claytoncast

I can remember my excitement the first time I saw my name on a television call sheet. I was lucky enough for that to happen while I was still at drama school. In the 1970s there was a healthy relationship between the Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre and Granada TV.  Quite often the casting department would call one of our tutors. His wife happened to be a very senior producer at Granada. They would ask for a couple of students who already had equity cards to come in for an interview for these small parts. Having gained my Equity card in my first year at drama school as a walk on for the London Festival Ballet as Rudolph Nureyev’s guard (That’s another story), I was keen and eligible. So, I would often hop onto a bus into town to the Granada offices on Quay street That first call sheet on which my name appeared, probably alongside an artist number somewhere in the hundreds, was for a thriller called “The XYY Man”. I was pushing the casting envelope by playing a choreographer...

Slowly the regulations are disappearing and we are being allowed more and more freedoms. Who would have thought that planning a train trip into the centre of town would be such a brilliant adventure? Perhaps that's what we should take away from the past eighteen months. That the little things are worth even more.  Getting back into the swing of things is harder than I thought. Last week I took the train and tube to go for a long awaited walk with a very old and dear friend. We had the most beautiful day with brisk sunshine and coffee and cake in a park and a good couple of hours walking and talking and catching up.  The next day I went into Spotlight for that rare occurrence-an afternoon of live auditions. We saw six or seven people and everyone seemed to be incredibly grateful for the opportunity to be in a room together and to talk. The actual acting seemed to become the least important part of the day. Yet  by the time I woke up on Wednesday morning I was more than rea...