British Battles: Life on the Front Lines of History

Freelance film-makers and photo-journalists Ken and Denise Guest have specialised in reporting from remote and inhospitable locations blighted by war. They have travelled with many different armies in the course of their work; sharing the lives and hardships of the local people. Sometimes the 'soldiers' with whom they travelled were irregular guerrilla forces sustained only by national pride or religious faith. In this context, regular forays into Afghanistan and Cambodia have been a feature of their journalistic careers. On other occasions they have found themselves with 'the big battalions'; at the cutting edge of the high-tech, multi-national peacekeeping operations of the United Nations.

Since 1980 front-line reports filmed by Ken have aired on television networks around the world. He reported the Iran-Iraq war from both sides and covered the conflict in the Lebanon from the 1982 Israeli invasion onwards. He was also one of the few journalists to cover the decade-long war in Afghanistan from beginning to end, making over thirty trips with the mujadhideen. His photo-journalist work has been exhibited in New York and Singapore.

Denise, a freelance producer, teamed up with Ken in 1986 to form Contact Productions: a company specialising in news and documentary work. Assignments for clients such as the BBC have involved them working together on the front line of wars from the mountains of Khurdistan to the shattered cities of Bosnia. They married in 1990 between coverage of the civil war in Liberia and the Gulf War.