It’s 8 AM, and I’m on a train to… Uxbridge? Oh. Somewhere in Buckinghamshire. I’m going to Pinewood Studios. How exciting! This is a reasonably late start for production, I know, but I’m still a bit bleary.
I’m working as a production runner on the third series of The IT Crowd. Having never been to Pinewood before it’s become something of a myth in my brain, populated with celebrities suckling on peeled grapes in their house-sized trailers while the teamsters smoke cigarettes outside enormous corrugated soundstage doors and buggies maniacally zoom directors from office to set.
I’m not far off.
Well. I am. But it’s a nebulous sprawl of a place, that’s a fact, and everyone still seems to be buzzing from having the latest 007 production in residence. Currently the big man on campus is Prince Of Persia and a lot of the supporting artists I talk to have worked on that as well.
I get through to lunch, and realize I’m having a blast. Pinewood is FUN, I think to myself, grinning like a lunatic as I sprint across a car-park trying not to slosh any of the six coffees I’m juggling over my skinny wrists. Then I stop grinning, because I look like a lunatic. But still. I don’t know if I really expected to have fun!
Because:
a) The last time I was on a multi-camera TV set was as an actor, and the runners never really looked like they were enjoying themselves too much, all frazzled eyes as they frantically checked their pockets for the last receipt they might have forgotten to get and furiously scribbled down dinner orders.
b) Most of us have been there, and while obviously as much an integral part of the structure as any other on-set job, I think it’s fair to say that being a runner is, well, a bit mindless.
Sometimes mindless is nice, and thankfully one is manic enough not to worry about it, or even to concoct this blog, which is scribbled on the long train back from Uxbridge after an even longer day (14 hours? I think?). Hence the scatter-brain. Here’s to sleep, and here’s to next time.
Alex
