to your career?
It wasn't a decision. It was a piece of luck - that sliding doors moment that opened a whole new pathway.
I was in my mid to late 20s, my acting career had fizzled out and gone nowhere - I was at a loose end, in every sense and short of cash. A friend who worked at the BBC asked if I wanted to make some money lugging camera gear around for a film shoot on Hampstead Heath.
I thought, ‘Oh, crickey, I've got friends working in banks, proper careers, and I'm lugging camera equipment in my late 20s. Has it come to this?’ But I swallowed my pride and thought of the £150.
It turned out that the shoot was for a series called The Human Body presented by Professor Robert Winston, and it went on to become an enormous success, winning multiple BAFTAs and international awards, setting a new benchmark for science television.
Towards the end of the second day, the director, who had seen me shuffling about, complaining about my back, called me over and asked my name.
I told him, and he said, ‘Aren't you a bit old to be doing this kind of thing?’ I said, ‘I'm not that old, but yeah, it's not what I want to do’.
He asked me what I really wanted to do and I said I'd love a job in television. He mentioned a research role he had open and asked me to come to his office on Monday to chat about it.
I said, great and told him I didn't know much about the human body.
He said, ‘Brilliant. If you don't know much about the human body, that means once you've understood it, you'll be able to explain it to people like you who don’t know much about the human body. The trouble with hiring experts, he continued, ‘is that they can't make it understandable.’
It was a really good bit of advice.
Sure enough, I came in on Monday and I got the job. There was no interview. It was just a coffee. You couldn't do that now. That’s how it started – a six-month contract that kept getting extended.
If I'd said no to that opportunity to lug around camera equipment, my career would have gone a completely different direction.
What advice would you give your 20-year-old self, knowing what you do now? Any advice you’d tell him to ignore?
My advice would be: don't be in such a hurry. Take your time. Try different things. Work out who you are and then decide what it is you want to do.
I'm a late developer and always have been.
There's a culture in the UK of pushing kids to decide on a career before they've had a chance to do stuff. And it's so constricting.
You can't possibly know until you're well into your 20s, because you don't know yourself. You don't know what your strengths and weaknesses are. Your decision-making is shaped by perceptions of what you think a career is like, rather than what you can give to the career and what it might give you. It’s the wrong way around.
Don't be in such a hurry. Experiment.
Where or to whom did you look for inspiration when thinking of making a career change?
It was my wife, Nina, who got me to think more specifically about teaching. She works in publishing in a senior leadership role and trained as a business coach during lockdown - she was a hugely helpful source of advice. It was Nina who made me realise that it wasn't too late to start a new career.
When we sat down to talk, I realised that what I had been doing for the last 30 years was taking quite complex material, topics that most people didn't know much about and repackaging them in a way to make them accessible for an audience, making them understandable, engaging, entertaining.
Nina helped me see that’s what a teacher does, certainly a history teacher. She helped me realise that the storytelling skills I'd developed in my TV career were just as applicable and useful in a career like teaching. That was the lightbulb moment.
What do you think is the biggest challenge for people considering a career change?
For me, it was an internal barrier. It was gathering the confidence to realise that I did have a lot to offer, not necessarily qualifications, but transferable skills.
The other challenge was financial. I felt there weren't so many jobs that I was suitable for and that I could afford to narrow the list down further, so I had to leave money out of the decision-making process. I was lucky, I had savings and I knew I could probably make it work financially.
Has your definition of “career success” changed now that you are in your 50s?
I've never measured my career by success in terms of either awards or salary. When I worked in television, it was all about doing the work. I had opportunities to take on more senior roles, but I enjoyed the nuts and bolts of making films, so I never really wanted to progress beyond a certain point.
Now that I'm in my 50s, I have a different interpretation of success.
Success isn't just connected to your career, it's the whole package, it's your life outside work, it's your family, your experiences, etc.
Ultimately, it boils down to how happy you are. And it might sound corny, but that's far more valuable to me than awards or a fat salary.
So yes - it's evolved.
If, you could put one quote a piece of advice and a big billboard for everyone to see, what would it be?
My mum before she died, gave me a printed quote by Goethe. It was a long, long quote, but the phrase that's always stuck with me is: Indecision is fatal.
So, when you're presented with an opportunity, go with it, because it's only through trying something that we know whether it'll work. If you can't decide, and you're dithering, you will never experience what you might be.
I've got the quote above my desk and I look at it and it speaks directly to my experience of taking the leap and jumping into a new career. I like to think that, in some small way, my mum had some hand in this, that she would have approved. I think she would have felt, ‘good for you, good for reinventing yourself’.
We always like to end with a recommendation so what is your favourite book to read, website to browse or podcast to listen to while relaxing with a coffee?
Well, I did have a little think about this. I love spy novels. I've just finished the last of the Slow Horses books by Mick Herron. I'm up to date on those, and they're fantastic - totally original and achingly funny.
I listen to podcasts often while crawling along the North Circular on my way home from school, and my go-to podcast is, The Rest is History with Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland, whom I once had the pleasure of working with. You’d think after a day of teaching history, the last thing I’d want to listen to is history. But actually, I find them very funny and hugely entertaining and just a lovely way to unwind.
As for websites or blogs, I'm a huge Arsenal fan, and I have to get my daily fix of Arsenal news and opinion from the fabulous Arseblog, which for many years has been like football crack to me. It’s great.
