Paradise Exposed: The TV Crew's Untold Stories | 8

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no introduction. There's pure cold-blooded terror running through me. James Christie Miller was the.

junior researcher on No Going Back, the Channel 4 series, which followed the Gaskins to Janik. He's the guy who took that unexpected phone call from the real Phil Gaskin. This guy shouldn't.

exist. That guy's dead. He's in a tomb. I know he's in a tomb. And Billy Paulette was the director.

and producer of No Going Back. He spent months living with the Gaskins and experiencing their.

adventure. firsthand. You don't fire at people in Nicaragua and certainly in that Bluefields area.

with some kind of consequence. Billy and James, hello and welcome to this bonus episode. Hello, Alice. Hello. For over 20 years, Billy and James have carried their memories of the Gaskins' extraordinary time on the Pearl Keys.

No, we see each other a lot. One of the things that's bonded us is Nicaragua. And every time we hook up, it always comes up, even before the podcast. And it's been a very bonding thing in our lives for the last 20 years. And also, we quite like each other.

Yeah, I was about to say. That was coming. I'm sure that was coming. James, can you tell me about your early interactions with Jane?

I spent a really long time chasing the Gaskins. And I was really, really determined that we were going to get them on board. Once I had that first contact with Peter Sokos, and he said, yes, there's a British family. They're scouting on the islands now. It was a really long process.

Just before we came into the studio, you brought in some photographs from your time shooting the series and on the island with Phil and Jane and the family. Looking at those pictures, and I don't want to offend you now, Billy, because you look incredibly young. I mean, I imagine you're around 23 now, so the maths doesn't work for me, but you look so young, as does Will, who was on the island with you. You must have got there and thought, this is bonkers. What are we doing?

Yeah. I remember we arrived in the dark. Nowadays, you'd probably go on a recce. You would have gone there once, twice. There would have been health and safety involved.

Well, I suppose, as filmmakers and storytellers and documentary makers, that's kind of what you live for, that those kind of opportunities are really exhilarating.

Yeah, and I'd been filming with Jane and Phil for a couple of weeks or months prior to this, because there'd been various things happening that meant that they'd missed their start date. So I'd got to know them quite well, and I knew from their characters, and I just felt that this was going to be something interesting to follow.

To land it for people at home, you didn't have much time. It sounds like you didn't really have much personnel at all, in terms of the whole production, but also, obviously, on the ground. Also, no technology. You're not travelling with smartphones in your pockets to either capture things or to ring people. You're going into the unknown and you're also going alone.

All I was given was a great big brick-like satellite phone, which connected to Intelsat, which was the only satellite communications at the time, back in 2000.

Bill at all. And for people who haven't seen photographs or images, you know, this is an island in the middle of the ocean, all on its own. You said to me earlier on,

if you scream, no one can hear you. That's true. It was true. And I did scream. And nobody came.

Thanks a lot, James. He was screaming your name. Yes, I know. I couldn't hear. To that point, I'm wondering when you thought, uh-oh, this has turned a bit dangerous.

Well, I knew that we were in for a kind of interesting ride when we went to Managua and bought the guns. That was not the first time, but I guess that brought home the fact that this wasn't going to be an ordinary documentary film. You don't buy, just go and buy guns. I don't think I'd ever been in a gun shop. But I think it was the casual nature of Phil and Jane buying these guns and the sort of lighthearted larks about, oh, if a Colombian drug smuggler's not given two barrels or whatever he says.

And James, are you back at the office just thinking, well, no news is good news. He'll check back in when he can. He'll send us a postcard. And we'll just see him when he comes.

back with the rushes. Yeah, very much so. I mean, there was no contact. You went to Nicaragua, and that was radio silence. And we were just hoping and praying everything was OK.

real way of knowing what was going on. It was channeling, you know, the zeitgeist at the time was the sick of Britain. You know, what can we get for our money here? Let's follow our dream. But I think on the first trip, obviously, the guns was an indication of something might happen.

playing, you know, having crab races. You mentioned that the kind of zeitgeist was for people having this sort of living vicarious. through watching this show about the idea of living a dream. You obviously got to go and live Jane and Phil's dream with them. You know, you were with them every step of the way.

