Pug Life

I am delighted to be able to announce my first appearance on the silver screen here in Germany. Blink and you'll miss me: I'm in the very first two seconds.


 

The shoot itself was a testament to the Germans' slavish adherence to process and authority. We'd all received an email before the shoot asking if anyone could provide a small dog in exchange for a commensurately small fee, and on arrival we noticed that the storyboard showed an elegant lady walking across the shot with a small dog perched in her handbag.

While we awaited the dog's arrival, the director picked out an incredible older lady to star as the glamorous dog-toter. She had the hairstyle and smoky eyeliner of a 1920s cabaret star, and looked like she might be old enough to have performed then as well. It's the back of her fur coat that you can see disappearing off to the left in front of me in the shot.

The quandary was, the dog was not actually that small when it arrived. It was in fact a rather plump pug, which looked like it might weigh as much as a small microwave. We had to send away for a bigger bag.

The whole way through the shoot, the dog struggled furiously to get out of the bag. The poor woman couldn't hold it any longer than the 10 seconds it took to walk across the shot, and immediately afterwards I had to lift the bag from her shoulder and pug-juggle the slavering animal as I tried to cram it's flailing legs back into the bag.

It looked at me gloweringly every time I succeeded in repackaging it, and I was sure that it was doing it's best to piss in the bag. But either the bag was watertight, or the lady's fur coat was very absorbent; somehow, we managed to get through the shoot.


"We have to have the dog," said the director apologetically. "The client wants it."

Eventually, it appears the client decided that a horribly cowed old woman, lurching drunkenly under the weight of a bulgy-eyed escapologist dog which was slowly drowning itself in it's own piss, was not how they wanted their brand to be perceived. I can't say I blame them for cutting the whole menagerie.

Her own dog, incidentally, is the huge wolfhound you can see in the background of the shot. They thought about it, but couldn't find a big enough bag.

 

Hunk

Yesterday I did eventually shoot the advert which my new hair-cut threatened to deny me. Early on in the shoot, the director intervened to give one of the other actors some tips about her interaction with me.

"Will you flirt with him while you serve him, please?"

"Well, I wasn't sure," she said. "I mean, he's meant to be playing an attractive guy, is that right?"

Meant to be?

The Most Expensive Haircut in the World

My hair has been out of control recently. I am saddled with uncontrollable locks, which grow in dense curly waves and refuse to submit to brush, hairdryer or gel. I haven't had a cut in the three months that I've been here, and I knew it was time when I met up with a friend who I'd not seen for ten years.

"I'm sorry," she said, fifteen minutes into our catch-up. "I just can't stop looking at your hair. What the hell happened to you?"

So I got a trim. It's still long on top, but it's now possible to identify that I have ears, and my head no longer looks like one of those dandelion clocks before the seeds have been blown away.

As I walked out of the hairdressers, I got a call from my agency. These are the people who have been sending me on the range of humiliating and fruitless trials which pass for auditions for lucrative adverts.

"Tom," said the girl on the line. "I've got some great news for you. You got the audition you went to last week!"

I was dumbstruck. I'd forgotten all about this audition, mainly because I'd been in there for a new record time of three minutes, and had failed to come up with anything better than a grotesque leer when asked to demonstrate my range of expressions for the camera.

"You have just the right look for the brand. They like the style, the big hair, it's perfect. Well done!"

Ah, I thought. Bugger.

This advert pays €400 for my time, and the same again as a buy-out to stop me doing similar advertising for a year. After toying with all of the possible excuses for why I looked so different - "I've got sudden onset partial alopecia" - I came clean.

So I'm now waiting for the client to approve my new look. If I lose the job, my haircut costs will have soared from €25 to €825. Surely the most expensive haircut in the world?

Tennis

I've been getting more auditions to appear in adverts here in Germany. Getting one would be amazing, as they pay at least ten times better than a day's work as an extra.

The last audition I went to was for a well-known fast food brand. The concept involved the customer being distracted at the counter by what he takes to be noise from a women's tennis match on TV, but is in fact two people enjoying their meal inordinately.

