Life’s too Short - If you’re working for the Beeb
Finally got to fast forward through the episode of Life’s Too Short (or Little Humour, as Private Eye call it) which featured our church pews. This was no laughing matter, I can tell you.
The pews were needed to dress a scene in which Warwick Davis asks a priest if his religion condones masturbation. The answer being no, Warwick walks out. Not surprisingly no Catholic churches wanted to donate space for this 2 minute gag, so an empty church property was found and then furnished from scratch. Our 30 odd pews, which are hardly visible, were there to validate the space in front of the shot. We supplied them flatpacked and numbered and forgot all about it until the day before the shoot when a panicked prop person phoned us and said the four BBC carpenters had pronounced the reassembly of our pews as ‘impossible’. We weren’t going to be paid, the scene was ruined, etc etc. We rushed our carpenter over to the location where he immediately started to knock them together. The MDF jockeys who were there obviously realised this was making them look pretty bad and there then followed hours of quasi-sabotage, bureaucracy and stone walling to try and make him fail. People with clip boards took him away for long Q&A sessions on Method Statements and Health and Safety Regs. Only one person was prepared to lend a hand; the other chippies mysteriously disappeared. If other people turned up it was to hinder and to try and slow him down. Despite this, our chap managed to make up nearly all the pews pretty much unaided by the end of the day. Private Sector 1, Public Sector 0.
And no, the joke wasn’t that funny. I liked ‘Extras’ though.