I didn't find it at all an island of paradise. It was quite tough. The island is pretty inhospitable. I mean, there's one part has a nice sandy beach, so you can make it look like a tropical island. But the other side is mangrove swamps.

And what did you do for water and, dare I say, the toilet?

Water came from the spring, natural spring well, which is why all the fishermen went there to shelter from storms and to use the water. So we would just haul our water up and use that, which was a bit manky. You wouldn't want to drink it. And toilet was just a hole in the ground.

I feared you'd say that.

Was it just one hole? Were there lots of holes?

I wasn't a bunger.

That one hole must have been, yeah, must have got quite interesting.

You used to dig, you used to move it around.

Yeah.

James,

I think it might have been. when he came back, the first communication. I think there was a sense of anxiety for me because we'd managed to secure this amazing family going on this incredible journey. And Billy heads off, and then it's absolute radio silence, tumbleweed for two or three weeks, with no knowledge of if it's working, if they're as good characters as you thought and hoped, and just no concept of what was actually going on. And so it was only when you got back, and then obviously the story started coming out, and there was a sense, but maybe it was going to get tricky, because they were really struggling to build the dive centre.

I knew the dive centre was never going to happen. when they talked about it in England. They couldn't swim. They'd never dived before. Nicaragua isn't really known for diving.

It's sort of absurd, really, isn't it? I mean, if there's no fish.

A dive centre? I didn't think it was going to work.

Obviously, from the moment that you stepped into Harrods and saw these guys, this family, you knew that they were big characters. The Gaskins story had so many twists and turns. Did you see it coming?

I had a sense that this wasn't going to be an ordinary story. Just filming with them prior to them, leaving, the way they talked to each other, Phil being very open about not wanting to go there. I knew there was going to be a kind of tension between Jane and Phil, even though they got on really well and appeared and did, I think, love each other. But yeah, I got a sense that things were going to happen, sure.

And they certainly did happen. And we will be diving into those twists and turns more after this.

Yeah, there was excitement. Whenever you came back from Nicaragua, there was excitement. There was a gathering to hear the latest insane updates of what was going on. And it just was increasingly, you know, you can't believe it. It just got more and more, and.

more insane at every return. I know, as filmmakers, you are almost mentally logging as you're filming. You know, you will obviously make notes after you film something and jot down moments and time codes and things of when something fantastic happened. But as I understand it, you're also thinking, this is a moment that's definitely going in this film. Was there one of those moments while you were filming Billy, when you knew that viewing figures were going to go through the roof?

Well, the Teodoro and Jane scene, I suppose. I thought, well, this is unusual, interesting, and it's going to be a bit of a talking point. So this is, of course, when Jane and Teodoro.

have a kind of confrontation, and Jane has been having a physical relationship, sexual relationship, with Teodoro, and he's also been having a relationship with the cook that's been working on the island. And there's this sort of very strange confrontation. Can you just talk us?

through how that came about? Teodoro had been sacked. He returned with some mates. Even before I knew what he did with the kidnapping, etc., etc., it was somebody you would meet and think, I'm quite scared of you.

And did you talk to him properly during your time there?

His English wasn't great. He wasn't a great chatter either, but I think he knew a lot more English than he let on. And he had this very deep kind of Frank Bruno kind of chuckle as well, but then he'd immediately stop and he'd stare at you. You could never quite get a kind of handle on, Teodoro. He was never going to be my best friend.

look at this thing, come with me and capture it? No, not at all. She was very open. She wasn't.

showing off. She was very aware of the whole process. So yeah, she said, are you going to?

come and film this? There must've been moments that you thought, I feel so lucky to be behind a camera getting this, not just seeing this. Yeah. And that was one of those moments where,

yes, you think somebody may have said, stop filming, but they didn't.

