So, Nick Knowles. What’s he like? I’m sure you’re dying to ask. Well, as far as I can tell, he’s the same on and off screen…positive, engaged, and fairly knowledgeable. I suspect though, at that level of fame, when you speak to anyone, other than your pets at home, and people who knew you growing up, you’re probably always in ‘broadcast’ mode. Everything is carefully filtered. From the minute they fitted me up with a microphone, I had my filter on.
One thing the production team did have trouble with, was getting us
I signed up for the pilot over a year ago but didn’t get the magic phone call straightaway.
I forgot all about it. Then suddenly, come autumn time, there were weekly rounds of Skype auditions. I was in Madrid at the time, visiting a friend. Distractedly, I texted “sorry, I’m on my hols, back soon.” Well, my Madrilenian friend Irene (pronounced Ear-Ren-Aye in Spanish), said “No! Celia!” (pronounced
An hour later, once we’d completely destroyed her husband’s work-from-home schedule by stealing his laptop, we were ready to go. The Skype app whirred into action and there on the screen was a shadowy Ear-Ren-Aye, wearing huge Onassis-style sunglasses, slowly nodding at me. “Hello Thelia, this is the Beh-Beh-Thay. Tell me about yourself!”. If it had been Emperor Palpatine himself, I’d have responded better.
There were about 3 mini production teams who looked after all the artists, travelling up and down the country over 3 months, filming us in our studios and at the temporary BBC base at Hope Mill Theatre in Manchester. These teams were freelance workers, and were very warm, talented and enthusiastic. In an 8-hour day, they would be systematically filming up to 15 artists on around 20 separate shots (that makes 300!). I shuddered to think how organised you’d have to be in handling files, with that sort of turnover.
It turned out that many of the artists were from Cumbria, and many of us are now in touch (and have a Facebook page, of course). We’ve all had extra visitors through our social media and websites, and sales for all. We are ‘the chosen ones’, as one artist put it (in a tongue-in-cheek way), yet no doubt we’ll be ploughing this furrow in very different ways. As another artist said, as his phone became overloaded with notifications and messages, “Too much traffic!”
Celia Burbush is a Cumbrian based artist, Cumbrian Artist of the Year 2017, a competitor in the new BBC show Where the Art Is (episode 7) and new cumbria24 contributor. For more information about Celia’s work or commissioning a piece visit Celia’s website.
