On Friday evening, I went to the first showing of &Sons at the Phoenix Picture House. Veteran film producer ,Victor Glynn, whose son is a producer of &Sons, invited to me to be an extra. An early scene in the film is a memorial service in the exquisite Worcester College Chapel. Five hours of filming resulted in two minutes in & Sons and yes, I was there in a one second flash of fame alongside Bill Nighy. I took this pic when he walked passed me.
My connection with Victor Glynn?
He taught me screen writing on the Diploma Course in Creative Writing @Oxford. I pitched to him Shakespeare in Oxford, a series of contemporary adaptions of Shakespeare plays a few of us had written. He liked them and suggested we workshop Polly Biswas Gladwin’s take on Romeo and Juliet. This was the resulting film, taken by Philip Hind, of that workshop that Victor pitched to Channel 4… Ah well…. Nine months work organising it. The story of my life…
https://vimeo.com/123886243 Joe and Zara
Without spoiling the plot, in &Sons there’s a theme of Nature /Nurture. For two decades I was involved in that debate through Atam . His PHD was in Quantitative Genetics and was published in Nature. Given the death of Jason Arday, Atam’s experience as a man of colour in academia is relevant. I wrote about it in my memoir .Scientific racism etc Chapter 17 FoL
Victor has had amazing experiences including producing early Mike Leigh films and the TV Inspector Morse series o I had to cast him away on Oxtopia Here is his story.Victor Glynn
Victor and Colin Dexter enjoyed the castawy events. Here’s a good memory ( Victor on the middle behind Morse author, Colin Dexter). Sir Roger and Lady Moyra Bannister were enthusiastic supporters of my books. Moyra said Brushstrokes in Time is ‘Absolutely Brilliant!’ 