After playing the scene a couple of times over, they asked me and the guy I was auditioning with whether we'd also 'read' for the part of the couple noisily devouring their food.

"It's the director's idea," the casting lady said. "He's worried that the original concept of two women might come across a bit sexual."

We were given a croissant each, which we had to bite into at intervals and grunt. I started tentatively; my partner replied with gusto.

"More!" shouted the woman. "More, more!"

I bit harder, and groaned louder. Our grunts increased in pace and intensity as we chomped through our croissants, spewing little clouds of pastry from our mouths with every exhalation. The competition was fierce - it's possible only one of us would get the role - and so when my partner switched from grunts to groans of pleasure I followed suit.

After a minute we were told to stop, and we looked at one another sheepishly. I felt like we'd shared an embarrasing and intimate experience.

We filed silently out of the room to find a couple of girls waiting to go in.

"What on earth were you doing in there?" asked one of them. "It sounded like you were making porn."

 

Extra, Extra!

I've been getting relatively consistent work as an extra recently. Here I am accoutred as a bell boy for a recent ad I was involved in for a budget supermarket.

Being an extra is not glamorous. Within the deeply hierarchical world of the media, you're not even on the bottom rung of the ladder: you are the rung itself, ignored and trodden underfoot. On my first shoot, which ran for 12 hours until 4 in the morning, we were first given some food around midnight. The extras drifted like pale ghosts around the dispassionate figure of our minder, who doled thin gruel out of a pot. Fights broke out over the small portion of stale cake we got to follow.

I expected that the pool of extras would be full of jobbing actors, students and hard-up foreigners. In fact, a large proportion of the people I meet are German pensioners, putting in a day's work to top up their income, or to stave off boredom. These oldies are always the most interesting people on set, and the Assistant Director's attempts to work them into the scene are brilliant.

The night shoot I did required a dance scene in a bar to be happening in the background. Not wanting to fill her trendy young bar too visibly with oldies, the AD put them at the back of the bar to dance, and for some reason consigned me to the same fate. So I spent a pleasant but surreal three hours faking dance moves in a group of septuagenarian women, who were doing their best to bump n' grind me.

"What time do you think we finish?" I whispered to one of them innocently.

"Young man," she said, laying her hand on the small of my back. "I'm old enough to be your grandmother."

With a firm touch that spoke of experience, she smacked me on the bum and shimmied off. Lost in translation again.

 

Nice Hair

Someone attached this to my bag today without me noticing. How did they know I was English?!

 

Volleyball

Someone asked me recently if I'd thought up a subject for my blog or whether I was going to jump from topic to topic. Reading over it again, I realised it seems to be an account of my abject incompetence or ritual humiliation at the hands of a ruthless German population.

I hesitated to make that the theme of my blog, as I assumed that as I settled in here, I'd move seamlessly from subjugation to triumph. However, seven weeks in, the experiences keep on coming.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been playing volleyball with my housemate and his Dad's friends. My experience of volleyball mainly consists of patting a deflated football back and forth over a saggy badminton net, but I decided it would be a good environment in which to improve my German.

I was relieved to find on arrival that his Dad's friends were exactly what I'd hoped for: a troupe of relaxed, forty-something men, mostly shorter than myself. When three bottles of cava came out before the game to celebrate a birthday, I was sure things were going to be ok.

"You'll pick the rules up as we go along," one of them said kindly, when I revealed myself as a beginner. "It's pretty easy."

As far as I can deduce from four hours of intensive volleyball, it is indeed a simple game with only one rule. Whatever I do is completely the opposite of what I should have done.

I cost my team dozens of points through serves that were too high or too low, through weak-wristed flaps at the ball and then through the inevitable blunderbuss punts into the ceiling that followed as I tried to correct myself. Every time a ball whipped over my shoulder and landed in a virgin unprotected area miles from where I was standing, I thought smugly to myself that at least someone else had messed up this time.

"Tom," one of them would say. "That was your ball."

