I recently came across this commercial for Wall's Feast that I was in.
We filmed it in the Masai Mara in Kenya in 1987.
I never recorded it and haven't seen it for 25 years. The extraordinary thing about it was that it looks as though it was filmed in a studio, but everything you see is for real.
We flew from Nairobi in an old Dakota,
and set up an enormous camp in the middle of the Masai Mara.
The giraffes in the background were being herded by four landrovers.
The setting sun with the acacia tree for the end shot was timed to perfection so that we embraced at exactly the right moment. The shot of the girl (Emma Harbour) with the giraffes behind was us standing on top of a landrover with a camera assistant waving a small branch in the top left of shot, while the reverse on me was shot at a safari lodge.
An entire camera crew were housed in a tented encampment provided by Abercrombie and Kent, with an enormous support team of caterers, drivers and armed guards to defend us against elephants and lions at night. I had my own tent with verandah, personal valet and shower. It was just like the thirties.
My 'gun' was a lorry starting handle with a it of wood attached -
The ice creams were kept in a cold box with dry ice so that some of the Feasts were rock solid, and some were half melted. When I bit into them I never knew which it was going to be, rock or bleucchhh.
We waited for four days for the skies to clear and for the incessant rain to stop so we could get the shots. Driving everywhere looking for giraffe and elephant, and getting badly stuck -
During this time we played liar dice, to a standard never since surpassed. I ended up as the champion and was rewarded by having iced water poured down my trousers.
Today it would be shot in a studio in a day. In the glory days of advertising, agencies would write copy that demanded we all go off to Africa for a fortnight and have a riot. I was also paid an absolute fortune, that only slightly compensated for the fact that my son Will, then aged 3, was in the Whittington Hospital in a totally frozen London with suspected Still's Disease (juvenile chronic arthritis). It turned out he didn't have it and was fine, but not before they'd pumped him full of steroids and seriously worried the pants off everybody, and it was not a time to go away.
Bloody hell, that was scary. I just opened up Powerpoint on the Mac to go through my show for next Friday, and ALL the text was garbled. I mean nonsensical, complete gobbledigook. I opened up a previous version, same thing. WHAT???
This would mean no show. I was panicking. Then I looked at the text and realised it had done a Caesar shift one space to the right, so that 'Good Evening' became 'Hppe Fwfojoh'. Was it a virus? I opened up other files and exactly the same thing, so at least it wasn't just the version that I'd just done a week's editing on. The fact that the whole program was consistently weird was slightly heartening. So, like you do, I shut down Powerpoint and re-booted it. Massive and huge sigh of relief. All was well.
Well what on earth was all that about then?????
Relieved, Norfolk.
In Outlook Express on Windows XP, I could press "Go to folder", press the initial letter of the folder I wanted, and get within one letter of where I wanted to go. In the early nineties, there was a lot of correspondence with System Operators, so I had a folder called Sysops. Then, as other S folders got added, the quicker way to get there was to give it a unique first letter, so the folder became Xsysops. So then for anything nerdy or receipts or computery things, I could go Go To Folder... X , Enter. Bosh.
So then I upgrade to Windows 7 64 bit, which comes with Windows Live Mail. I import my entire history of emails, going back to 1992. Wow, that's 20 years of email and I've still got it all!
So I start off, Go to Folder, hit X - and nothing! Ok SOME GUY has looked at this and made a conscious effort in the upgrade, to DISABLE this function. Why? Is it saving fucking band width, memory, disk space? No, it's a tiny little function that a child could program, and some dipshit MIT graduate has decided probably a billion people don't need that, it's redundant - they never used the program so they didn't see the need. This then got past a whole host of other MIT graduates, all earning huge amounts of money, in countless meetings, going over every line of code, and decided that it would be a positive, thought-out plan to TAKE AWAY SOMETHING THAT WAS USEFUL! Why would you do that?
Still recovering from heavy sampling of the "Bentinck K50" at Brew Wharf, Vinopolis, to celebrate Kevin's birthday. An agricultural brew that reflects my Aussie birthplace. Very little subtlety and hits you like a rock. It's almost edible. I completely love it. Having some bottled especially, so pressies on their way for Christmas!
I've been needing to do this for years. When my father died in 1997, I inherited his large collection of books, which are all together on shelves downstairs. Judy and I already have a pretty large collection and I've been wanting to assimilate the two into their relevant categories. I've bought some software called Collectorz Book Collector, which syncs with the net to provide all the details if you input the ISBN number, plus it comes with a barcode scanner, so for modern books it's pretty quick. I don't need anyone to shift the books around, I'll do that afterwards, just input them all to the database and note the location. I haven't got much money to pay anyone, so ideally this would be a labour of love, or possibly minimum wage. You can do it in your own time and join us for meals. There's a spare room if you need to stay over. I've got a friend who is interested and she's popping over next week, but may not want to do it. If you're still interested, we're in North London - Islington. Please email me at tim@bentinck.net
