Day 3 - Saturday 27th September: Exteriors

We meet Tony at the far end of Roman Road, and walk to the middle, where the first bit is – the walk through the market – and then the spiel to camera, while two Gay guys watch from a balcony, calling encouraging things.

Then come the first of the three Cockneys; Tony points the camera at a stallholder, I give him the line, and he’s perfect. The second one is more challenging; we have to wait until someone’s less inhibited younger sister can reach us in order to say ‘You’re pulling my leg’ (during which time, I try to enlist the participation of a very impressive Sikh, only to discover that he doesn’t speak English), but it’s the third line, ‘Well, stripe me pink’ that gives the trouble.

Maybe it’s just the time of day, or the place we’re standing, or Tony putting me on the spot over being the one with the dramatic bg, who’s obviously going to be able to charm droves of Cockneys into doing what we want, but the only two who will stand still for anything like long enough are a druggy looking bloke with dreads and an ageing crone, neither of whom can act.

Convincing ourselves that we’ll sort it in the edit, Tony and I depart to get the railway bridge over Coborn Road (which means carefully avoiding a little girl in a fairy costume, because you know what people are like) and the bit in front of Bow Road tube station, making notes to self that the traffic noise will come off in the edit.

We eat in a kebab shop on the end of Roman Road, during which time it goes dark.

Drive to the top of Fairfield Road, and get a shot looking down Douro Street, with Ginny as one of the distant pedestrians. It looks like proper old East End, having not been infested with plastic shops and tarmac, and as such is lovely, but back in the day that it was all like this, the East End enjoyed poverty on a par with Dublin, so we must limit our nostalgia. (Peter Birch later says, very kindly, that we have managed to make the East End look far dodgier than it really is, as in reality these days its all ‘arts students in Shoreditch talking about ciabatta and fine ham’).

Ditto for the old Bryant and May Match Factory (we wait five minutes for a train to cross the railway bridge); back in the day, this was the place that Match Girls caught ‘Phossy Jaw’ as a work-related ailment, and eventually went on strike – and won. We start the shot as the train goes over the bridge, and completely by chance a pedestrian walks by; aren’t we lucky?

Pausing to shoot Bow Bus Garage (which we don’t use in the end), we then drive to Bethnal Green to get the LCPS locating shot.

The location is a former school in Bethnal Green, and the CU of Prescott in his car is filmed in front of it, not outside the kebab shop – to minimise traffic noise – and with a hand held, battery powered, light.

But we used the battery doing the CU, so by the time we get to the loc shot, the juice has run out; we tell ourselves we can fix it in the edit and press on.

Finding a Kebab shop that will fit with the ‘being outside the school’ illusion that we want to create has taken some doing, and the fastest way to blow our chances is to ask and get told ‘no’, and ‘no’ could arise for any kind of reason, so once we have waited five minutes for the family in the four wheel drive to bugger off out of the parking space we need, we work very fast, hastily applying the sign, then doing the pan, retrieving the sign, and then and driving away very fast.

Traffic is shit, and when we finally get to Greenwich we discover that the wonderful angle we’d previously found on the Dome and Canary Wharf, will only work from the top deck of a bus, so Tony (making something of a point of his lack of vertigo) stands on top of a Telecom junction box and films it like that.

Ginny and I get the tube back to Enfield; it was all so much simpler when I lived in Stamford Hill.