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It’s hard to believe that we’re only one day into filming. We got through so much today and there was so much incident, but also I woke up at 3am (I managed to get to sleep for another hour or so at 5) and we were working til 11pm.
It was also the first time I got to see the location in daylight and the view from my bedroom is of the grey Welsh sea, a golf course, train line and an old ruined (I am presuming) chapel. The weather was reassuringly overcast, but it wasn’t pissing down like it was almost all the way through last year’s film.
I had jokingly told the director I would only work on the film if there was central heating (last year we filmed in a draughty castle and the outward bound centre we slept in had a broken heating system), but although there is a radiator in my room it wasn’t working, which I assume is a little prank set up by the director.
Last year there was a lot of waiting around to do and then a few brief scenes, but this time (today at least) I was more or less in everything (if sometimes in the background) and it was intense and packed with surprises both on and off camera.
Our final scene of the day saw most of the cast in a hot tub/swimming pool in the garden. It’s one of those pools that you can some in, even though it’s tiny as there is a current to push against. It was, if anything, too hot. Almost like the director was satirising my unreasonable wish to not work in freezing temperatures.
It was a surreal end to a day that had been pretty surreal 24 hours.
The morning was mainly establishing shots with me trying to pretend I knew how to measure things and use a saw, but I came away with all my fingers still attached so that’s a victory. As always with improv there was the slight worry that the stuff I was coming up with was useless and some of it was useless, but by the evening I hit my stride a bit more and there was a lot of corpsing as the cast came up with very funny stuff that went off in unexpected directions.
There’s no way of knowing where things are going and we’re recording stuff out of order this time due to actor availability, so we did three versions of the end scene today - without really having any idea what would have happened in the interim. So it’s strange, but
The first guests for the new RHLSTP have just been announced (the badgers have known for ages) and there’s already some tasty fixtures. My doppelgänger and fellow one-baller and motorcycle enthusiast Charley Boorman will be guesting on 7th March, 14th March I will be talking to Jamie Demetriou and 21st March Armando Iannucci returns.
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