One of the most dramatic parts of the story, of course, is the kidnapping. You arrived back in Bluefields after a break in the UK and the Gaskins told you all about their horrendous ordeal. It must've been completely shocking to hear it and to think you'd just been with them, you'd taken this break, and this life-changing event had happened at the hands of somebody who.

you'd met and spent time with. Yeah, that was an absolutely mind-blowing moment. Not that I didn't believe it, but it was so unbelievably extraordinary, was that not only do you get kidnapped, but you actually escape, and you escape by pouring petrol on somebody and then.

lighting it. And what did you think or say when she said, who'd done it? I suppose it all fitted.

in. Why wouldn't it be Teodoro? Seeing what had happened previously. And what happened to Teodoro after the kidnapping? Well, he just disappeared.

found again. So I imagine the time back on Janik after the kidnapping was incredibly tense and uncomfortable. Soon after that, Jane gives a warning shot to the environmental agency boats that had come to pay her a visit. You said in the series this was the most frightening for you. Looking back now, can you believe you just didn't go home then?

and thinking, fuck. At the time, we didn't know who they were. It was just people on a boat. Only we could see a guy with a gun. So that was, yeah, quite, very scary indeed.

But as somebody who'd spent a lot of time with them and had become a friend of theirs or friendly with them, was there any moment when you wanted to say to Jane, I think it's done now? I think.

it is time to go home. No, because I wasn't there to judge or tell people what to do. And the whole ethos of all of the programs is that we were following people longitudinally over a set period of time. So we were there to not produce them and tell them when to go and what to do. We were following them in that classic fly on a wall approach.

two roles. I just wonder if in that moment, you thought, you know, Jane's just been through this really traumatic experience. Phil is basically incapacitated. I just feel like I'm the grown-up here who needs to take charge. Did that ever cross your mind?

their lives and Jane had to make her decisions and Phil had to make their decisions. I knew what I would do in their situation, but I wasn't about to kind of tell them. It's why I wouldn't make a very.

good filmmaker, because on day one I'd be like, guys, I think we should go home. This is really scary. Let's go. The food's not great and the beds aren't that comfy. Let's just get the next flight out.

I mean, I think obviously nowadays we would have been airlifted out and the shoot would have stopped,

I should imagine, but different times. I, like everybody else, was bowled over by the text on the screen at the end of the Jane and Phil episode, which said that Phil had died of an asthma attack. It just hits you in the gut. You can't quite believe what you're reading. You were back in the UK when Jane called to break the news and obviously you knew he'd been unwell, but did you?

have any indication that things had got that bad? The last time I saw Phil, he was in a pretty bad way on a ventilator machine. I mean, he was having trouble breathing. He was obviously depressed as well. He really wanted to leave.

know. Just an unbelievable moment. Now, there's another surprising twist, which is what I found constantly making this podcast series. There's another thing that's happening that we have to talk about, which was that there wasn't just one Phil Gaskin. There were in fact two.

Yeah. It was a proper heart in mouth moment. It was extraordinary because it was so out of the blue. I remember it was Michelle in the office who actually put it through. It was a key part of the team.

It went to the top.

It went to the top pretty quickly. It was quite a small office. It was quite a gossipy office. There was definitely a huddle. There was a sense of, we need to tell Channel 4..

Oh, thank God for you, James.

But it was a moment. I think nowadays, you have to really detail background checks, work with the police and HMRC and all of the official channels. Everything's covered now.

Billie, did you know that the real Phil Gaskin was going to come to the island with a journalist?

Yeah, because Phil spoke to me. I offered him an interview and he said, no, I've done a deal with the Daily Mail and I'm going to go over there. We didn't have enough time to follow them. Otherwise, I would.

James and Billie, you've been speaking to one man over the last year, possibly more than some of your best friends and family. That's our executive producer, Pete Sale from Forest Sounds, who joins us now. Hi, Pete.

