I had my first in-person audition since the Covid era began last week. What a thrill finally to be in a room with the casting director, director and producer rather than the lockdown-triggered misery of self-taping. Actors generally fall into two categories: those who rather like watching themselves and those who would rather be boiled in oil. For the latter category, the self-tape is a unique form of torture. From quickly finding someone, anyone, to read the other lines (most recently a well-meaning neighbour who put so much into her off-camera performance that she needed a gin and a therapy session afterwards) to trawling through the takes while trying not to look at one’s face or hear one’s voice – it’s just gruesome. So hurrah to meeting in person again.
The impersonal nature of self-taping is just one small patch in the tapestry of how we do things now. I am so unnerved by society’s ever-swifter transition to an online existence that I flee from it in many ways, from avoiding all social media to moving my poor daughters every time their schools get too iPad-happy. I’ve now gone one step further and have spent the past year planning a screen-free secondary school with a very smart group of educationalists. We now have a template for an intellectual but low-pressure education in which screens, both on and off site, will play a small rather than seismic part in our pupils’ lives. Now we just need money. Easy, right?
On the money note, it’s fundraising time for my charities: School-Home Support (which keeps children from very tough homes in school and learning – please look it up, it’s extraordinary), Age UK, the Children’s Surgery Foundation, Cure and the great social enterprise the Big Issue.
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