Skip to main content

Service Desk in Black

In 1987, at the age of fourteen, I was involved in a youth film-making project in London. We made a short film called "Why?" which clocked in at about 8 minutes, and featured, among others, a very young Charlie Condou (who currently plays Marcus Dent in Coronation Street).

The video went on to win the BBC's Showreel 87 Film Awards,  Judged by Michael Apted (Gorillas in the Mist, The World Is Not Enough, Blink), Chris Menges (The Reader, The Mission, The Killing Fields) and Bob Godfrey (creator of Henry's Cat) with “Why?”, a film about school bullying, shot on video and televised in the Christmas of that year.  As the cameraman on that film I was especially honoured to be told by Michael Apted that he was impressed with the camerawork.

I had always wanted to be a film maker and even did five days running at Scott Free, Ridley and Tony Scott's production company in Beak Street, Soho in 1993. It was then however, that the reality check hit me and I decided that the politics of film-making was definitely not for me. The highlight of that short tenure was to lay eyes upon the original H R Giger drawings for Alien, hanging above the great man's desk, and the large globe used by Gerard Depardieu as Columbus in 1492. Ridley himself was on the phone while I stocked his fridge with beer, but he did take a moment to thank me as I was leaving his vast top-floor office.

Fast-forward 20 years and when the opportunity to write and direct a short video for Cheshire Council's ICT Service Desk came along, I seized the moment and wrote a short treatment for the opening scene of the video, which, it had already been decided by the team, would be a riff on "Men in Black".

Cue the "Service Desk in Black", which formed the "fun video" part of an overall entry by the ICT Service Desk into the Service Desk Institute's annual awards for "Best Large Service Desk". As a finalist, the fun video has to be produced for the Gala ceremony. It has to showcase the team and the great work they do.

So, now the ceremony has been and gone, we can unleash the video to YouTube. We shot it over three evenings in early May 2013, and had a huge laugh doing it. It was one of the highlights of my career to be involved in this project.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Turning Fifty

I woke up early this morning on my 50th birthday. It was as bright outside as it would ever be at 5am due to it being the summer solstice, the longest period of daylight time. From here on, the nights get longer. Sitting in bed with a cup of tea I started to think about some of the first stories I wrote, and a few memories came back to me. The first thing I remember writing was in my penultimate year in primary school, so we're talking 1983-4. Successfully combining two major phobias of mine, it was called "Tarantursnake" and took up a whopping four pages of my English workbook. I remember getting a decent mark for it, but the only thing I could remember from the story itself was a man hanging on for dear life to a pole suspended over a pit of tarantursnakes. In fact, that may have been the whole thing. I'm not so sure it followed any conventional rules of narrative. Later, in 1987, in high school, a collection of us smuggled copies of the newly published paperback of
Post a Comment
Read more

The Path Behind the House - a two minute ghost story

So eager was I to get home to my wife and child, that I drove a little carelessly. It was Friday evening, and I was at the end of another long working week in the city. A weekend at home was exactly what I needed. When I was only a few roads away I rang Juliette. I was sitting in traffic waiting to join a roundabout and she told me she had lit the fire to make the house cosy for my return. She was bathing little Elliott and had allowed him to stay up late to see me. I was concerned when she hung up the phone without saying goodbye. Perhaps she had needed to urgently attend to our boy's regular antics of tipping water out of the bath.      I pulled up the gravel driveway and swung the car in front of the house, noticing that the front door was ajar and all the lights in the house were on. I got out and stepped across the threshold, calling out to Juliette. She didn't answer. From the kitchen a beautiful smell of cooking. The carpeted stairs were peppered with dark drips. The lig
1 comment
Read more

My books are now in Prestatyn and Rhyl Libraries in North Wales

  Four of my books are now available in Prestatyn and Rhyl Libraries. Being an indie author I wasn't sure that they would accept book donations as they might have had a computer system on which they may have needed to be discoverable. Either that wasn't a thing and my concerns were unfounded, or they were actually discoverable on said computer system. Anyway, they have taken copies for both libraries. If you happen to be in the area, the books they have available are: The Tolworth Beacon The Axiom Few The Sapling Method (set in Prestatyn!) The Train Set So basically, and this was definiitely not intentional, they have all my "The Something Something" books. Does this mean my titles are becoming as cliche'd as "A Something of Something" or even "The Girl Something Something"? Maybe I need to find a new title format... Except I am writing a sequel to The Tolworth Beacon which is going to be titled "The Tolworth Something". (I do know wh
Post a Comment
Read more