If you like to imagine you live in a period drama – and which of us hasn't fantasised about a lifestyle of malnutrition and grossly compromised mortality – I'd say there weren't many better places to don a home-sewn Regency gown and affect your best consumptive cough under a generically olde-fashioned streetlamp.
On Friday, I was particularly excited because Rupert Penry-Jones and Phil Davis were also there filming.
The main cause of my excitement was that for a short time I believed they might have been making the long-awaited second series of Leeds-set legal drama North Square, which my friends and I think of with the same rosey-lensed nostalgic glow as we do the fruit crumble at our university refectory and the days when we could get through a dinner together without an extended discussion of fertility in the over-35s.
I was so excited I trod on a sandwich, which I failed to see in the darkness, and was then thrilled to discover wasn't a dog turd. It had that familiar sense of give-and-skid under one's foot.
Luckily, my penetrating reportage skills were to the fore, and I captured these images for you.
(V.I.G.s = Very Important Gilets)What I haven't captured is the moment when a passer-by asked my gawking friends and I if it was OK if he walked through the filming area. 'Oh yes,' we replied authoritatively. 'You're fine, go ahead.' We were thrilled by this. We did not need a fluorescent gilet to conjure up the impression of insouciant authority and TV gravitas.
13 comments:
How exciting Miss Jones!
My 'TV spies' tell me (ie, stuff I have heard round the Radio Times office, hey it work's for Metro's showbiz 'expert' Neil Sean!) that what you witnessed was the filming of series 2 of ITV1's modern-day Jack the Ripper drama, 'Whitechapel'. Series 1 of which, was quite the rating success last year.
Does your friend know she lives at the site of a (albeit fictional) grizzly and brutal murder?!
Mr T
"My gawking friends and I". Your excitement was clearly great. Don't worry I saw Ali Bastian in the office the other day and my apostrophes went completely out of the window.
Ha! And I had really thought about that one as well. Almost makes me want to use a sad face. Almost.
Oh no, no, no. That was the line and YOU CROSSED IT.
How marvellously you have captured our Friday night adventures Miss Jones. You shall have to visit my fair square again soon!
North Square - it was great wasn't it?! I have visited where it was set several times since (it's a nice place to sit in Leeds in the summer) and quite often think about how good it was - very sad I know. How did you manage to avoid throwing yourself at Rupert Penry Jones?
RPJ is a bit pretty for me. I'm probably more likely to throw myself at Phil Davis.
I seem to remember you having to restrain yourself from throwing yourself on the bonnet of Roger Black's car when you saw him at the Athletics Championships - I can see a certain similarity between him and RPJ. Although, now I think about it - weren't you trying to restrain your mum rather than yourself?!
Definitely not - Roger Black was far too pretty for me.
mrs jones
Miss Jones and Mrs Jones - I am going to search out the letter Miss Jones sent me detailing the Roger Black incident - I still have it somewhere!
Oh god. Really?
We may have been leering over Colin Jackson in a car park. This is separate to a Roger Black autograph incident.
This post has taken a turn I did not expect.
Arriving uncharacteristically (no sniggering) after the rest of our party I missed the full sighting of Mr Pretty. It was all rather exciting nonetheless. I'm not sure what it says about me that I checked the blog for reference to the fabulous cake action of later that evening.
Sorry Miss Jones! You have clearly had an incredible amount of close encounters with celebrities; do you remember the Lee Chapman autograph incident? I think we utterly confused him when we asked him to sign an Islamic Sufi textbook rather than his own autobiography (at his own book signing)! I still have that too (not that I am a hoarder)!
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