« Songs of Praise comes knocking | Main | The rise and fall and rise of superheroes »
June 10, 2012
Songs of Praise recording - What happened?
I had a good Friday afternoon with the Songs of Praise team in my garret.
How can I describe it?
Pretty much like the filming of Spielberg's classic, 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' really.
Chaos, of course, and all very glitzy and all very Hollywood: Cameramen, sound engineers, large catering combo, directors, producers, assistant directors, executive producers, make-up, animal trainers, chief grip, fight coordinator, the stunt team, script writers, Aled Jones' P.A, my P.A, the P.A to my P.A., publicity departments, set designers, the Los Angeles Fire Brigade etc etc - are you getting the picture?
And when it came to the filming, I am proud to say I only used a stunt double twice. Once for the whole crocodile sequence - during which three extras died...fortunately they weren't celebrities - and the other, for the naked mud-wrestling scene with Aled Jones. We must hope we don't lose that in the final edit.
In truth, it was an enjoyable and peaceful experience with a very civil team of four - Aled Jones, producer, camera man and sound man. They were a professional pleasure to work with.
Squashed on my small sofa, I had quite a long chat with Aled about loneliness and solitude. What's the difference between them? Can you be lonely in a crowd? Does it help to have a faith? What can parents do to help their children in this matter? How do you move from loneliness to solitude? And he wanted to know what I meant when I said, 'loneliness is a struggle against reality. Put down the struggle and you put down loneliness.'
These were some of the things we considered, before I got into my sporty clothes so they could take some shots of me running outside down various streets and from various angles.
I had one or two small requests of course:
'Er, could you speed the film up a bit to make it look like I'm going faster?'
'And please, CGI to give my thighs a little more bulk. I mean, let's put technology to good use.'
Not the loneliness of the long distance runner but the solitude of the long distance runner. A daily gift.
The programme goes out on July 29th which is rather nice because that's my birthday.
The BBC are spoiling me...
Posted by Mr Bojangles at June 10, 2012 10:02 AM