Hello, Alice.

Now, I know you love being on the microphone, Pete. That's why you're usually through that bulletproof glass, just through in that booth, just there. But today, you've made a special exception and you are willing to be on the record and help us lift the lid on how we made the.

podcast. Yes, slightly begrudgingly, I am here. Perhaps listeners will think at the end of this, there's a reason that Pete is generally the other side of the glass.

I'm sure not. I'm sure there will be an always on with exec Pete coming your way soon from Wondery. So you're going to help us take the listeners inside the process. This is obviously an incredible story, as we've just been talking about. We have these two parallel tales running alongside each other.

Well, it wasn't actually me that stumbled across it. There's someone I work with at Forest, we're the production company that worked with Wondery to make this, who saw the episode of No Going Back going out and was very, very taken by it and always wanted to do something in addition to that over the years, and has got to know James and Billy. So it's been talked about for a long, long time, perhaps not in podcast form, but... In podcast form. And then, when I joined the company a couple of years ago and we were talking about it and I was very taken by Maria's story, and yeah, we just kicked around various different formats and we thought that we could pair Jane and Maria together, and that would be a really interesting and compelling way to look at what happened on the Pearl Keys.

And I think it was because everybody has loved listening to it. How did making this show compare to making all of the other shows that you've made? Obviously, I see you through the glass, rubbing your head, looking quite stressed, wringing your wrists, middle of the night, emails, just the normal stuff when someone's really enjoying working on a production. Has this been particularly difficult? Has it been challenging?

I thought my poker face was better than that. Has it been particularly difficult and challenging? These stories that we work on, these sort of stranger than fiction, true crime, or we do a? They're always really, really tough, but this one in particular had its own set of challenges. Firstly, on the Gaskin side of the story, Jane didn't want to take part and we had to make sure because she wasn't in this podcast that we were really balanced throughout and the portrayal of her was not only accurate, but fair.

we would cover Jane. One of the elephants in the room is that we obviously in the podcast didn't talk about the children, and in your show and in the TV show, they were mentioned. Can you just talk to us about why, in The Price of Paradise, we sort of skimmed over that part of the story?

We obviously mentioned in the podcast that Jane had three children and they're there on the island, but we made the decision not to name them or use any archive with them in because they were children at the time. So they were 13,, 11, and nine, I believe. So other people are making decisions on their behalf, whether they are going to be filmed in the show. But now that they're adults, we felt it wasn't really fair to go back and name them and to use archive from them because they didn't give their consent at the time, because they were children.

And James, how has it been listening to it sort of removed a stage by listening to it in the podcast? Do you feel that there's a bit of a redemption story in there, or does it just feel?

like a different take? It does feel like a fresh take on it. I think, because Jane's a very good headline and she's a very good way into this story, because she's very alluring as a character, if you see her as a character.

that era. Something that loomed over both Jane and Maria's story in The Price of Paradise was the ownership of the pearl keys. That's sort of the kind of backbone of the whole thing. Westerns like the Gaskins felt they'd bought their island fair and square, of course, whilst the indigenous and Afro-descendant communities claim that they belong to them. Billy, while you were out there, do you give the ownership issue much thought?

Oh, yes. It was quite apparent, meeting Peter Martinez, who was the Gaskins lawyer, and the fixer, and just integrating with people in Bluefields and having the protesters come to the island, that ownership was key. And there's that great scene when we're going to meet the local mayor and he tells Phil in certain ways that these islands can never be sold, can never be traded. So it was there all the time.

And Pete, for you, how was it investigating Maria's side of the story? Because obviously she wasn't in the TV show.

Yes. So this was an added challenge. Maria herself was so generous with her time, so eager to be part of this. We recorded many, many interviews with her. But getting other people in Nicaragua to talk about what happened and her story and what's happening now was very, very difficult.

something about that. I personally think it's a really important part of the story, which did come out in a TV program, but what the podcast has done, as Pete said, has really sort of shone much more of a light on it and hopefully given it a proper focus, because it's clear that ownership of the islands and land is such a fundamental issue and it needs to get sorted out.

