We had a nice quiet Saturday ahead of Sunday's planned get-together with Matt. It did occur to me that the proposed two-week shoot idea had obviously been totally abandoned, and the only thing stopping the project from turning into a lifestyle for everyone involved was the fact that Matt and Erica's lease on the house ran out in a fortnight.

When I turned up at the house I found Matt and Darren sitting around
vegetating. It was about 4pm and the proposed agenda consisted of food,
drink, herbal reinvigoration and a few vids, plus as much discussion of the way things were going as we we could bear to indulge in. Before we could get on with this, however, Graeme and Chris rolled up on an unexpected visit. They, at least, seemed happy with things, so much so that they launched into one of their regular re-enactments of Fawlty Towers, with Graeme as Basil and Chris as Major Gowen. This was wearing a bit thin for me as I'd already heard it about eight times, but then again Joe and I did a similar party piece where we performed the entire opening scene of Reservoir Dogs, playing all the parts between us, so I suppose I shouldn't really grumble.

Matt treated us all to some more of his unique chiaroscuro-style cooking but made up for it by plying us all heavily with drinks immediately afterwards. Things devolved into a cheerful fug and the TV went on (by odd coincidence, Fawlty Towers was actually showing again that night). Then Chris and Graeme cleared off leaving Matt, Darren and I to plough on into the evening.

We relocated to the upstairs front bedroom - not, I hasten to add,
because there was any funny business on the cards, but because it was less cluttered, had a bigger TV, and didn't smell so funny. It was empty bar the TV and a mattress and the windows were not even curtained.

So we sat and watched videos as the summer sun went down and we found
ourselves in darkness but for the cathode ray flicker of the screen and the faint glow of the streetlights outside. I can't, it must be said, remember everything that Matt made us watch (I was pretty heavily sluiced on JD by this point - it's not my usual tipple but Matt's selection was limited and it seemed a bit more of a Hollywood kinda drink), but one of them was definitely Shallow Grave. Matt raved about how this was exactly the kind of film we should be making in this country. Darren agreed with Matt, obviously, but I was less impressed and remain so to this day, mainly due to its studied amorality and the lack of synergy between style and substance. There was also In The Soup, a then-celebrated American indie picture (mainly because the director, Alexandre Rockwell, was a mate of Quentin Tarantino). This seemed to me to be a much better, warmer, and quirkier film (Steve Buscemi plays a struggling film-maker who discovers his lovely, avuncular benefactor is a Mafia don) but Matt seemed to spend the entire
film scoffing and pointing out every appearance in shot by the boom mike.

Eventually things got very cloudy and we ran out of tapes to watch. We were in the depths of night now but still weren't quite ready to quit. Matt clicked through the four available TV channels, eventually settling on ITV (mainly because back then the other three weren't yet running round the clock). In deference to the region's large Asian community, and because it filled up the schedule, it ran Bollywood movies through the night at weekends.

We sat and watched the subtitled fun in a pleasant, trolleyed silence, until the dashing hero and his comic-relief sidekick set off to the big city by motorcycle and sidecar. Halfway there they launched into one of the regular exuberant song 'n' dance numbers, complete with energetic choreography. What was especially impressive was the way they did it all while still zooming along on the bike.

'Wow,' said Darren (it actually sounded more like 'Waaaaw,'), 'that's
smart. You never see that in our films.'

Even in the dimness I could see the familiar dangerous glint come into Matt's eye. 'No,' he said. 'Chris has a driver's licence, hasn't he?'

'What?'

'Well, it'd look fantastic, wouldn't it?'

'Matt, for one thing we don't have a motorbike, for another we're not
doing a musical, and most importantly what works well going down a deserted Indian country lane would probably be a criminal offence on Beverly High Road.'

'Mmmp.'

I eventually persuaded him to save it for the next film and Matt agreed, but the mood was broken and I went home, not without a quiet sense of relief. It was 4am.

The next morning Matt and Darren went off to Manchester to see Erica and her mum giving the rest of us two days off. This quickly turned into three days off as the rail network was unexpectedly paralysed by a strike (how things have changed since then), and the trio were stranded on the wrong side of the Pennines. I made good use of the time, seeing the soul-crushingly awful Batman Forever on the Monday and Kevin Smith's marvellous Clerks on the Tuesday. I was so impressed by Clerks that I trimmed my stubble into a goatee in tribute, which drew some comments the next time we all met up. We'd had so many continuity nightmares on the film already, mainly due to every character having a glass or bottle or ciggy in their hand in nearly every scene, that someone suddenly growing a beard between scenes wasn't the big deal it might have been elsewhere.