The few points I did win were mainly though flailing a limb in the direction of the ball and making such an unorthodox connection that both my team and the opponents were completely befuddled and by chance the ball dropped on the right side of the net. I turned to one of my team-mates to celebrate.

"It's not just about winning the point," he said. "Sometimes it's nice to play well."

So what have I learned from my first seven weeks in Germany? That no matter how old you get, you're still not too old to make a fool of yourself. I probably could have worked that out in London.

 

Hummus

I've made a startling discovery which has led me to doubt my middle class credentials and question everything I hold sacred about the world.

I was invited to a dinner party the other day and I was told I didn't need to bring any food. I'm terrible at accepting people's hospitality without providing something in return, and so I decided to pick up some bread and dips as a delicious starter.

I reached the supermarket and was surprised to find not even a lack of a hummus section, but not a single solitary pot of the stuff anywhere. Now bear in mind that in the UK, or in London at least, any self-respecting Sainsbury's or Tesco Local is about 75% hummus, this was a bit of a shock to me.

In a hurry, I grabbed up a substitute that looked like that bloody amazing beetroot salad thing you can pick up in pots. The contents, I feel, say rather a lot about the German diet.

I mean, it's sort of a beetroot salad, right?

Doing it sexy

I was prepared for many obstacles to my making a go of it here in Berlin to present themselves. I was sure, for example, that my lack of regard for the rules of German grammar would eventually catch me out in some way. I thought it was possible that my range of vocabulary would be too limited for me to hold down a job. I was prepared for everybody to want to speak to me in English, meaning I failed to learn as much German as I wanted to.

In fact, the main impediment to my progress at the moment is something so familiar to me that being reminded of it's presence is like being reunited with that teddy bear you spent your life carrying around as a toddler: comforting, if somewhat embarrassing. I'm talking about my incurable, incapacitating clumsiness.

On reflection, I think having been sacked from my bar job may have something to do with them having found the elephant's graveyard of broken bottles and glasses I'd secreted beneath the bar. When I totted up my breakages from overzealous washing up and badly filling fridges so that they became booby traps of falling bottles, and added onto it the amount of beer I'd either spilt or knocked over during my time, I calculated that they probably made a loss on me over my four shifts. And they didn't even pay me for two of them.

Today, I was photographed in a casting for an online advert for a beer company. The brief was that I needed to be able to open a bottle of beer with a lighter. The first couple of takes went well, and then the lady running the audition stepped up the level of complexity. I needed to walk forward holding two bottles, one in each hand. Then I needed to move them into the same hand, and open one with a lighter.

"And this time, do it a bit charming," she said. "You know: sexy."

Suddenly faced with all of these different tasks to think about, I lost all use of basic motor functions. My legs were like Inspector Gadget's giant telescopic appendages, and I was holding what felt like about twenty different bottles of beer in my hands, which were suddenly those massive foam fists they used to wave about on Gladiators. I wrenched away at the top of one of the bottles, and it exploded into the air, the lid knocking into the camera stand as a sticky spray of warm lager covered me and the floor. I leered at the camera.

"That was sweet," said the lady maternally, giving me a look somewhere in between pity and amusement that my incorrigible clumsiness always seems to invite. "We'll call you, ok?"

Don't Mention The...

Although I was unsurprisingly not invited back for more shifts at the cafe where I was so relentlessly rubbish, I was asked to be photographed again. This time, I could keep my trousers on: they asked me to pose as a man with a scar on his chest following a heart bypass, and a corpse.

I'm delighted to say that as you might expect from a German agency, they're taking their brief unrelentingly literally. They've been commissioned to produce pictures that will deter people from smoking. So far I've seen (or been involved in): man lying on the bed looking sad; man touching scar looking sad; woman in wheelchair looking sad; man blowing smoke into sad-looking child's face; and, finally, melancholy corpse.

The shoot took place in a disused hospital on the edge of the city. The building disconcertingly gives the impression that it was deserted in a hurry; that everybody just went home one day and didn't come back. The staff rota is still on the wall, as is the mobile number of the stand-in nurse. The cupboards are full of prescriptions. Most of the beds are made. I kept thinking I was going to walk into a room and find a patient still there, mouldering quietly away.

