Barbados Day 7 – Woman, be there on Friday

Sunday morning, lazy time read my book, shower, wonder down to the nearest garage, called Tigermart, that’s Esso in England, remember the old advertisement “we’ll put a tiger in the tank”. I pick up eggs and bread; the eggs are loose so you have you be careful carrying them home. I buy Fishcakes; they have a hot cupboard with fast food items in there, chicken wings and fishcakes etc. Fishcakes are not really Fishcakes, they are Fishballs cooked like One Hung Lo would cook prawns in batter in a Chinese restaurant and they are delicious and extremely cheap. I wonder back in the sunshine past the beaches where the surf is pounding in and the wind is sighing through the palm trees, a bit like a Sunday morning in England! Eggs and bacon and toast for breakfast, very familiar. This place is not called Little England for no reason and Sunday is quite English, more English than England is these days, people are dressed up for Church and shops shut at 1pm. It’s a quiet day, but not so quiet for Sam who has been out since early morning working.

Now you should be feeling quite envious, as I go with Sam and Beki to Bathsheba on the Atlantic coast to watch filming on location being carried out. Imagine bikini clad actress’s standing in the surf in this Tropical paradise with some dreadlocked lean mean vision of a young Bajan like Garvey making all the women feel real hot, with some cool rum punch on a table, everybody suntanned while we all look on sitting in the shade in chairs with Director written on the back with an ice cold drink. Carry on dreaming.

Sam arrived back from the morning filming done here in Bridgetown and we head off to the location shoot. First we go up to the Pines area to pick up Barbados’s latest superstar, a young guy called Hal Linton. Sam describes The Pines area as Bad Boy Alley and Hal actually tells me that sometime back he had been shot at. We slowly make our way up to Bathsheba which is an amazing place where people come to surf in the Soup bowl.

We pull up outside a Minimart shop, this is our location. The owner closes up at 1pm and we are inside a shop which is impossible to keep cool, with hot lights, cameras, 7 people sweating like crazy, in order to get a few seconds of film for a Digitel Q Points advert.
(That’s like advertising for say Orange in England). The 1st 45 minutes are taken up with positioning the equipment, keeping Hal from looking too sweaty, and placing the right advertising material over the window behind the shop counter and ensuring that the shop assistant is seated correctly and smiles at the right time. Hal is pacing around practicing walking up to the counter, flipping his mobile phone open, pointing his phone at the advert behind the assistant and saying top me up with some of those.

Eventually all is ready, even though the shop has a big closed sign up outside, people still try to get in past the camera set up in the doorway. We have been here an hour and then it starts to roll, half a dozen takes, followed by Sam barking instructions, and another dozen takes and about 1 second of advert is in the can, as they say. Now we get down to the close up of the receipt being printed out and the shop assistant handing Hal the receipt from the electronic point of sale machine, she’s not bad, this shop assistant, she obviously done this a lot, and 15 minutes later another second of advert is also in the can. We are now pouring water from the cool cabinet down our throats, as everything gets set up for the big bit. Hal now has to use the phone to call the bikini clad women he had been chatting too earlier by a pool somewhere to ask for a date next Friday.( all that part of the Advert with the bikini clad girl had been done in the morning back in Bridgetown). They didn’t use the one we had photographed on Day 1, she was apparently too short for the clients liking.

Just as Hal is about to speak an Ice Cream van goes past, but it didn’t matter as the microphone on the hairy boom 2 inches from his face wasn’t working. That was put right, Hal started his call, and half way in a local rummy enters the shop wanting cigarettes. Hal recomposes himself and a dozen takes later another few seconds of advert is in the can.
It’s now 3pm.

Beki, Sam, and I leave the crew to pack up and take Hal back home, and we head up the road to the Atlantis hotel where we are now too late for the lunchtime buffet but, who you know and all that, the owner is quite happy to supply us with plates of whatever there is still available and we sit at the best table in the house overlooking the ocean. The beers arrive just as the rain starts, driven in off the Atlantic by a ferocious wind which has us all gripping the tablecloth to keep it down. Beki gets some photos of the rainbow, whilst the owner chats to Sam about theatre matters and another beer arrives. When the rain stops, the plates of food are brought to the table, we had seen no menu; nobody had asked what we wanted although Beki had said she was vegetarian. I had chicken, macaroni pie, rice and peas, roasted vegetables, battered deep fried pumpkin and a side plate of beans, pickled pork and salad, a wonderful spread.
Later we stopped at the end of the airport runway and took pictures of the sunset and planes coming in. I had a rum punch on the veranda and was asleep by 9pm