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.