Station Zero

It was December 2021 when I announced my half-baked to make my own Arthurian film , inspired by all the other Arthurian films I’d been watching for this blog. Now it’s May 2023, and the project is very nearly finished. Here’s the poster for Gwenevere , with artwork by top shield designer and location catering whizz Sarah McIntyre. I’ve also cut together a short trailer for the film, which you can see here on YouTube . 

I’ve been at work on editing our Arthurian movie Gwenevere since the beginning of the year, and it’s very nearly finished now. The last thing we needed to get was some flashbacks to Gwenevere’s love affair with Lancelot, which will crop up as brief montages at a couple of points in the story. We didn’t have time to shoot these in our main blocks of filming back in the autumn, so it seemed to make sense to leave them till spring - they’re meant to be taking place in a different time to the rest of the film.  We also needed a different setting - the film is about Gwenevere’s journey through the wilds, and it’s all shot on Dartmoor. So we thought a beach would make a nice change of scene, and since Laura Frances Martin , who plays Gwenevere, comes from north Cornwall we decided to find somewhere near her to film. That’s how we ended up in Bude, just down the coast from Tintagel. There are some lovely beaches there, and there’s also a handy castle called The Castle . It isn’t an actua...

Strangely moving scenes in the village churchyard yesterday, were the people of this valley gathered in the twilight among the gravestones of their ancestors to watch fireworks marking the coronation. I don’t know how many of them are ardent royalists. I know at least a few are proud republicans. Some, who hold their farms on lease from the Duchy of Cornwall, had the former Prince Charles as their landlord for decades, and may have more reason to grumble about him than most. But they weren’t there to celebrate Charles’s enthronement. They were coming together as a community to mark a national moment, which is also of course a local moment, and a personal moment. I tend to feel that having strong opinions either way on the subject of the monarchy is the sure sign of a crank. Royal fans and ardent republicans, like Brexit enthusiasts or people with #FBPE in their Twitter handle, are best edged away from at parties. I suppose if you’d asked me when I was twenty I would have said, ‘down wi...