And what about Peter Sokos? Obviously, he's the man behind tropicalislands.com. I did check, it is still available. guys, still available to buy. Where is he now?

So we don't know where he is. I have an email address for him. I did contact him a couple of times to take part. I sent him a right to reply. Obviously, there's quite a lot of allegations against him in the series made by various people.

if you did get in touch. James, when you were dealing with Peter Sokos, obviously you were trying to get contact details of families, trying to buy his islands for the TV show.

Did you think anything sketchy was happening? No, he seemed like a very nice guy. He was very friendly. He was very, very keen to put forward the Gaskins and he was very helpful. And he was someone who got back to me because I was pinging out so many emails and they were just disappearing and nothing coming back from all of these land for sale websites.

like an angel. He'd give me a story. He had seven of these islands to flog. You know, he thought maybe a Channel 4 show. Yeah.

saw opportunity. And that was the way that it was always kind of phrased. And it was the case with No Going Back. It was always going to be good publicity for all the businesses that were featured.

in the programmes. And, Billy, did you visit any of the other pearl quays and meet the other?

Western buyers? We did. So they're quite spread out, the quays. You can't really see them from Janik or Jane's Island. We went to one island.

us to film with him. And Pete, your team has spoken to some islanders too, right? Yes. So.

Marty, who Billy just mentioned, who is from New Zealand. He's a male model. Very attractive man. Check him out. He bought an island.

a solid roof and fish. So sorry. It's a no from me. Yeah. Well, it was a no for anyone who stayed.

there and he left in 2004 and it's all abandoned now. We believe, certainly in recent pictures,

there's crumbling buildings. There are various YouTubers who go to Marty's island now to kind of explore the deserted island, because he built an amazing house with a pool and he brought over, I think he lived in Milan as a quite big model previously in Milan with his family. He brought over, he shipped over all of this European antique furniture and his harp, of which is only two in the world, this incredible antique harp. He kind of had a Bond villain dying. Yeah.

surreal. Yeah. From everything that everybody said, it's fair to say that this story and these islands, they cast a long shadow. You know, this story has been in your lives for 20 plus years, Billy and James. I'm wondering, James, did the experience continue to affect you?

how did it set you on your way in the world? Then I was quite a junior TV person. I definitely rinsed it. I think, career wise. I'm here today.

but do you think you'll ever work on anything as unique? again? I don't think so. No, I don't think.

so. The times have changed. People have changed. The world has changed.

definite one off. Finally, this is to all three of you, I wouldn't actually put this past you either, Pete. Do you secretly have Pearl Keyes tattoos? Sadly not. We should have done, shouldn't.

we? We should have got like a little Janique sign or the chain of islands, maybe a bit like the guys on the Lord of the Rings. You don't have to tell me where you're going to have it. I just think.

it'd be a nice memento. Maybe if the next beer session gets a little bit out of hand, that could.

be the moment. Well, we're in Soho now. There are plenty of tattoo parlours. Go for a long lunch.

Exactly. I mean, Pete, I feel like you need it as a warning to never do anything like this again.

So you're ravaged by telling this story. The three of us are due to hang out now, after this, so maybe we take a walk in Soho and see what happens. So, Alice, actually, do you mind if I ask you a quick question? Oh goodness, go on. So one of the main pieces of feedback that we had, particularly from listeners the other side of the Atlantic, was on your pronunciation of Nicaragua, and I wondered if you could elaborate on that, because apparently it's very, very wrong.

series, stuck to my guns and went with Nicaragua. Now, I will say that nobody on the team flagged that, but everybody that listened did. I'm going with the British English pronunciation, Nicaragua. I will say it's very wrong, but I also don't say Balencia or Paris. So that's my defence.