The visitor

At 8pm last Saturday night, the phone rang in my hotel room. The receptionist sounded suspicious and protective. 

“There’s a, er, gentleman here who wants to talk to you.” 

I was expecting him. 

“It's OK, we have an appointment – please tell him I’ll be right down.” 

She sounded only a little relieved. When I saw him sitting silently on a sofa in the corner of the reception area, I understood her reticence.

The next hot thing

Sunny Sunday mornings are always special. 

A leisurely soft boiled egg with soldiers lying lazily beside a frothing cappuccino, my computer open at a blank page, ready for the weekly update on my world. It’s my favourite moment of the week. Except that instead of a view of my frosted garden, I’m looking at the Empire State building glowing in the sunlight of a New York midtown skyline. 

Outside my hotel here in Brooklyn, the streets are still silent, no sign of life apart from a few tracksuits in the park jogging guilt into my brain as I order another round of buttery toast. 

I only arrived last night, and this afternoon I’ll be back in the care of British Airways, 14 hours of my weekend lost on a plane. It’s a long way to come for one meeting, but that’s the strange world of television. You work away at a project for months, and then suddenly somebody says they’ll meet you, but only next Saturday, and off you fly. Literally.

With One Word I Was Married

I could never live in New York. It’s a great place to stay for a few days (or, as we did last week, for a few hours on our way home from LA), but the extremes of temperature would soon drive me into airconditioned madness. The winters are freezing and the summers are like a permanent steambath.

Joanna and I weren’t exactly prepared for the icy blasts down 5th Avenue. We only had clothes for 75-degree California, so we looked incongruous dressed in layers of t-shirts while everyone else wore overcoats.

My first trip to New York was a result of young love. In my first year at university I'd fallen for a girl called Mary and, having pledged eternal devotion, my world fell apart when she won a scholarship for a year at a New York university. Mary-less, I pined for about six months until my mother, despairing of all my moping, lent me some money to fly over and spend the summer vacation with my beloved in New York.

So, with clean socks and underwear, I set off promising my worried mother to contact her as soon as I arrived.

New York in June was in the nineties, both in temperature and humidity. It was pouring with hot rain and the moment I stepped off the plane I was bathed in a thick mask of perspiration. Mary was sharing an apartment on the Upper East Side with a neurotic actress, three cats and no airconditioning. It was hell, but somehow through the jetlag, despite the sweaty nights in a single bed, we seemed to be getting on OK.

So I dutifully sent my mother a telegram (it was 1972, well before the days of International Subscriber Trunk Dialling or the fax machine). Mum had given me strict instructions to report three key facts: Had I arrived? Where was I off to? and How were things with Mary? The trouble was, telegrams were charged by the word, and I could only afford twelve.

It took me two and a half hours to squeeze the facts into the limit, and I even managed to include a reference to the weather. Triumphantly I telephoned the result through to Western Union:

EMBRACED BY NEW YORK AND MARY IN POURING RAIN FLORIDA NEXT STOP.

It wasn't until I returned to England two months later that I discovered the havoc my telegram had wreaked back home. Western Union had only got one word wrong, but it almost gave my mother a coronary:

EMBRACED BY NEW YORK AND MARRIED IN POURING RAIN FLORIDA NEXT STOP.

She was devastated. I was her only son, and now I had married without even telling or inviting her. And we were off on honeymoon to Florida. Nevertheless, to Mum’s eternal credit, she went to St Nicholas’s Cathedral to light a candle for our future happiness.

The next time she heard from me was a month later. I sent a postcard from San Francisco saying I had run out of funds and was living on MacDonalds. By then I was marching behind Jane Fonda in support of McGovern against the evil Nixon. He lost by a landslide. But we were young, idealistic: and, in those days, very thin.

Speaking of which, I offer you all an apology. In my New Year’s Day blog, I swore I would lose 21 lbs by Easter. Of course I hadn’t reckoned on Easter being so absurdly early. Well, that’s my excuse and, yes, I failed. My cause wasn’t helped by the last three weeks in LA. My mother brought me up to eat everything on my plate, which is a really bad idea in the land of the giant portion.

On Easter Day I confess I was just 10 lbs lighter, and I have a feeling that Keith Hann, who took the challenge with me, will be gloating in his column tomorrow. My cheque book awaits the bad news.

