My Scottish Odyssey: Part One

I’m presently on a Virgin Train winging my way through the Midlands on the way back to London after three days away. The older I get, the more gruelling travelling becomes, and I’m absolutely shattered. 

My trip started in Newcastle. I felt a great rush of excitement as I pulled into the city. It really is like an old friend, someone you’re always really happy to see, even if you haven’t bumped into them for a while. Every street corner seems to have a memory attached to it. I made two films in the city and have spent long periods of time there as a result. Funnily enough, I’ve always been there during times in my life when everything’s been on an even keel, so all the memories are full of joy. 

The team up at BBC Newcastle are always so friendly: they knew their patch, they know their listeners and they’re always incredibly keen to roll up their sleeves to make great content for the North East and Cumbria. 

Stepping off the train, I instantly became aware of how crisp and cold the air felt. It was a massive relief after being crammed into a boiling hot train compartment which smelt of electric fires and dust. It was so hot that I could sense people panicking. Every face I looked at was bright red and slightly sweaty. 

As I walked through the ticket barriers, I remembered my first trip to the city and being filmed arriving there by the local BBC. They wanted to record my first impressions of the city but were quick to tell me that, under no circumstances, was I to pronounce the city like a Southerner, ie “Newcarstle.” I was told to sound a short “a” and to stress the castle part of the word. 

This was back in, I think, December 2010, which coincided with the coldest snap of weather I, certainly, have ever experienced in the UK. Temperatures dropped to minus 18 in the city and there was snow and ice everywhere. I seem to remember stumbling about in a suit, a duffle coat, wellies and a flat cap, and being astounded that Newcastle folk didn’t bother with any outer layers. Many of the lassies were out in high heels, skating on the icy hills of the city centre like Bambi. I remember asking one lad why he wasn’t in a coat. “Cus me friends would have taken the piss out of us” he said, adding, “I did think about wearing one...” 

Despite the Arctic temperatures, the sun was shining most days, so everything took on a very magical quality. Alastair from the BBC and I went on a bizarre odyssey which involved getting off at every single station on the Tyne and Wear Metro network. The idea was to see what the environs of each stop had to offer in terms of filming locations, but, somewhere on the branch to South Hylton, we became so bitterly cold that our trips to the stations merely involved getting off the train and sliding along the platform into the next carriage before it left again. I remember getting off the train at one stop to explore a multi-storey car park in the hope that its open roof had decent views over the tracks. When we got up there, the whole top storey was covered in a foot and a half of utterly virgin snow. What had been an expanse of Tarmacadam was now a giant field in the sky. We danced through it like little kids, taking great delight in the footprints we were leaving whilst our blue shadows stretched for miles in the late winter sunshine.

I was in Newcastle this time to do an interview with my old mates at the BBC about the UK Jewish Film Festival which comes to Newcastle at the end of the month. My job at the moment is running the festival’s tour - and it’s a fairly comprehensive undertaking. We’re visiting 21 towns and cities across the UK, from Inverness to Exeter, Bangor to Norwich, with the dual-pronged mission of getting films about Jewish people into locations where there are very small, often isolated, Jewish communities whilst simultaneously hoping that non-Jewish audiences will also come to watch. A good film is a good film, after all, and, in an era of growing anti-semitism, it also feels important to debunk myths and stereotypes associated with Judaism by demonstrating what a diverse bunch Jewish people are. That’s the theory, at least. 

Last week, this wonderful job took me back home to Northampton, where I learned that my Watford Gap film is now ten years old. Where do the years ago? On that front, I’ve noticed a whole flurry of BBC broadcasts in recent months, none of which I’ve had anything to do with, which bear uncanny similarities to projects I’ve run in the past. First there was “A Symphony of Buskers” (I made “The Busker Symphony” for Channel 4 in 2006) and then “The M1 Symphony” which sounds fairly similar to A1: The Road Musical if you ask me! Ah well: all art flies up into the ether and falls back down in little flashes of someone else’s inspiration. Ewan McColl made “Song of the Road”, a radio ballad about the building of the M1 twenty years before I was even born! 

