100 Faces is born

The 100 Faces film was broadcast by the BBC in the North East and Cumbria today, and it seems to have gone down very well, certainly if the twittersphere is anything to go by. I got incredibly nervous around the time it was airing; worrying that people somehow wouldn’t get it, or would think it was pompous or unnecessary. I was so surprised by the negative comments that the Metro piece garnered. By the time that particular film had finished airing, it was trending on twitter, with the most astonishing number of negative comments! In the case of 100 Faces, however, I needn’t have worried. There was an overwhelmingly positive response and apparently even the newsreaders who introduced the film were brushing away tears as it ended!

I have placed the film on YouTube, and already had a series of very positive responses, one of which came from Sir Tim Rice, which was quite a thrill. I am so pleased with the film, and so proud of it, and so grateful to BBC North East and Cumbria for being brave enough to commission it. It takes guts to say yes to a roving, nutty composer who says, “trust me, it’ll be fab!”

We popped out for some sellotape at noon today, and returned home at 4, having been unable to resist the allure of a greasy spoon and a lengthy trip to PC World where I bought a wireless speaker system. It was the first time I’ve been to a branch of PC World and been served by an articulate young man who smells nice and seems to want to do almost anything within his power to help. As a result, I ended up buying the most expensive speakers in the shop. That said, I’m so often required to play music and films through my computer, that it was becoming quite embarrassing to turn up to various unofficial screenings to play everything through a single speaker because the wires to the other one had been chewed through by my pet rat! Sometimes you need to invest in the technology that makes you at least look like you know what you’re doing.

Speaking of which, Cas the rat is poorly at the moment with an enormous tumour which seems to be engulfing him at a rate of knots. There’s nothing we can do. The tumour will just get bigger and bigger until it takes all the nutrition from his body. He’s too old to survive an operation, so we just have to keep feeding him, giving him love and hoping he doesn’t end up in too much pain.

350 years ago, London had largely defrosted. In fact, Pepys had followed the Duke of York to St James’ Park a few days before and watched in horror as he tried to skate on broken ice. Pepys’ week was a riot of meetings with key London figures. Lord Sandwich had started to trust him with incredibly sensitive information and Pepys was beginning to reap the rewards of his puritanical attitude towards work. Less happy was Elizabeth, poor thing, who was lonely. It’s terribly sad to think that Pepys’ solution was to search for some kind of paid companion. Why did the woman have no friends? I assume because she’d be plucked out of an impoverished immigrant household and dropped into the home of a social climber, who himself didn’t have a natural position in the world. Elizabeth was never going to be accepted by the likes of Lady Elizabeth Batten and yet Pepys had effectively closed the doors on her previous existence, routinely refusing to have anything to do with her parents.