Today was the first day on set for the second series of Henry 8.0 — the follow-up to the online comedy series I co-wrote for the BBC last year. Brian Blessed plays Henry VIII as a boisterous man-child inexplicably transported into the modern day and living with his long-suffering sixth wife Catherine Parr.
In the first series he was firmly rooted in front of his computer in a modest semi-detached house in suburbia. This time we're taking him away on holiday to spend the summer in a cramped caravan somewhere on the south coast of England.
We're rehearsing and filming the interior scenes at Longcross, an ex-MOD facility now used for film and television production, and shooting a few exterior bits and pieces at a real caravan park.
The rehearsals went well and hearing Brian speak the lines out loud of the first time was pretty cool. The scripts seemed to be getting a good reaction of the rest of the crew so hopefully it's funny. We've written seven mini-episodes in total but probably won't have time to film them all so inevitably there was some talk about which we'll drop if necessary.
One of the episodes focusses on Henry's attempts to play both sides of a Monopoly game to pass the time during a rainstorm, and it turns out that Brian has never played Monopoly. Not only that but he's completely unfamiliar with the basic concepts of the game and so rehearsing that one, with some fairly intricate comic business around money, tiny hotels and community chest cards was a little bit of a struggle.
There were numerous highlights from the day, including trying to film a cheeky series trailer with lots of top-volume swearing from Brian (to be beeped in the edit) without upsetting the real residents of the caravan site (who, presumably, were there for a bit of peace and quiet).
Also the rather seedy-looking man in a nearby tent who, during an early visit by the production team to the caravan site, apparently said: “Filming eh? I do a bit of that myself. Mainly glamour stuff.&rdquo
Oh, and a rather scary-looking bloke on a mobility scooter, who whirred over for a closer look, only to be loudly addressed by Brian as “madam&rdquo.
Tomorrow morning we start actually shooting the scripts themselves so that should be fun. We've moved on from the original conceit of the first series that everything was seen through Henry's webcam and so we've been able to broaden out the action. There's some fairly silly physical stuff this time around including a home-made catapult and some flying foodstuffs which I'm really looking forward to seeing come to life.
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