Further Under the Duvet Read Online Free PDF Page B

interested, of course, and I’ve no reason to believe he might be. I think it might be my Giant’s Causeway teeth.)
    First written for Penguin Books’ website, 2002
.

Action!
    Film sets are exciting places. There’s the chance of clocking (hopefully) famous actors without their make-up on, or of seeing stars slipping into another star’s caravan for sexual jiggery-pokery. There’s even the opportunity to feel part of the creation of something wonderful, if you’re that way inclined. But what most people don’t realize is that the best thing about film sets is the on-set catering.
    Food is central to the cinematic process, and the catering is as much for the massive team of techies (cameramen, soundmen, etc.) as for the actors. Long, intense days, spent under boiling-hot lights, doing the same thing over and over and over again until it’s right – if they didn’t get regular nosh, they’d be hitting the deck like Victorian ladies who’d been flashed at.
    I happen to be furnished with this insider knowledge because when a film was made of my novel
Watermelon
and I got to visit the set, I was given the choice of – get this –
three
delicious hot lunches and when I couldn’t choose between banoffi pie or apple crumble and custard for dessert, they gave me both. Then mid-afternoon, there was the mother of all tea breaks. You’ve never seen anything like it: hordes of techies and extras, desperate for a sugar kick, descended on the catering shed where cake and biscuits were being dispatched like famine relief at a Red Cross feeding station. The cateringteam were barely able to tear the cellophane off the boxes of biscuits and cakes to keep pace with demand. And such high-quality confectionery! Chocolate Swiss rolls, Battenburg, fruit cake and the big tins of chocolate bikkies that only ever normally appear at Christmas time. You know the ones I mean – they contain at least two biscuits individually covered in gold foil. (One is usually mint cream and the other orange cream, which I find a bit of a let-down, but still.)
    So when news reached me that one of France’s best-known film-makers (Christian Clavier) was going to make a – French – film of another of my novels (this time
Last Chance Saloon
), my first thought was not of winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes but of what I’d get fed when I visited the set. If an Irish catering crew could manage to pull off such delicious nosh, just think of what the French and their culinary skill would produce. Foie gras all the way, was the conclusion of everyone I spoke to. Boeuf bourguignon, crème brûlée, tartes Tatin, crêpes, cheeses so powerful they could almost sing and dance… Excited? Bien sûr!
    Finally the food-filled mist dispersed and I realized what an honour it was to have a book chosen to be made into a French film. As an intellectual friend said, ‘Everyone knows the French make the best films in the world.’
    And although I agree, to my shame I am woefully ignorant of French film. This is because
    a) I am not French
    b) er… um… actually I’ve no other excuse.
    But I’ve seen enough to conclude that they are mostly about beautiful pouty girls called Solange, wearing extremely redlipstick, brazenly parading around in their pelt and having sex at the drop of a chapeau (hard to believe that France was a Catholic country, how come they escaped the guilt?), while men called Serge, wearing black polo-necks, slim-fitting trousers and unfeasible sideburns, pace the bedroom, smoking millions of fags. The films always seem to be shot in extremely depressing bluish light and dialogue is sparse but meaningful. ‘L’amour est mort.’ ‘La vie, la mort – quelle différence?’ Er, oui, exactement…
    Suddenly I was wondering why they’d picked
Last Chance Saloon
. For starters it’s a comedy and I wasn’t aware of many funny French films. I know those
Monsieur Hulot
yokes are classified as comedies but they’re as funny as being savaged by a