From Northampton, I went to Manchester, where the UK Jewish Film Festival is a very big deal. They screen twelve films up there each year, and everything is run with great precision and passion. I was there to oversee their opening night: a screening of the French language film, My Polish Honeymoon, which I have been championing ever since I saw it about four months ago. It tells the story of a young  Parisian couple who go to Poland in search of their Jewish roots. It’s a film about belonging, really, and how difficult it can be when you don’t know where you come from. It’s witty, charming and quite sad in places. 

One of the film’s lead actors, the charming Arthur Igual, was in Manchester to do a Q and A after the film, and I was tasked with looking after him.

It had been a beautiful day in Northampton, but the further north I drove, the worse the weather became. It turns out that the Met Office had issued a yellow warning for the Peak District and Manchester, and I have seldom driven in such dangerous circumstances. In fact, the last time I drove in similarly shitty conditions, I was also in Manchester! On that occasion, there’d been a mega-snow storm, with snow so dense that vehicles were driving at less than five miles per hour. I remember my car suddenly going into a skid and spinning in a somewhat slow, full circle towards the side of the road. My first thoughts were, “that will do.” I got out of the car, looked around for a sign to tell me what the parking regs were (all were covered in a thick layer of snow) and promptly abandoned ship, my body shaking with adrenaline! But I digress... 

After being interviewed on Radio Newcastle on Tuesday morning, I had a lovely cup of tea with my old friend, Helen, who produced both Tyne and Wear Metro: The Musical and the first 100 Faces film. It’s always such a huge joy to see her, and she was looking particularly well. 

I travelled further North after lunch, following the East Coast Mainline up through Northumbria, over the glorious bridge at Berwick Upon Tweed and into Scotland. It’s surely one of the finest sections of railway in the country, clinging, as it does, to the coast for mile upon mile. There was a feint rainbow over the water at one point, then the rain started falling and the sea seemed to turn angry and grey. 

I kept catching glimpses of the A1 Road, which often runs parallel to the railway. The road becomes single carriageway in those parts, really for the first time since the Archway Road in London, which was, of course, my stomping ground until we moved to Finchley in the summer. 

There’s not a single stretch of the A1 which I don’t know, and I kept spotting places where we’d filmed whilst making my road musical film. The clover field on the outskirts of Berwick where I’d had a massive bout of hay fever, Eyemouth where we filmed a fishermen’s choir and where I was when Fiona called me to say she was getting married, the curiously bleak power station at Totness which we filmed from the window of an articulated lorry, the white-topped “Bass Rock”, which looms mysteriously out of the sea at North Berwick, and then, suddenly, the iconic Arthur’s Seat informs you that you’re nearing Edinburgh. And what a sight for sore eyes that must have been for ancient, weary travellers. 

Edinburgh was its usual buzzing self. Winter had definitely arrived up there and my stroll along Princes Street to the hotel was a bracing affair. It truly is the most spectacularly beautiful city. It may even be THE most spectacularly beautiful city in the world. Its castle seems to be made from the very granite rock that it sits upon, almost as though it were born out of the hillside. Pushed up from the bowels of the earth.

The Scottish premiere of My Polish Honeymoon took place at the Edinburgh Picturehouse, whose staff have been profoundly delightful at every stage. It’s a magical cinema, right in the heart of the city, just a stone’s throw from the castle and Princes Street. I was very relieved to learn that the screening had sold out, because it means all the work we’ve been doing in Edinburgh to let people know about the film has paid off. 

I focussed my marketing attention on French speakers, the Polish community and, obviously, Jewish people in the city, so it was quite fun trying to guess who was who as people took their seats! 

I had invited Laurence Païs to the screening as a special guest. She is Consule Générale et Directrice de l’Institut Français d’Ecosse. Having failed GCSE French, that became quite a mouthful to say in my little speech of introduction. I could feel my face flushing ever-redder as I got closer to the words!

The film was very well received and I was lucky enough to talk to a number of people afterwards, one of whom was a Jewish survivor who’d been smuggled out of Belgium as a baby by her heroic English mother when the Nazis invaded. I was so confused when she started talking to me because she didn’t look a day over 60! Her story made me realise quite how much fundamental kindness us Brits have lost in recent years. In both World Wars, when no one really had a bean to their name, we accepted huge numbers of refugees: Jews. Belgians. Poles. And here we are in the 21st Century clinging to our wealth like avaricious lard buckets.