Shooting day two

Two more days of filming back-to-back and I’ve woken up this morning feeling like I entered a black hole during the night. I forget how exhausting filming can be. Actually, the older I get, the more I forget (or suddenly learn) how exhausting everything can be! I am very grateful to the two days off we now have. There is, of course, a bewildering amount of admin for me to do, but I’m hoping that Keith and Andrei (camera and sound) will get to relax and sleep and look back on a very successful start to our odyssey.

I couldn’t have asked for a better team around me. Both are incredibly laid back yet highly enthusiastic about what we’re doing. They’re truly investing in the project. Banter, as we travel about, is great. We laugh a lot. Keith and I say terribly inappropriate things and Andrei hasn’t yet tried to escape from a moving car! The nature of the people we’re filming - Holocaust survivors, Kinder Transportees, those whose lives were saved by the Quakers during the Second World War - means that our discussions can also get quite deep. Andrei is Romanian and I have become quite fascinated with his stories about the 1989 Revolution. All of this has made me realise quite how shrill, yet hollow, some of the yelling on social media has been of late. Sometimes I think it’s important to recognise how lucky we are to be living in 2018, in the UK, before telling the world what terrible victims we all are. We might do well by taking a deep breath and working out what the word victim actually means.

Anyway, two days ago, filming started at 10am, at the Holocaust survivors’ centre, where we met four wonderful individuals who have seen, first hand, the reason why it’s vital that people like Trump and Putin are kept in check, and furthermore why the UK and the US’s backward step into self-protectionism is so worrying. Brexit has played its part in destabilising the world, be under no illusion about that. But at least, I suppose, we get to measure our apples in pounds and shillings. Philip, Ivor, Miriam and Manfred are all wonderful characters whose faces will light up the film. Miriam had a heart attack just over two weeks ago and yet she breezed in, looking fabulously glamorous, keen to get on with life. That’s the spirit of a survivor.

Faces 16 and 17 were filmed at one of Jewish Care’s centres up in Hendon. Jewish Care have been wonderful help for us during this project. Lisa Wimborne, who works for the organisation, is one of the first people I contact when one of my faces drops out. She has saved the day on more than one occasion.


We filmed the lovely Matthew, a guy with a deeply infectious smile, who is confined to a wheelchair, and a five-year-old lass called Daniella, who calls everyone dude! 

Lunch was in a kosher bakery, which meant I got to shovel shedloads of vegetarian baked goods into my pie hole - Barekas with cheese, barekas with mushroom, vegetarian sausage rolls... I was utterly spoilt for choice, but must learn how to spell bareka.

The next five faces were filmed in the staggering surroundings of West London shul, which has to be one of the finest synagogues in London. Rabbi David was wonderfully welcoming. He is understandably, deeply proud of the building, and the more I hear about what goes on inside, from LGBT weddings to World AIDS day services, the more I feel in awe.

Rabbi David sings in the film, as does a glorious cabaret performer called Melinda Hughes, who kindly filled in for a last-minute drop out and, in the process, made herself one of the leading lights of the film! At the same location we also filmed suave actor, Henry Goodman, Brass family member, Zak Easthop (who plays flugelhorn in the film) and Tahlia Kaye, an Indian convert to Liberal Judaism.

As we exited the shul, London was gearing itself up for the World Cup Semi-Final. We could hear groups of people singing “football’s coming home” and there was a tangible sense of excitement in the air.

The M1 was empty as we drove north. By the time we’d arrived in Northampton, the match had started and England were a goal up. We were in my home town to film our oldest face so far: 97 year-old Sidney Teckman. I want to be like Sidney at the age of 97. Open. Honest. Dignified. Witty. Sharp. Proudly wearing his RAF badge.

We were there to talk to him about the Battle of Cable Street, which, in my view, is the single most important event in British Jewish history. We did a little interview with him about his memories. Not really for anything other than preserving his testimony. People don’t really know about Cable Street. Young Jewish people don’t even know about what happened on that day in 1936. And they should. And we should be very grateful to those like Sidney and Bernard Kops, who stood up to be counted when they were given the chance. Bravo Sidney Teckman. We owe our liberty to you.

It was as we left Sidney’s house to start a journey to Leeds that Keith the cameraman revealed that bites on his legs which he’d got whilst filming the fires on Saddleworth Moor, had got infected. His leg had swollen up and he was beginning to worry. So the evening ended in A and E in Barnsley Hospital, surrounded by pissed-up football fans nursing injuries inflicted on themselves after our disappointing exit from the World Cup, which we caught at Leicester Services.

It was, Keith informed me, exactly eight years to the day that we’d wrapped filming on A Symphony for Yorkshire. Where does the time go, please?