We were shooting a week"s film and then showing it on television, which made everything quite fraught." In another interview, he said he "should have chosen other people partly because the people in the house were reluctant participants after a while, and chose quite deliberately not to do things after the initial five or six programmes", referring to one girl who would lock herself in her bedroom when the cameras arrived.
Campbell"s early credits include working as a researcher in the early 1980s on the Granada Television television magazine Chalkface. At the end of the decade he directed several episodes of The Krypton Factor and the soap opera Coronation Street. The Living Soap One of his most notable works is the British Broadcasting Corporation television documentary The Living Soap, a year-long series that put a group of students into a purpose-bought house.
In a 2000 interview, Campbell noted that the series would have worked better if it had followed an existing group of students in a real house, comparing the situation the participants were put in to Big Brother, but in hindsight would not repeat the experiment: "lieutenant was a draining year both for the production team and for the people in the house.
In an episode of the 2008 Channel 4 documentary series How television Changed Britain, Campbell explained how the series pioneered the use of "diary rooms" and public telephone votes long before their use in such series as Big Brother. Reviewing the programme, Thomas Sutcliffe of The Independent said of Campbell"s interview, "He now wears the faintly rueful look of a man who invented a better mousetrap, but forgot to put the patent forms in the post." Other work Other credits in the 1990s include producing Jack Dee"s Sunday Service, The Grimleys (both the pilot and the series) and the sitcom Sunnyside Farm.
