Day 46 - "Blue Peter and Alcoholics"

Day forty six, Blue Peter and Alcoholics. Life behind the police lines in Lockdown Spain for a British couple and their three good legs cat.  

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Day 46 Blue Peter and Alcoholics

 

It is day 46 of our Spanish lockdown, Chris is busy watching a webinar for managing your gym back into business, it is going to be a long complex journey to open gyms up again.  They are a major place where contagion could occur. 

 

Until there is a vaccine the new normal is going to be anything but normal.  This morning I recorded more of my children’s scripts, that kind of takes your mind of things as there is a lot of concentration pronouncing words correctly, enjoying what you are saying without going to Blue Petery.

 

Blue Peter is a children’s television show famous for sounding very enthusiastic about everything.  I mentioned once before when I accidently burned a dinner guest with my Advent Candle from an old coat hanger.

 

I worked for a couple years with Blue Peter Lesley Judd, she was great fun, a really heavy smoker, she would sit crossed leg on top of my desk tapping away her script on an old Remington newsroom typewriter we rescued for her, as she didn’t like the computer thingy.

 

She told me that a lot of her Blue Peter assignments were done on a tight budget, she said there was never a discussion about insurance or risk assessment.  She said one time they winched her across from a Lighthouse to a boat, she told me she was so scared a petrified that she wet herself, screaming out at the cameraman .. he just replied, don’t worry love I am filming only your top half the kiddies will never know.

 

I got to work with Peter Purves, another Blue Peter presenter and former Doctor Who companion.  We were at the London Academy of TV Film and Media, a rather odd place housed in the Church Hall of St Pancras.  The church was a beautiful Greek revival church built in 1819.  The church hall was a squat concrete ugly lump built in the early 1970s, we had our studios on the ground floor and on the first was the Church Hall used for TV and film rehearsal during the day and The Karate Club and Alcoholics Anonymous in the evening.

 

The toilets next to the little voice booth I used, would frequently block and raw sewerage would wash under the wall and into the booth, so it always smelt very strongly of room freshener.

 

From there we taught a variety of students, some already from radio and television, some complete novices.

 

Peter Purves had the glamourous studio with studio lighting and a camera with autocue.  I had the room that was used for makeup – so we were surrounded by weird dolls heads that the stage make up students would practice on.

 

I found teaching really hard work and although I enjoyed it, I can now see why teachers need six weeks off in the summer to recover each year.

 

Day 46 and Chris is busy with his webinar, telling me when the virus hit China and the gyms closed, and Instructors lost their incomes, one chain went on a recruitment drive and cherry picked the best Instructors, paid them a retainer to come and work at their gym chain when the pandemic was over.

 

We struggle a bit with the Internet and I was pleased to discover our Internet company RadioKable was now offering 40Mb download speed.  I wrote asking to change to the slightly higher speed.

 

The called.  “Mr Stephen, your mast is in a state of collapse, so many people using the internet, we cannot make you faster.”  A very pleasant man by the of Vincente said.

 

“Oh dear.” I said is there anything you can do.  “We can make your bill 10 Euro cheaper each month.” He said. 

 

The Internet is almost as important as clean water and electricity, Spain has suddenly discovered that their infrastructure lags a long way behind other countries.  Fibre Optic is available but it is installed by the old state telephone company, who make it painfully difficult for us to get the service.

 

We had an Engineer come to access our Estate, when we told him that one resident didn’t want cables across his house, he said “Well you can’t have the fibre optic then!”  With that he jumped into his van a sped off.

 

We arranged for a fund for road cutting and applied for the licence from the Town Hall, which took several weeks to be authorised.  By that time it was too late, the old state telephone company had moved on to their next location.  So no Fibre Optic.

The Administration is famously slow and ponderous in Spain, with many people at many desks in many departments at the Town Hall, all sitting as each individual piece of paper lands in their in-tray to languish a few days before the inevitable stamp of approval is dipped onto the ink pad and slammed down onto the application and then off the paper goes to the next desk.. and so on.

 

If you are coming here to retire and enjoy the better weather, which today is blowing a 60 kilometre gale, yet again! You are probably going to be fine.  But for anyone contemplating a business who has been used to the relative efficiency of northern Europe, you will need a lot of patience.

 

I think it is one of the reasons the Spanish work to live, rather than live to work, most just can’t be bothered waiting for that piece of paper to emerge triumphant from the Town Hall.