claytoncast

On mornings when I’m filming, early starts are almost de rigeur. You wait in the previous night to receive a text message from the second assistant director as to what time your car, or as is increasingly likely these days your shared transport, will be arriving. You take a moment or two to marvel at whose decision it is that it will take over 75 minutes to get from where you live in south-east London to Wimbledon at 6 AM and you set your alarm for an early start. On other days, I don’t see those hours in the morning. Yet often they are hours when I might have woken and be lying in bed trying to snatch an additional sixty minutes of shuteye. Given the change in my domestic arrangements of late, I have at least three mornings each week when I wake at home alone. There is no reason then for me to go back to bed should I stir during these early hours. In fact one morning a couple of weeks ago I did go straight into the kitchen and make myself a cup of tea at 6:30 AM and wit...

I remember with huge excitement first time I was going to be on the television.  My appearance on the box of dreams in the corner of the living room  as a 14 year old boy was when I won a competition on the children's television programme  Magpi e (the ITV version of Blue Peter ) to interview Diana Rigg. I had submitted three questions I would like to ask her, and so accompanied by my mother, a day out to the studio involved an early morning train from Rotherham, a chauffeur driven car from St Pancras to the Thames television  Studios in Teddington. a casual meeting with the renowned Edward Woodward (then very famous as Callan) in the canteen, a new purple shirt specially bought for the occasion from Sexy Rexy's in Rotherham, and an appearance on live television interviewing Diana Rigg. This was before the age of the video recorder so I've never really had the chance to see it. It made the headlines, well the third page of the Sheffield Star anyway, in that time ra...