Continuing the series about Unusual Friends - TV crews and Movie makers
Many of you will have seen the TV program that Spanish Television put out with the title Destino España, on which I was featured a few years ago. What is less well known is that there were two men behind the scenes who shot the footage and who became friends for a while. They were from a company that made these programs for Spanish Television, we shall call them Manu and Alberto. One of them was the camera expert and the other was the interviewer and the contents manager. It took quite a few weeks of organising the date of the recording and they spent a full day with me, with several hours of filming to make the 7 minute section in which Marisol and I appear.
One of the curiosities was that when we went to the beach to record the bit on Cart Sailing, there was some fog and no wind! Now without the wind it was impossible to go with the Cart, yet you see me moving in the video. It is just about audible when someone in the video says 'Today the wind is red'!
That was because one of them who was wearing a red jacket, would push me for a while and the other would try and record trying to keep the pusher out of the frame.
At another moment in the recording we met a group of friends at a bar in Laredo. They had told me to invite some friends and that we would show up and say hello and have a little recording session. When they saw about 20 or more friends at the bar, they told me that they had intended for me to invite 2 or 3 friends. Of course believing that Spanish Television had immense resources my friends were consuming large quantities of drinks, however the poor TV crew were not willing to pay large sums. A suitable compromise was reached with the generosity of the Bar owner, who belongs in my post about the Bar staff.
I should add that for weeks we could not walk down the road without someone pointing us out, or coming up to us to congratulate us. Some weeks later when at the end of our Camino de Santiago walk we arrived at Santiago de Compostela, and queued up to have our 'pilgrim credential' stamped, the agent looked up from his desk and said 'Oh, I know you! You are from Cantabria, right? And you were on that TV program'.
Talking about the Camino, this year on another section of the walk, I was interviewed by a different TV crew. This time also there were the two people, but the difference was that the talker was a woman.
Some years before when we lived in England, a film maker who I think went by the name of Sushil, asked if he could make a film about a group of artists of which Marisol was a member. We (I say we because I was the IT advisor for all things electronic) had a few meetings with him to decide what locations he would use, and the group being about Spanish Artists in London, one of the locations we chose was Westminster and the Parliament. We decided to make a section of the video across the river with the Houses of Parliament visible in the background.
We had only been working a few minutes when two police officers showed up and asked if we had permission to film in the area. Obviously not. We had to pack it in and to make it even more eventful they decided to do a 'Stop and Search' on my backpack and gave me my first (and last) Form 5090.
Fortunately it said 'Name check revealed no trace'.
Sushil never completed the project and we all had cold feet.
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