Earlier on this week I was in a little place called Darwen in Lancashire working on Heston Blumenthal's new series for Channel 4. For this particular episode he was celebrating the great British tradition of the tea break. This involved having Heston arrive perched on a giant tea pot, lowering an enormous tea bag into it which I had spent hours stitching up the day before, and then dunking a child sized chocolate and caramel biscuit into a giant tea cup (the biscuit was literally the same height as a small child). Here are a few photos from the day which were taken by my friend Thomas Glover.
Would you like a biscuit with your tea sir? I'll just call 5 other people over to help me carry it to your table.
Have a break, have a Heston's Dunkgestive.
Mr Blumenthal arrives on the back of a truck accompanied by a giant tea pot
More exciting than the Queen rocking up to the party, at least Heston gives you unlimited cups of tea and biscuits!
And for my next trick...
...I will need some assistance from my rather oversized teabag
At the beginning of the year I did a two week work experience placement at Red Production Company. I was helping out with a variety of different programmes that were in production at the time, mainly doing office based work but I also managed to get on set for a day. They were producing a series of short films for BBC Learning entitled Life Stories to highlight a variety of relationship and friendship issues which will be shown in schools as part of PSHE lessons and I was helping out as a floor runner.
My job on the day was to make sure all the children, chaperones and crew were happy and to ensure the cast were at the right place at the right time (make up/wardrobe/set etc). It was also my job to queue the children onto the set at the right time and generally help out with whatever needed doing. It was really great to be working on children's based content again and all the kids were absolutely fantastic and the crew were bloomin lovely. I was also highly impressed with the fact they had a catering van on location, which when you've been working on low budget indie films, you tend to get very excited about things like that and believe it to be the highest form of luxury. Not only did the catering van provide hot lunches and snacks throughout the day but when I arrived at 7am on the Saturday that we were filming, I was informed that breakfast was also included, a pick n mix hot breakfast butty with all the trimmings to be precise...heaven!
Anyway here is the finished video, it's a lovely little story about two school friends and it's a great feeling to watch it back and know that I played a part in creating it.
