It’s funny how one seems to gravitate to specific locales in the city on a sort of Buggins turn basis. I have spent most of the past two days trolling around Trafalgar Square.

And an eventful period it has been: the opening of Patrick Marber’s Dealer’s Choice, better than ever at the Trafalgar Studios; a visit to the Charing Cross police station to report the loss of my mobile phone; a day in the Sainsbury Wing theatre at the National Gallery to see the graduation work of the London Film School; and the opening of Absurd Person Singular at the Garrick.

The London Film School’s chairman is Mike Leigh, who tells me in a programme break that there’s a new musical version of Doctor Zhivago on the way. He’s hoping that the Sinatra-style title number will be “My kind of doc, Zhivago is, my kind of doc, Zhivago is…”

At the graduation ceremony, the producer Jeremy Thomas, one of the school’s new patrons, tells the assembly that when he started in the business at the age of seventeen, he could worm his way in anywhere and pick up all the skills he needed. Within five years he was Ken Loach’s editor; now, apart from all his British films, he produces Bernardo Bertolucci.

It’s harder to have that kind of training now without going to film school, which is why the LFS, a unique organisation anyway, is so important. It is about to vacate its atmospheric but too cramped premises (where it has been for over forty years) in Covent Garden for a much larger warehouse in the area on a £7m building programme. 

There was some lovely work on view, notably Les Mouches, a half-hour film by Leon Yan about a disaffected French boy leaving London and returning home, and a delightful short, Sight Test, by Joseph Knowles about a myopic young cellist finding her way in the big city. All of the films we saw were technically accomplished and one or two even more than that.

The future of the British film industry and British television (please God) is at the LFS, which is why Leigh is so dedicated to its cause, and not just because he studied there himself in the mid 1960s. Leigh and director Ben Gibson have attracted a new group of heavy-hitting patrons including Tony Elliott, Roger Graef, John Hurt, Hanif Kureishi, Tilda Swinton and Alan Yentob.

I didn’t have to turn my mobile phone off in theatres this week because I’d lost it, I’ve no idea how, while walking around the Strand and Northumberland Avenue before the Marber play. Admittedly I was slightly laden with some Christmas shopping I’d done in Hammersmith after the matinee of Beauty and the Beast, but like most people I check my phone every half hour.  
  
It’s like losing one’s diary. One is enveloped by a state of utter despair and helplessness. Still, the phone was stopped and once
I’d had explained to me by Orange how I activated my insurance and ordered another one — it only took about fifty eight phone calls — I was quite enjoying the sense of liberation at having lost it in the first place.

Now, as I write, the new phone is charging up and almost ready for action. I shall be enslaved again by tea-time. I hope I remember to turn it off when I go to see Tintin tonight.
 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.