From somewhere in this bizarre building, they'd dug out a body bag to photograph me in. "Don't worry," said the stylist. "I cleaned it."

They put me in and zipped me most of the way up. The photographer leaned over me menacingly. "This is for Dresden," he said, and zipped the bag up to the top.

So there's another of my questions answered. You can make jokes about the war.

Naked Lunch

I've been really excited this week because I got picked for a modelling job. I'd pretty much forgotten about it as I'd sent my photo off a month ago, but I received an email a few days ago confirming that I'd be needed, and that I'd get more details nearer the time.

Then, the day before the shoot, I recieved the following email:

Hi Tom

This is approximately what we need you to do.

Today was the day of the shoot, and I spent 15 minutes lying on the floor on a fake bed made of polystyrene, completely starkers and curled up in the foetal position. The scene was made even more surreal by the photographer and his assistant, who were standing on stepladders to get a better shot of me, shouting at me in comedy German accents. I was asked variously to demonstrate more 'power'; to writhe around and grab my hair; to cry in anguish; and finally to rearrange my legs to better protect my modesty.

All in all, quite the strangest job I've ever done. And it answers one of the questions we've often mulled over at work: how much would you need to be paid to come into work completely naked? At €100 and a couple of slices of pizza, it turns out my price is credit-crunchin' low.

Coffee

I've had my first few trial shifts in a couple of bars over the last week in Berlin.  Being a barkeeper here is somewhat different to working at my local in the Essex countryside.  There, all you needed to do was wipe the taps thoughtfully now and then with a damp cloth and occasionally produce a warm pint of muddy water for the gnarled old men huddling silently at the bar.  The Germans demand rather more of their bar staff.

After 15 hours of work, I've learnt every insane combination of drink you can guzzle in this bizarre country (banana and cherry juice, anybody?).  I can just about get my head round serving beer which is 40% froth in a glass the size of a large infant.  I can even handle being paid at a trial rate which puts me a rung below the technoslaves working away on Apple's Chinese production line.  I just can't work the bloody coffee frother.

It doesn't help that nobody can show me the precise technique for achieving froth Nirvana; instead, I've been told I need to 'feel' it, much as I imagine a jazz musician feels their way through a jam session.  I've seen it demonstrated - mostly when my exasperated co-worker whips the test-tube Vesuvius I'm creating out of my hands and with a graceful movement gently brings forth a delicate cloud of froth.  One of them even suggested I start talking to the coffee machine, or praying to it like some horrible god.

My inability to produce good-quality froth makes me feel inadequate with an intensity I've not experienced since I was a teenager.  The waitresses whisper to one another as I skitter along the bar, scalding myself on the latest hastily-made coffee I've crowned with limp burnt milk:

  "Look at that, the new guy can't even make half-decent froth."

  "I know, it's pathetic.  Do you know he can't satisfy a woman in bed?"

  "I hear he's got a willy like a damp Wotsit."

In truth, I'm struggling to muster up the energy required to master this absurd triviality.  Why do people need to have their coffees topped off with a decorative  hump of aerated lactose anyway?  The wretched stuff disappears as soon as you put your spoon into it.

But I'm going to need to learn it.  Somehow, inexplicably, I've been invited back to do a paid shift in the week, despite the quality of my work ranging from unacceptable to barely adequate.  The coffee machine and I are now tied in an unhappy marriage of convenience.

So while I battle to learn this dark art I entreat you: next time you order a posh coffee, please spare a thought for the poor bugger who probably burnt half his fingers off perfecting that pointless milky top.

 

Fire!

 Even the fire stations in Berlin are covered in cool graffiti.  Who wouldn't want to be a fireman heroically carrying a scantily clad blonde from a burning building?

What you can't see is further down the building: the fire was started by an enormous dragon.

And the fire engines, incidentally, are luminous orange.  Nice touch.

