The View
Give me an hour, a missing film crew and a pocket park, and I’ll be just fine, thank you very much.
HOURS OF BOREDOM punctuated by moments of sheer terror’. Some sources say that was Ernest Hemingway’s verdict on war; others that it was Robert Mitchum on making movies. Whatever and whoever, it can certainly apply to making television programmes as well.
Terror may be putting it a bit strong – although I do leap for the off button when The Apprentice comes on – but everyone in TV knows the truth in the statement ‘hurry up and wait’. Wait for the right light, wait for make-up, wait for that plane to go overhead. Or in this case, wait for the crew to turn up.
I was waiting outside a greasy spoon in Bethnal Green. The crew were running late from a morning’s filming in Soho’s Chinatown. (I was being interviewed about the artery-furring delights of the full English breakfast for a show to be broadcast next year). When news came that they’d be another hour, I did what I always do in these situations (maybe you do it too): I looked for somewhere to walk.
The patch of green I spotted down a side-street turned out to be Weavers Fields. It’s the largest park and green space in Bethnal Green, the name referring to the fact that the small houses that once stood here, with their high, large upper floor windows designed to catch as much of the light as possible, were home for centuries to a thriving community of hand weavers. Until the 1950s, this area was a maze of tightly packed and densely populated terraces, that were later cleared to make way for the park and provide some much-needed fresh air, greenery and recreation for the people from this part of the East End.
It is still doing just that, and for an itinerant freelance Northerner down in ‘the Smoke’ for the day, it was perfect. The fields were full of kids playing, couples ‘courting’ and even the odd hipster on a laptop. It is also now home to Boishakhi Mela – the largest Bengali festival outside of Bangladesh – which celebrates the Bengali New Year each May with a riot of colour and heady aromas of dahl, bhuna and biriyanis.
It took me about half an hour to take a turn around the perimeter, past the kids’ play area, the dog training centre and the ‘woodland walk’. To be honest, the woodland of Weavers Fields, Bethnal Green is never going to form the basis of a range of Sylvanian Family toys or a series of delightful children’s books. There are too many old lager cans and squirty foam canisters for that. But that is not the point. Here, tucked away behind the sari shops and
