Who Dun It?

It's always good when you  have just done something new in your career, and yesterday saw the end of the filming of series 4 of "Him and Her". Despite the extensive amount of television that I've done, this is the first time I have been on a series for the whole length of the shoot.

I can't pretend it hasn't been hard, and I can't pretend at times that it hasn't been repetitive and a little boring, but I can say that it's been the hugest amount of fun working with the nicest people, and a very very talented crew.

It will be absolutely fantastic to see the finished show in the autumn. It being in the hands of an extremely capable director, one knows that it will end up looking brilliant, and having read what are just simply superb scripts, I think that people who tune in and watch it will have 5 weeks of brilliant observational television comedy.

 For the rest of August, September, and most of October it looks like I'm back to the usual run of corporate work. My book is out, and hopefully doing well. People who read it seem to like it and find it not only informative, but entertaining, which was always an aim when I wrote it. Of course the challenge now is not to let that book be my sole literary output.

It's no secret that my passion is whodunits. I devour them. At the moment I'm trying to race to the end of the book I am currently reading as the new Ruth Rendell "Inspector Wexford" novel downloaded itself to my Kindle on Friday, and I can hardly restrain myself from opening it up. Throughout the late 90s I did many corporate murder mystery nights, many of them scripted by Brian Jordan, and performed (in various stages of inebriation by myself) and a team of regulars.  There is a great joy in setting out with a plot, probably 2 pages of script, and the whole evening to fill. The English seem to have another session with murder and it was easy to capitalise on this. One gig famously  took us from Milan in the morning, to Geneva in the afternoon on the Orient express.  A top team of improvisers  laid the plot out in various scenes in the different carriages, and we decamped the whole of the thirty six guest party  at a station in the Swiss Alps to perform the actual murder. You can read all about that in my book, but my one abiding memory is it having got back on the train at around 1 PM, we were told that the timings were slightly wrong and we didn't  actually  arrive in Geneva until nearly 4 o'clock. Unlike my recent days on a film set, where a gap of an additional 2 hours can be plugged by reading the paper or watching something on an iPad in one's dressing room, here this meant two hours more of entertainment hastily dreamt up for three carriages of a lurching steam train.

It was always  best to let people know they were attending a murder mystery.  On arriving at a hotel in Henley-on-Thames one early December evening at a Christmas party for a firm of accountants, we were told that we were to be a surprise. Our faces dropped. If you come out with your firm on Friday just before Christmas to eat and drink at the firm's expense, your major objective is to get absolutely blathered. It's not to try and unravel the intricacies of a plot involving twin Polish conjurors, and a homosexual theatrical agent. Sure enough, no one had any interest in us whatsoever and whole scenes disappeared in a mixture of alcohol and ribald cheering.  I think we decided to award the prize on the basis of whoever had  being the least trouble in the audience. Not an easy decision

I've got my sleuth, I've got my location, and  I've probably got about 25% of my plot.  I have  booked myself onto a crime writing course in September, and my next objective is to get at least two chapters together to show to an agent. So that hopefully when they say who done it,  I can answer…… me!