Having lost nearly a week's filming Matt wisely decided we should press on with redoubled urgency. This took the form of a quickly-organised night out down the Adelphi, where one of the biggest local bands, Spacemaid, were performing. I spent most of the evening playing pool with Matt in the front room but the band's vocalist, a willowy strawberry-blonde in painted-on leggings, lingers in my memory rather clearly for some reason.

Afterwards we went back to Chris's flat, which was an attic conversion at the top of a building already three storeys high. Following a petty discussion regarding the provenance of the name of the band Mega City Four I sat down to read Erica's dissertation ('The Politics of Anarchy') which she'd lent to Chris a few weeks earlier. Everyone else got on with the drunken chit-chat, excpet for Matt, who was obviously bored.

'I'm,' he said, and I swear this is true, 'a super-hero.'

'I don't believe you,' I said, the only one there too dumb to play
dumb.

'I am. I'll prove it,' he said. He pointed to the window, which was set into the angle of the roof and indeed opened onto it. 'I'm going out
there.'

And he was, much to everyone's surprise. It was thirty feet at the very least down to the pavement and Matt was, self-evidently, slammed out of his skull. Thumps and clatters echoed overhead as he ran back and forth over the tiles.

'Aren't you worried?' I asked Erica.

She shook her head. 'No, not really,' she said with impressive
disinterest.

Well, he was only her husband, but he was my meal ticket and I felt
obliged to at least try and stop him killing himself. I considered climbing out after him for a good quarter-second before trotting down to the street and peering up at the roof instead. After a moment Matt's head popped out over the guttering.

'Hello!!!!!!' he yelled.

'Be careful!' I shouted back.

'It's okay, I'm a superhero!' came the reply, at window-rattling volume.

This stumped me a bit, conversation-wise. 'What's your superhero
codename?' I yelled back eventually.

'It's a secret! Do you promise not to tell anyone?' he bellowed in
response.

'All right!' I was beginning to get hoarse.

'My secret codename is - the Red Letter!' he shouted. What a stupid name, I thought, then noticed lights coming on in windows up and down the street. I beat a hasty retreat indoors, where Erica ordered Matt back inside with impressive vocal control. We decided to leave so that the lovely Caitlin could enjoy the undivided solicitations of Chris and his friends, and also avoid the probable arrival of the Noise Police.

It was the wee small hours again as Matt, Erica, Darren and I paid a
brief call to a kebab house before heading back to theirs. Once out of the fast food zone Beverly High Road was wide, dark, and deserted. So deserted, in fact, that Matt persuaded us all to lie down in the middle of it for about five minutes. God knows why - pedestrian power, or something. We'd hear any oncoming traffic long before it hit us but there was still a rather pathetic frisson of daring to the whole experience. Eventually we got bored of pretending to be roadkill, and our burgers were getting cold, so we went on our way.

And then we came to a post box. It was a standard big red British
pillar-box, the sort of thing I get very patriotic about. Matt looked at it. 'I can leapfrog this,' he said.

The box was about five feet tall and broad with it. 'I believe you,' I said as earnestly as I could manage.

My acting skills had deserted me again. 'No you don't,' Matt said,
insightfully. 'Right, watch this.' He took a short run-up, pounding down the pavement before hoiking himself inelegantly through the air. We spectators winced in unison as pelvis smacked into cast iron and Matt slowly toppled into the gutter. After a moment he got up.

'I just need a bigger run-up, that's all,' he said. We watched again as trainers slapped 'gainst paving stones and Matt once again entirely failed to clear the box. Yet he rose again once more. We eventually sat on a low wall and watched, eating our burgers as Matt repeatedly bounced off the domed summit of the pillar-box. It was fairly obvious that short of Darren picking him up and throwing him, the Red Letter had met his match in the Post Office's cunning installation.

'Doesn't this sort of thing worry you at all?' I asked Erica quietly as Matt executed a particularly graceful flop-into-gutter.

'Not really,' she said with an air of resignation.' You've got to take the rough with the smooth in any relationship.'

Matt finally admitted defeat after about twenty minutes and we finally got back to the house. But the fun was not yet over. Matt made us all lie on the grass in the back garden in a sort of + formation telling each other anecdotes from earlier in our lives. This went on for another half hour or so until I felt the need to return to Planet Earth and went home - feeling, almost despite myself, a strange but genuine bond with the others.

Of course, over the next few days we manifested between us an interesting variety of colds, lost voices and chest infections, which didn't help the project much. If nothing it proved that while we might have a strange but genuine bond, we were also idiots led by a maniac who spent far too much time lying down outdoors in the middle of the night. It certainly convinced me that Matt should move to Los Angeles - while his talent as a director was questionable at best, he'd've made a great cult leader.

Next Episode: the end is nigh. Plus, the fringe benefits of having a gun nut as a landlord.

Adventures in Cinema Collection

Awix

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