Mashing it

Finally, today, I get to mash through the edit. Which turns out to involve writing more notes that splicing scenes together. We’ve got one last day of interviewing coming up and need to figure out what links, if any, are required to join the sequences together.

Before all that was the catch up.

A couple of days back our boy had sent us the second of his book proposals to read through and comment on. Normally I would have dived in and re-written the thing rather than list suggestions but given our time constraints the latter took effect.

Three pages of notes and a gander around related internet sites and that was sent off. Given that he had been at the birthday party we had to cry off from attending I doubted I would get a reply today, or even possibly tomorrow. But it was out the way.

After that a nose through the Sunday papers online because I just couldn’t be bothered to walk up the road and physically get them, and a sit down to some inept rolling news spewing from the television.

Certainly not unaware of current events around the world, it had been more palatable when I had a hammer or a power tool in my hand because I could wallop nails and screws. Without that option I was just left to grind my teeth and grip the chair until my knuckles showed white through the tan.

Back in the early 1990s I worked for a short while at a documentary company set up by some ex-BBC ass-clowns. In fact BBC Pebble Mill, which made it worse.

The couple were also Jamaican, which meant that as soon as their next round of documentary proposals were turned down they blamed the commisioning editors for being racist. The fact that the proposals were rubbish simply never came into the equation.

Which brings us to the Israelis. I sympathise with the plight they have been through, and the horrors that befell them during the Second World War but... what the fuck is wrong with these people, and why is everyone letting them get away with it?

Time for a UN declaration that says once this mess is eventually cleaned up, if the Israelis ever find themselves on the receiving end and attempt to play their Holocaust card again, they get the living shit beaten out of them. We’re sorry about the centuries of persecution. We’re sorry that when Moses crossed the Red Sea he turned left instead of right, which meant the Arabs got the oil and the Jews were left with the orange juice. But for fuck’s sake!

Talk about the abused becoming the abusers. It’s a classic transference*. Since Israel has America by the balls, and therefore Britain by default, they can get away with murder. I’m not flying the flag for Hezbollah, but you don’t get terrorists by systematically flattening the country they are hiding in. The Americans should have told them that. Although they’re too busy rearming the Israeli army.

So much for a relaxing Sunday. Although there was some comic relief in the news reports of the 007 stage at Pinewood burning down, again. Obviously there weren’t enough people working on site to be interviewed so a couple of real munters from a visual FX studio who had nothing to say and took a long time saying it.

Still, the reportage proved better than some of the websites. Even after the original news items were expanded upon as the day wore on, they didn’t get any better. The same witness cropped up on the Sky News site (explaining “It was a very big fire,”) and the BBC website, announcing that the stage had been “completely on fire.”

As precise as the comments were in describing a big building on fire, it obviously wasn’t quite enough to fill out the story. Which mean that the weekend staff rolled into action.

According to the Sky News report:

‘It is not the first time that a James Bond set at Pinewood Studios has been damaged by fire.

In 1984 an explosion ripped through a corrugated steel building built in 1976 for The Spy Who Loved Me and also used to shoot four Bond movies.’

The corrugated steel building in question would be the 007 stage, burnt down during the filming of Legend.

The BBC article proudly announced:

‘Pinewood - which began life in 1935 - has a long association with the Bond films, starting with the first movie Dr No in 1962.

It merged with Shepperton Studios in 2001 and attracts a range of films of varying budgets.

Together with Ealing, the three studios have formed the backbone of the British film industry for 70 years.’

Which would actually be Elstree. Still, it began with the right letter of the alphabet. Bless.

And after all that I got down to some work.

* Although specialists are eager to point out that transference is common, in fact it is not always the case. Not everything works the way it’s supposed to. They say that women sexually abused as children become frigid. One of my ex-girlfriends had been interfered with when she was a child. She was absolutely gagging for it.