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.