When I first moved to London, one of the many things that blew my mind was the number of film crews you’d run into on a daily basis. Back in Leeds, you’d only ever see the TV cameras out if there had been a really exciting crime, or if the plot of Emmerdale required someone to go shopping. But down here? You’re actually never more than 10ft away from a production team with a pronounced taste in The North Face gilets.
For a while, I found this quite exciting. You’d turn a corner on your way home and find that your street had been cordoned off, or that your local pub had been commandeered in the name of British television, and you’d almost feel a twinge of pride. Only, as the years passed, the showbiz sparkle lost its lustre and I began to regard these crews first as a tolerable necessity, then as a bearable nuisance and finally as malevolent paramilitary units dedicated to winding me up.
Look, I think it’s great that there’s lots of filming in London, I really do. But the next time a woman with a clipboard icily mouths ‘we’re doing a scene’ and gestures that I should stop in my tracks when I’m on my way to collect my son from nursery, I’m going to steam in like Boromir doing his last stand in The Lord of the Rings. It’s just their officiousness mixed with the belief that us callow members of the public will be so in awe of their cameras and gilets and lattes that we’ll happily stand in the rain while they do take 48 of a man wearing a trilby walking down a cobbled street. Well, I’ve decided I won’t do it any more. Fair warning.
Star buying
I was very impressed by the news that Brad Pitt took two of his kids to the Chiswick branch of B&Q. Camped out in Surrey for filming, Pitt obviously wanted to give his children an authentic British Easter weekend experience, so dragged them to a retail park to be bored out of their skulls. The scene is not hard to imagine. ‘Dad, can we buy a nail gun?’ No. ‘Dad, can we go to Frankie & Benny’s?’ No. ‘Dad, what’s the North Circular? It’s… it’s just a road, Shiloh.’ Suddenly, celebrity doesn’t seem quite so distant. Fair play.
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