Brideshead Revisited

Commercial Television’s most lavish and expensive adaptation of a literary classic is to be screened this Autumn and amongst its galaxy of ‘stars’ is to be BP’s 1917 Caledon petrol lorry. Filming for the thirteen part serialisation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited took over two years to complete and was reputed to have cost £6 million.

It should have been ready in a year but was delayed by the ITV strike, which lead to several actors taking outside filming and theatrical jobs. When the strike ended, several, including Brideshead’s narrator Jeremy Irons, were involved in other films and could not get back to Granada’s locations for several months.

The BP Caledon was the oldest and largest of the half dozen commercial vehicles used in the series and was booked by Motorhouse Hire of Milton Keynes to be in Manchester for a week in January to take part in the 1926 General Strike scenes in Brideshead Revisited. As the Caledon’s custodian I was on hand to keep it clean and see that it ran well. I arrived on the set at seven o’clock on a cold and rainy Monday morning last January (TV men start early to catch all the available hours of daylight) ready to show a film ‘extra’ how to work its controls. He was one of the specialists whose role in films is to drive whatever is being used ‘in frame’ and as a result has to be a member of Equity. Fortunately for me he took one look at the open cab of the Caledon and at its antiquated controls and refused to have anything to do with it! Before I knew what was happening I had been whisked off to the makeup department where my hair was shortened to Twenties style (the standard fee for this indignity was £6 and I nearly lost my beard too, which would have been another £20 in my pocket!). Then suitably dressed in stripy suit and trilby I was whisked back to the Caledon and told to follow a taxi which would lead me to the scene of the day’s ‘shooting’.

The taxi driver unfortunately did not appreciate that the Caledon’s acceleration is rather pedestrian and its handling in heavy city centre traffic something of a nightmare. After he had left me behind at several traffic lights we became permanently separated when my hat blew off at a busy intersection and I had to stop to retrieve it. Eventually I found my way to some old fashioned streets beside a Victorian tobacco factory where the film crew were waiting. After that followed two days in which a vintage motorcycle combination kept leading our convoy of lorries each laden with half a dozen ‘undergraduates’ around the same three street corners for endless ‘retakes’. One of the best was spoiled by my trilby blowing off yet again, which caused me to collapse in uncontrollable laughter in a thoroughly unprofessional manner, but in the end the Director was satisfied and we moved on to a new location. This time it was in the courtyard of a Dunlop factory, where by strange coincidence the Caledon’s solid rubber tyres were remade seven years ago. We were now filming the starting point of our convoy’s journey, which like many other scenes was shot out of sequence for no other reason that I could ascertain than to confuse us. The sun was by now shining brightly, but because the week had started with rain it had to continue and we were regularly doused with a fine shower from a hosepipe! We had been joined by a Sentinel steam wagon and it was used to hide a modern storage tank in the yard until Dunlop pointed out that this contained inflammable chemicals! For two days we were filmed loading, setting out and running the gauntlet of an angry mob. All the toughest looking extras had been dressed in threadbare clothes and made a very intimidating sight as they lobbed foam rubber bricks at us and tried to drag us out of our vehicles. In reality the extras used the occasion to relieve their boredom from having stood about endlessly by making witty comments to see if they could reduce us to laughter.

After several days of living in a hotel which did not serve breakfast until the same moment that we were due at the studios it came as a welcome change to be invited to spend a night with the steam wagon owner’s family, but after an evening attempting to live up to our reputations as ‘actors’ in his local pub we were not at our best at 4.30am as we attempted to find dry kindling wood to light the fire and get up steam on the Sentinel. We must have looked a strange sight in our period clothes as we broke up old pallets by the light of a torch. Just over an hour later there was enough steam to hitch the Sentinel to the Caledon for a tow start – neither of us feeling strong enough to swing its seven litre petrol engine into life by hand.

The next bout of filming involved rushing the convoy at breakneck speed down a narrow, cobbled street and hoping the director would not ask us to stop suddenly. We were made to travel so close together that a multiple pile-up would have been inevitable in view of our totally inadequate two wheel unassisted braking. It was interesting to see the lengths that the producers went to ensure period correctness. Some modern cars, whose owners could not be found, were disguised as workmen’s huts or canvas covered piles, whilst lamp standards were painted to blend against walls and had fibreglass gas lamps placed in front of them. An incongruous building in the distance was hidden from the camera by a vast hoarding advertising a mythical product, and an expanse of bare concrete was painstakingly painted to resemble a brick wall.

The remainder of the week was involved with filming a final confrontation between us and the mob in a derelict railway station (the first in the world) made to resemble a London street market. Just out of camera range on the other side of a railway arch in what one day will be Manchester’s Transport Museum, stands Coronation Street, where we drivers crept off to photograph each other in front of the Rover’s Return. Another illusion was shattered when we discovered that the street is a complete fake with scaffolding supporting it at the back like a typical Hollywood cow town.

The highlight of our filming involved a lorry being overturned by a hawser that the mob had stretched across our route. I was rather worried what BP might say if the Caledon was selected for this treatment, but need not have worried as Motorhouse Hire had laid on an unrestored Morris-Commercial to suffer this disaster. No doubt the director would have liked to film the stunt, but in the interests of safety and not damaging valuable early transport relics the crash was in fact carefully staged by a crane carefully tipping the lorry onto a mattress and then its load of vegetables being artistically strewn around to disguise the deception. Our convoy was supposed to arrive at the scene where we all dismounted to investigate. A slanging match with the mob then developed, followed by flying vegetables and then fists. I had better not tell you too much else in case it proves to be critical to the plot, although I can reveal that it was very difficult to lift our ringleader (played by Donald Pleasance’s son Jeremy) through the opposing crowd so that he could remain visible to the camera. Having said that you will probably miss the results of the whole week’s filming if you even blink at the wrong moment, or worse still, it may all end up on the cutting room floor.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy seeing the BP lorry in its starring role as much as I enjoyed driving it – as usual it behaved impeccably.