Hot Air from BA

This is my third letter from America. We’ve now flown from LA to New York to pitch our ideas to MTV. The flight takes five hours to cover the 2,500 miles and our tickets on JetBlue cost $350 each. We’ve just found out that, because of the change of itinerary, British Airways won’t transfer our London Heathrow to Newcastle booking, so we have to buy new tickets for the short 50 minute, 250-mile hop. Cost: $450 dollars each.

The Night I Got Drunk With David Hasselhoff

Tomorrow night has been rescheduled.

I’m not referring to the resurrection of ITV’s News at Ten, with Trevor McDonald cryogenically preserved in his chair still clutching his cheery “And Finally” stories. No, tomorrow tonight at ten o’clock I had been looking forward to watching Sky One’s coverage of the Golden Globes.

Jo and I are suckers for celebrity awards. She provides the fashion commentary and tells me who everyone is (I have no capacity for facial recognition, which is a bit of a hindrance for a former chatshow producer). I sound off about the movies that should have won, and then Jo puts me right. Over a bottle of red and a mound of tortilla chips, nothing could be finer.

Instead, this year’s ceremony was cancelled because of the writers' strike and replaced by a press conference. By tomorrow morning we’ll know the winners, so Jo and I will be debating the results over breakfast.

My office is piled high with DVDs because by noon tomorrow I’m supposed to vote for the BAFTA shortlist. Like many voting members, I don’t get out to the cinema as much as I should -- our local cinema in Hexham is not the most comfortable way of spending two hours. I really miss the Everyman in Hampstead, where they serve you drinks and food inside the auditorium, and you sit on plush two-seater sofas. So instead the studios send me every film to watch in the comfort of my own living room. Because they only arrive in December, and also because I can only do things against an absurd deadline, this means that for the last few weeks I’ve been watching two a night.

Normally the awards season, which begins with the Golden Globes and ends with the Oscars next month, has one or two certain winners. This year, for the first time I can recall, it’s a really tough choice.

Personally I hope Atonement wins director Joe Wright a gong if only for his six minute long single shot of Redcar transformed into Dunkirk. I want to meet Mr Wright one day to ask him about the single chorister in the bandstand who's singing the wrong words to Abide With Me (or maybe he's the only Welshman), and whether he considered going for a retake, but I do think the shot, and the film, was one of my movie highlights of the year.

But it’s up against very stiff competition like American Gangster, Michael Clayton, and No Country for Old Men. There’s talk of glory for Daniel Day Lewis for his soulless oil man in There Will Be Blood (though am I the only one who thought the film far too long and self-indulgent?) but for me the real stars this season have been the women, particularly Ellen Page in Juno, Julie Christie in Away From Her and, above all, Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose. Juno had the year's best screenplay by far, but I guess it'll be considered a little too lightweight for the big prizes.

Whoever and whatever wins tonight, I’ll miss seeing the ridiculous frocks and borrowed diamonds, the rehearsed smiles, bland interviews, and above all the terrible speeches.

I know how easy it is to get carried away in acceptance speeches. I was once up for an International Emmy in New York. I’d made a film with David Jason called The Bullion Boys which had been nominated for Best Drama. It was produced and directed by Christopher Morahan, who'd won many awards for Jewel In The Crown.

We knew we hadn’t won from the moment we arrived because my co-producer Richard Broke was in a wheelchair, and there was no ramp onto the stage: a bit of a give-away. So Chris, Richard and I spent the evening getting blind drunk, and everyone at the table cheered as I tore up my acceptance speech into little pieces.

Just as we opened our eighth bottle of champagne, I thought I heard my name being called out. Then I saw my face on the television monitors. We had won. Chris and I managed to stagger through the minefield of tables to reach the front and received the award from David Hasselhoff (a man who knows a bit about the effects of drink).

I don’t remember much about what followed except that, with every word of my acceptance speech forgotten, I launched into a diatribe against the Academy for its lack of disabled facilities for our co-producer. The result, in politically correct America, was a three-minute standing ovation, as Richard wheeled himself to the centre of the hall to share our moment of glory. I was last seen at 1am pushing him down the middle of 6th Avenue, with taxis swerving to avoid us.

I think it was probably the best moment of my life. And it shows how drunkenness and spontaneity (but mainly drunkenness) can beat a professionally written script any day. I just hope the writers' strike is over before the Oscars.