edinburgh international festival.

Not to be confused with the Fringe, the EIF is the more cultured big brother of Scotland’s capital festivals. To be honest, growing up in South Manchester, I’d never heard of Luc Bondy, Pierre Boulez or Lucinda Child. But in this game you learn something new every day.

Like always check out your vulture before the day of a shoot. When the handler wrestled this impressive avian out of the back of his transit it turned out to have only one eye…something about a fight. ‘Didn’t I mention that?’ enquired the handler. After assuring him we weren’t in the habit of hiring one eyed scavengers from the African savanna we obviously had no option but to work around the problm. Everything had to be filmed from the bird’s ‘good’ side, which made the day interesting. At four feet tall, beaked and clawed like a demon, great respect was due. Most of its studio time was spent sitting on its butt with a ‘screw you’ attitude, eating and then barfing up dead white mice and defecating on the brochure. Pretty much like your average agency party.