(A day in the life of filming ‘The Puzzle Lady’. An upcoming TV series for Channel Five)
It was only 6 a.m. but a craving for toast and a cup of tea encouraged me out of bed and into my dressing gown. I tottered downstairs.
The bread was not where it usually is and, after a dozy search, I spied it piled with other stuff on the far side of the kitchen. I sleepily extracted a slice of wholemeal and then discovered the toaster wasn’t where it should have been either. Nothing was where it should be. It was weird and I briefly wondered what on earth I had done.
Of course I had done nothing. Everything had been moved or packed away by a team of set designers, lighting and sound engineers, directors, assistant directors, guys with masking tape and Stanley knives, girls with giant rolls of sticky tape to cover the carpets, curtain hangers to soften the light and people taking pictures off the walls and wrapping them in bubble wrap. All I did was stand and observe between thirty-five and forty extremely friendly, smiling people working their socks off as they rearranged my house and my things.
Some friends, who don’t know me very well, were horrified when I told them I’d agreed to let a film company use my house for a day. Fact was, I couldn’t wait!
After several visits from the location manager, the director and other ‘arty’ folk, including a group of ten or so who came one morning at eight o’clock to have coffee and swarm all over the place taking photographs, the date was set. There would be two days’ preparation before the filming day and afterwards, I was assured, everything would be put back in place. Did I have any worries?
“Yes,” I said, “My cat, I really don’t want to put her in kennels but I have visions of her wandering in, yowling for food and ruining a scene.”
“Oh, don’t worry about her – we love animals, she’ll be fine,” said the director but had the grace to hesitate, briefly, before he said they would prefer it if I made myself scarce on the day of filming.
Shortly after eating my toast, cars and vans began to arrive in the back yard to unload people and equipment. A food truck appeared and then, to my utter delight, a massive ‘cherry picker’ trundled in. Only weeks before, the exterior of my house had been power-washed by a chap who’d done a wonderful job but he’d missed a weed that was now gigantic and growing out of a chimney. I hadn’t had the heart to call him back to climb up there again so, when I saw that wonderful machine, I felt fate had stepped in. I decided to bide my time…
It was hard to tear myself away from everythng that was going on but not before I had seen the ‘cherry picker’ raise a huge black cloth to block out the sun and then watch a massive lamp put in place to be the sun!
I kept away until it began to get dark and when I returned I found the end of my garden had become a graveyard, peopled with ‘policemen’, the ‘baddy’, the leading lady, Phyllis Logan, (who played the housekeeper in Downton) and a large ‘moon’ hanging (from the ‘cherry picker’) in the night sky.
Film making, I now realise, is the apotheosis of ‘collaborative’ art. The team of artists that ‘invaded’ my house were, each one, skilled in his or her own profession – wardrobe, make-up, cinematography, writing, sound engineering, electrical engineering, set design and, of course, acting. Everyone knew from the word ‘go’ what they were doing and they did it with passion and deep concentration in almost complete silence. They were all connected with ‘Blue Tooth’ and mobile phones, so when the director required an actor to be in a certain place, all he had to do was ‘call’ the actor’s ‘minder’ and the actor would quietly be guided to the spot with no fuss. It was like being inside a working, ticking clock, each person a moving cog.
As promised, the following day everything was put back the way it had been before. And yes, the gentleman who came to collect the ‘cherry picker’ rose, as it were, to the occasion and with a, ‘No problem, love,’ removed the offending weed before he trundled home.
752 words (about 4.5 minutes)
Felicity Graham
Felicity was born in Cheshire in England in 1941. At the age of five she was dragged, kicking and screaming, to Northern Ireland where she (later) married, had a family and has been living ever since. Among other things, she has been a secretary, a BBC Radio reporter, a veterinary assistant, director of a local Saleroom (Temple Auctions), obtained a degree in Fine and Applied Art at the University of Ulster and has recently published her debut novel, “Days of Wine and Wardrobes”.
She now lives near Lisburn with her cat, Wudi.
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