We were filming a driving scene today, on a special private road circuit somewhere in Surrey. The TV show Spooks were also filming there. It made a nice change to be out of the cramped house we've been filming in and on the open road, but I was quite nervous about it as I was required to do some driving and the car I was in was a manual and I am used to driving an automatic car. It's been well over a decade since I have had to use gears and I was worried I would have forgotten what to do.
Luckily in the morning the car was on a low loader, which means it was being pulled and steered by a truck in front, where the cameras were also placed.
Basically you sit back and the car drives itself, like you are a Knight Rider. It is quite surreal to be sitting in a car with the steering wheel turning by itself (it is what I imagine the people of the future will experience all the time) and you have to resist the temptation to grab the wheel and steer against it or everything gets screwed up.
Before lunch a nice man took me out for a drive to make sure I was up to it, and I seemed to remember what I was doing. But this was without the pressure of a film crew in front of me and several cars behind me and stunt drivers coming the other way as I careered over the white lines due to my passenger interfering with me by performing a sex act that can not be described on a family website - a hand job which develops into a blow job. Now you're going to watch aren't you? Don't worry, you don't get to see nothing. That will come later in my career.
Ironically my character complains about what is going on, fearing for his life as he can't "multitask". Ironic because I found myself bamboozled by the amount of things I had to be thinking about and my driving really went to pot. This was mildly amusing to begin with, but then I stalled on a hill just as we were about to do an important shot. I had attempted a couple of hill starts while practising, but now under pressure, with the camera truck moving away from me and five or six cars in procession behind me, I began to panic and stalled again and again. Getting hotter and hotter and redder and redder and with my clutch control proving very inept I thought I was never going to get started again. Finally with a little push from the assistant director I was off, but the inside of the car now smelled of smoke and I worried i had damaged the gear box or the hand brake with my inexperience. We didn't get the shot we required which meant we had to go again and daylight was diminishing and it kept raining. I felt very embarrassed by my poor driving and was transported back to the old days where I was a nervous driver and had a driving instructor who practically told me that I couldn't even drive.
Once you've lost your confidence with something like this it is very hard to get it back quickly and i fear that we didn't manage to get a good version of the ambitious and amusing shot were attempting.
It took me several hours to recover from this mortifying experience, but hopefully it wasn't an entirely wasted day.
Good news for DVD fans. The slightly poor quality recording of my show "The Twelve Tasks of Hercules Terrace" is now available from those good people at Go Faster Stripe for a very reasonable eight pounds plus packing and postage. And you also get a free programme from the show. Go Faster didn't film this show and the production, whilst perfectly watchable isn't up to their usual high standards. Hence the slight price reduction. But you can hear and see everything and it's well worth the sticker price. And if this sells well then it will augur well for release of future shows, so please support it, by visiting
the Go Faster Stripe website. And spread the word about this to anyone you think might be interested.
