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Published: April 8th 2008
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Wednesday 24th October £80 was the damage to get the rim and spokes replaced on my bike after the fateful bunnyhop incident. Won't do that again! After work I decided to swing by the West End and see what was shaking. Emerging from the Charing Cross tube at Trafalgar Square I was greeted by a rather surreal looking 20 metre tall Homer Simpson blowing in the breeze. They'd pumped him up for the London Gaming Festival and he was joined by a massive video screen that was showing gaming action being played inside tents set up in the Square. Anyone could go along and try out the latest consoles and games.
Just up the road at Leicester Square, the Odean West End cinema was holding host to the BFI London Film Festival and tonight the première of "Things We Lost In The Fire" was to take place. Halle Berry, being the star, was due to show her face so I decided to hang around for a bit. After waiting for about an hour she popped out of her limo (something else almost popped out as well looking back at the photos) to a flurry of paparazzi flashes and screams
of HALLE! She posed for the media frenzy, did a few interviews and walked around and gave some autographs. As she came by me the fans were going a bit psycho so couldn't get an autograph but I did get a semi decent photo for my troubles. It was a pretty cool experience so I looked forward to going to a few more as there's always a few on each week at one of the three big cinemas in Leicester Square.
Friday 26th October Today I was to be in the audience for a new television comedy series tonight starring Adrian Edmonson (The punk - Vyvien, from The Young Ones). I'd applied for tickets for this show along with a heap of others on-line at a television audience website. I'd made the mistake of assuming the studios were in the heart of London somewhere so when I found out it was in Teddington - about an hour by train, I nearly had a cow. Rushing home after work, I got a Young Ones photo printed out for him to (hopefully) sign and scurried down to the tube station. At Waterloo, I had to grab an overland ticket
Papparazzi
At the West End Odean to Teddington which I managed to do about one minute before the train departed. Phew! Not out of the woods, I sprinted all the way from the station to the studios and grabbed a number from the overtly gay ticket guy.
I thought having number 200 meant I'd get a seat up in the bleachers but for some reason there was a vacant front row seat so I didn't waste any time. A stand up comedian got the audience warmed up and explained the filming process as well as standing by to provide some between scenes laughs. This was to be the first show in the first series of "Teenage Kicks", a comedy based on a Dad (Edmonson) moving in with his two kids. It was cool seeing the part everyone played in the making of a TV show - the Floor Manager, cameramen, boom operators, make up artists and actors all doing their thing. Most of the scenes had to be redone due to a minor (or sometime major) stuff up, but as it was their first show we expected as much. Some of the out takes were funnier than the finished product anyway and Adrian liked to
clown around a bit behind scenes. As our laughter was being recorded, (no canned laughter here) we had to keep up the initial enthusiasm even though we might have already seen it three times. TV screens set up facing the audience showed us what the home viewer would eventually see. After a few hours, the last scene was wrapped up and the cast received a warm response. Adrian ducked out pretty quickly so I handed my pictures to one of the crew to see what he could do.
Saturday 27th October Off to an early start, I had to work all weekend replacing the monitor cables for all 50 of our desks whilst tidying up the rest of the cabling. No mean feat when some desks have up to 8 monitors. All up I'd work for 26 hours over the weekend with most of that time spent underneath a desk. Needless to say, my back was feeling it.
After work I met Emma at Leicester Square to see the last performance of "The Vegemite Tales", a theatre show about a group of Aussies living in a share house in London. It starred amongst others, Blair from
Halle Berry
with a bun in the oven. Big Brother / Neighbours, who was actually quite good in this role. It was a couple of hours of laughs in the single level theatre packed full of Aussies, half with pint in hand. We related to a lot of the shows content and it was comforting to see that we're not alone in our situation.
Afterwards we started walking down to Trafalgar Square, just past the National Portrait Gallery when Emma said "That's Dustin Hoffman!". I said "Bulls**t", walked back and sure enough, the man - Hoff, was coming out of his hotel with his wife and a couple of others. I didn't was to invade his space so I just took a short video of him before we left him alone. Pickle me grandmother!
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Cameron
non-member comment
ooh laa laa
Now that's what I call a decent set of hooters!!!