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.