*FILM* "Coffee Time"

[jim woolley]

Hoping that the still in-production THIS IS ENGLAND 88 can heed my advice and add some much-needed coffee-time CGI shots of Woody taking some much-needed time-out and just chilling with a cup of coffee in a coffee-bar whilst staring into the waitresses' delectable decotellage. I noticed a fancy-free few shots of the gaggle of girls in TIE 86 being quite keen on their cups of tea prior to an aborted wedding palaver, but I wrote a few letters to 'Points of View' and Channel 4's 'Right to Reply' about how the popularity of Nescafe and even Nescafe Gold had reached the outer limits of the UK even in 1986, alongside Scandinavian penchants for leather bracelets, the Spectrum 48k and Jet Set Willy etc...the omittance of these but instead the troubling product placement of the American Commodore 64 was perhaps deliberately obtrusive but these need to be remedied by more UK themed product placements in 1988 - Spectrum computers were still popular. I can imagine Meggy and Banjo would have been ripe consumers for the excellent transport option that was the Sinclair C5 - these could be tremendous modes of transport to stage a prison break on for Combo with his old buddies. Just throwing in some script options and remember the coffee scenes - harking back to the initial popularity of course of coffee in The Beatles and Cilla Black era, which seems apt for the throwback character of Woody. (His name a reference to Woody Woodpecker, the annoying yet endearing cartoon mayhem causer...who seemed to be over-stimuated by something like coffee...)

[RichK]

Main shoot finished mid-April so it's perhaps a bit late for script notes...

Where's the chalky dog poo? That's always been my question to the production designers. There was always very dry dog poo when I was younger, almost white, on the pavements but you don't see it these days. Want to know why? It's the increasing amount of vegetable protein in the modern dog diet, Iams etc, less pure meat. So now you know...!