€mployment

I had my first paid work this week, teaching English to six separate classes of middle-aged engineers.  The language school I walked into by chance to drop off my CV had double booked one of their teachers for the week, and so were happy to disregard my lack of any kind of teaching qualification.

The brief from them was clear, and the bar was high.  "The most important thing is that you arrive.  I don't care what happens in the lesson, they'll just be pleased to have someone there to speak English with.  But if you don't turn up, that's bad."

I did turn up, taught my lessons with some success, and went to the company's HR department to pick up my timesheet.  It was a trademark HR office: miles away from the rest of the business, full of women and completely bonkers.  It reminded me of the amazing admin office in Green Wing.

 Here's a conversation I had with their HR Director on my last day which could have come straight from that show:

HRD:  So did you enjoy your time teaching here?

ME:  Yes, very much.  I'd like to come back.

HRD:  Well, you've certainly made an impression.  I hear your methods are quite unusual - climbing and dancing on the table?

ME:  Um, I was trying to teach prepositions.  You know: over, on top of, underneath...

HRD:  Excuse me, can I interrupt you for a moment?

ME:  Yes.

HRD:  I've been wanting to say this to you all week.  You smell amazing.  Brigitte, look, come here...

At this point, I was smelt by a small group of women who all agreed that yes, I did smell lovely.

The good news is that I escaped unmolested and have now earnt my very first Euros.  I'll let you know if I get invited back for some more table dancing - hopefully of the academic kind.

Multicultural Flatshare

 I've found some accommodation for the next three weeks in a really friendly flatshare in Friedrichshain while I continue my search for somewhere more permanent.

I'm taking the room of an Italian guy while he's on holiday, and the remaining housemates are a Belgian, a Brazilian and a Persian.

Vorsprung Durch Conversation

One of the pleasures of not having yet found anywhere permanent to live and staying in a hostel is that I get to hear some great multicultural conversations.  I overheard this classic meeting of minds between a German guy and an American girl.  The topic was vegetarianism.

    AMERICAN:  So I'd been eating meat my whole life until I was 12, and then I did a complete 360.  Just didn't want to eat the stuff any more.  So I haven't touched it since.

    [GERMAN looks puzzled.]

    GERMAN:  I'm sorry, but you'd still be facing the same way.

    AMERICAN:  What?

    GERMAN:   A 360 turn would take you the whole way round.  So you'd still be eating meat.

    AMERICAN:  But I turned all the way round!  Like as much as you can!

    GERMAN:  That's a 180 turn.

    AMERICAN:  OK, so maybe it's like a 365 degree turn.  Like all the way around and a bit more.

    GERMAN:  No, you'd still be facing basically the same way.  A 180 degree turn is the most you can do.

    AMERICAN:  Maths was never a good subject for me.

    GERMAN:  It's a 180 degree turn.

I love the Germans for their precision.

He's not Rappaport either

 Umm...  So it appears they're lacking black actors in Germany.

The review I read said Joachim Bliese makes an astonishingly realistic portrayal of a black New York pensioner.  I think he looks like a dead man dunked in Marmite. 

Lady Jane

The view from the window of the cafe I'm sitting in to escape the torrential rain looks like a black and white photo.  Berlin is a grey city today. 

House Hunting

My first day of flat hunting and still only one solid response received:

Hi to all nudists or anybody, who would like to become one, our mixed nudism flat community is searching for a new male roommate, who is open.minded and seriously iinterested, without any obscene thoughts or sexual interests. Please send us a message, if it fits, tell something about you und send a photo of you, only without clothes please. We are discrete. Thanks, Jose.

I'm curious: how does a nudist community function on a day-to-day level?  What's the deal with cooking (especially shallow frying and using the oven)?  Does everybody cosy up on the sofa?  And what happens when the doorbell rings unexpectedly? 

I'm reassured that they're asking for a photo.  This is obviously a carefully aesthetically engineered group of nudists.  I've sent them this, and will let you know how I get on.  Perhaps they'll pull me up on the specs.