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Up at 5.30am like a stupid motherfucker, and I couldn’t blame the kids. I am doing some acting in a film and needed to be in a church in Epping by 8am. I’d set two alarms, but nearly went back to sleep, but forced myself up and was leaving the house just as the rest of the family were getting up.
I’m glad I am not more successful at getting acting work. This job sucks.
I had left some time for traffic, but had left early enough to avoid any problems and was at the church 30 minutes early. Of course I wouldn’t really be needed til after lunch, though I did appear in the background of one scene (with my back to camera) at about 10am.
Early mornings and then loads of waiting around, often in cold buses or in this case a cold church. But the camaraderie of the troupe gets you through it all and I was glad to have the familiar face of Alan Francis playing my brother. He had been in a few sketches in Fist of Fun (including the wedding sketch - so maybe he specialises in church work) and I’ve bumped into him a few times on the stand up circuit.
The film is called Giddy Stratospheres and I play the eccentric and self-obsessed showbiz father of the star Laura Jean Marsh (as well as Nick Helm who is only 13 years younger than me - prompting Marek last night to insist that I changed my first line to “You know, I fucked your mum when I was 12” though Laura didn’t seem keen on the change). In my mind I should be playing the romantic lead (I don’t know why, because I’ve really only ever been cast as perverts before, but YOUNG perverts), but I have gone straight to playing the father of adults. They did at least age me up a bit, greying up my hair and moustache, meaning when I caught myself at certain angles I looked like the old man from the Shrewsbury Pie Pie sketch who didn’t fight in WW2.
The costume and specs I had been given were phenomenal and I didn’t look like myself, which is good news if I am shit, but bad news if I am good. Once we got to my bits in the foreground it did seem to go well. It was nice to work with Nick, although my character is more or less in a world of his own and barely engages with anyone else and Laura is a fabulous actor and the one I talked at the most.
The church was old and beautiful and I was delighted to see the 10 commandments on the wall with the esses as efs, as they should be. There was a font from 1300 and a brass plaque from the 1600s and as I sat in the congreagation I wondered about the people who had put in the stained glass windows or painted the ceiling and tried to imagine who they might have been and when they would have lived.
It was a long day and I was one of the last to leave and I don’t think I’d like this to be my daily routine (though had I charged my computer or brought a charger with me I could have got some work done). It’s really fun to spend a couple of days on something like this though.
Into London tomorrow for my other scene. The moustache stays for now.
And it was another of those days where it felt like things might be moving in my direction (they happen about once a decade and they never are) as there was probably my best week on Taskmaster, in that I did OK in the tasks and was also funny and the acting challenge was probably my finest moment on the show, though the face of the girl lost in the woods might trump it. Luckily they cut a fair deal of Greg’s riffing about me being a wanking man in a bush. Though there is still quite a lot of it left.
Once again I lost a task by fractions of a second. This one a studio task, but even so (SPOILERS) I won another episode and also made up the 10 point deficit that I started the episode with against Daisy and found myself one point in the lead for the whole series. Will I be able to push through for the win? Or will I fuck it up? You will know in two weeks.
And then my guest spot on the Russell Howard show was broadcast on Sky straight after Taskmaster. You can’t get me off the fucking telly. The only thing that can stop me is my film career meaning I don’t have the time for the old idiot’s lantern.
