Ian Dury & The Blockheads - Mash It Up Harry (Live)

Yesterday’s post’s title was - Happy Birthday Harry - but it had nothing to do with Harry.

Harry, a friend, lives in London and was 18 yesterday.

He likes potatoes.

Ian Dury was also from London.

Ian Dury penned and sang a song titled – Mash It Up Harry.

Mash, as you know can mean potato.

As in mashed potato.

I saw Ian Dury on stage a Looooooooong time ago as part of the “If it ain’t Stiff it ain’t worth a Fuck” tour, a promotional tour for new artists signed to Stiff Records.

And I found myself sitting in a caravan drinking tea at the side of the road near the North London Circular with him a decade later.

We had both, separately, been hired to be in a film that was shot in a disused cinema somewhere near the Brentcross shopping centre.

He had been hired to add name and status to the end product, I had been hired because a friend's(Mark)sister was the continuity girl working on the project and they needed four people for a small scene supposedly taking place on Dartmoor.

Since the action took place at night, the inside of a dusty disused North London cinema in Brentcross looked very similar to the wild beauty of Devon.

The main actor in the film was John Hurt and as he passed in the foreground of the shot, the four of us – representing The Sherlock Holmes Appreciation Society – passed in the opposite direction in the background.

Making a film means hanging around a lot so we spent the day devising comic ways to pass in the background, I was working with Mark, my partner Alex – because the continuity girl asked her brother who asked me who asked Alex – and Peter Weir, who isn’t the famous Australian film director, although I’m sure HE would have jumped at the chance to work with Alex, Mark and I.

If he had only known the continuity girl.

Thinking about all this now, and trying to back it up with a bit of Google and Wikipedia it may well be that Ian Dury was in the caravan not because he was IN the film but because he wanted a cup-of-tea or knew someone on the set.

Maybe the continuity girl?

Our scene was eventually shot and even more eventually edited and discarded – if you sit through the whole film (whose name slips my brain) AND the entirety of the credits, we get a special thanks at the end.

The continuity girl however was spotted by an Independent Portuguese film maker, who just happened to be passing, and asked her to be in his next film - Bearskin - as the female lead.

Her name is Julia.

And all this leads to a connection with the enigma surrounding whatshisname, and thus provides a confusing clue to the forgetful problem posed on Sunday.

p.s. The answer is not Ian.