Watching Things Get Made

This all started in-or-around 1982 when I was going to college in Dublin and living on Lower Sherrard Street on the Northside of the city. 

I went to bed one night, having just walked quite a distance to find a post box so that I could post a letter I had written. Then, when I woke up the next morning, I found, to my grave consternation, that there was a post box right outside my window.

Why had I walked all that way to post a letter when there was a post box practically within arm's reach of my bed? The answer soon became clear. It wasn't a real post box at all, it was a movie post box. 

Some time, in the wee small hours of the morning, a large movie crew had set up on my street to film a 1950’s period drama. Yellow lines on the road were covered with sand, fancy old cars were wheeled in and, yes, a convincing post box was set up right outside my bedroom window.

And there, in the middle of it all, was a Movie Star. Actually it was a man I had never seen before but one look at him and there could be no doubt that he was a Movie Star. I was right too, he was or, should I say, he would be. Not quite yet. Not for another few years after his day filming on Lower Sherrard Street on the set for a film called ‘The Country Girls’. Not until he had gone on to do ‘Reilly, Ace of Spies’. But yes, Sam Neill was destined for stardom and I knew it the first moment I saw him on my street.

So that was the first thing I ever really saw filmed and it instilled a bug in me. A few years later I moved to live and work in London and I would often travel around the city to watch bits and pieces of movies and TV being shot. ‘Mission Impossible’ at the old GLC Building, ‘101 Dalmatians’ in the middle of Leicester Square. When I lived in Acton, Arthur Daley’s garage was just around the corner from my flat so there was often a bit of activity there. I enjoyed watching the slow-moving action, the method. I just enjoyed being close to the feel of it all, I guess.

My best story from watching something being filmed happened on a Sunday afternoon in London back in about, ooohh, 1986. I happened upon a film shoot while strolling around and, of all things, they were shouting an episode of Sherlock Holmes, that great one with Jeremy Brett as Holmes. They were filming on the steps down to the South Bank from Westminster Bridge and a nice little crowd had gathered to watch the work being done.

Jeremy Brett wasn’t actually there, as far as I could tell. The scene featured Edward Hardwicke, who made such a wonderfully calm and convincing Watson during his long tenure. In the scene, Watson had to descend the steps, looking perturbed, and retrieve a newspaper from a paper boy who was standing at the bottom of the steps. He had to then study the newspaper headline, look even-more perturbed and march off purposefully. I’ve never seen the episode with this scene in it, I wonder if anyone knows it?

It wasn’t going terribly well, the scene that is. Quite a few takes had been done and the director still didn’t seem happy so he called for another. As a side note, it was interesting to see that the newspapers which the paper boy had were all blank sheets of paper except for the first one which Watson got. Anyway, everything was set for one more take and here came Watson, purposefully rattling down the stone steps to where the paper boy waited. 

But he was too forceful. Perhaps the director had asked him to be a little more forceful, who knows? Whatever the reason, Watson pulled the newspaper from the paperboy and ripped it neatly in half. 

Everyone stared for a moment.

I should say that I never speak at film shoots, I’m too respectful of the process, but this was too good an opportunity to miss and, after all, the shot was already ruined. Watson was staring at the ripped paper, the paper boy was holding in his giggles, when the duffel-coated guy at the back gently spoke up.

“Well, that’s torn it, Watson.”

The reason this is such a fond memory for me? That’s easy. Everybody laughed. I love to get a laugh and this was a very good one. On the Sherlock Holmes set, in the drizzle, everybody got a little laugh.

And the next take went much better. 

Stressed

I think a person who might read my blog from time to time would pick up stuff about me here. There’s quite a lot of me buried in the hundreds of posts, mostly in the corners.

I don’t think they’d have got this part though. I don’t think they’d know how very stressed I can sometimes become. 

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe this stress thing, which is such a feature of my life, permeates the posts in a way that I can’t even see. Maybe that. I don’t think so though. My tendency towards stress in my own ‘inside-thing’ and I don’t tend to shout about it very much. 

Hopefully it goes without saying that I know I’m not alone. We all get stressed. Many people get stressed a whole lot more and a whole lot worse than me. I know that. It’s just that this is my stress and that’s all I can scribble about with any conviction. 

I’m only scribbling about it now because I’m coming off the back of a seriously stressed-out period. No, you don’t need to know the details. I've raised the barometer about as far as it should go in this last week and now I’m tumbling back down towards relative-normality again. It’s a time to reflect. A time to look around. A time to try to get some bloody sleep.

Gosh, I’ve made it sound like a big thing now. I’ve made you reckon that this is one of those pieces of writing where you’ll need a flamin’ help line number at the end of it. It’s not like that, it’s not a big deal. Well it is, actually. When I’m in the middle of a stressed-out shit-storm right here in my head, it’s the biggest and the only game in town. Nothing else matters. 

When I was younger, I surfed whatever stress I generated within myself like a… great big surfing person. But I’m getting older now (rapidly) and episodes of enormously-high stress now seem like nothing other than a complete pain in the arse. I  am over stress, completely and utterly. It’s just a shame that it does not seem to be quite over me.

It doesn't happen all that often any more. Every now and again, something will open the door to stress in my head and off we will go. I recognise it straight away and try to I shut it down, logically and calmly. Sometimes that works but not always. A foot has been wedged in a door and logic and calm will not always close it up again. A chain reaction will now occur and then food and sleep and all other such minor considerations will go out the window for a period of time.

I know some people who suffer with bouts of stress see them develop into full blown panic attacks. I’ve thankfully never had one of those. I have my defences; breathing, exercise, I even have a little mantra I repeat to myself. No, you don’t need to know what that is either. Those things help me to kick a gap in the long line of tumbling dominoes in my mind.  I’ve never had the full blown tsunami of a panic attack but, heaven knows, I’ve felt the waves rippling at my knees often enough. 

It’s over now, for this week at least, and I obviously know that I didn’t have to do it at all. It served nothing. It was silly. But knowing that I don’t have to do it and fully realising that it is stupid does not send it away. Actually stress tends to cackle maniacally at shit like that, particularly around 3.15 in the morning.

And when it finally goes… it would be a cliché to say that it is a relief. It is a relief but not an easy, straightforward one. Stress can have me bouncing, mentally, six foot about the ground. When it goes, the overwhelming feeling I get is one of being grounded. I feel a bit like Bruce Willis in Die Hard, in the corporate bathroom, making fists with his toes. Every stone on my path, every weave of my carpet seems more precious and real. I’m back on the ground again. Grounded. It’s a word that has happy connotations but some sadder ones too.

I fear that stress may, quite literally, be the death of me someday. My family history is not all that wonderful when it comes to matters of the physical heart and you really have to be inside my head to fully appreciate how very uncomfortable my own version of stress can get when it approaches its zenith.

I’ll continue to try to be good. I’ll always aim to be sensible and not to get too wound up. But if you hear someday that I’ve completely blown my main gasket, in the middle of some super-high-pressure thing, then maybe come back here and acknowledge that, at the very least, I saw it coming.