Throughout this year I’ve been involved in another music video with the legend that is Mr Basil Brush. Yes, my old foxy pal is having another pop at a Christmas song with his little fingers crossed behind his back that he can storm up the charts, and maybe, just maybe get Christmas number one.
We’ve been here before, I know. In 2018 we made White Christmas, but on that occasion we didn’t shoot the video until October of that year. With this latest one, Boom! Boom! It’s Christmas Again, it all started way back in January. It was all the brainchild of my friend and filmmaking collaborator Chris Clark. I’ve lost count of how many Christmas music videos of his I’ve worked on now, but this one was the biggest one yet, a blockbuster epic that brought in a multitude of national treasures from children’s television. There’s Muffin the Mule, Mr Blobby, Hacker, and a trio of my childhood favourites in Zippy, George and Bungle.
Ronnie, Chris, Mike Winsor, Paul Denson, Phil Fletcher at the back. The end of a long week of filming in Rauceby
Performing two of these characters, we had the amazing Ronnie Le Drew who’s puppeteered on many big-budget productions (not to mention the original Rainbow series I watched as a young boy). Disney’s new Pinocchio film was one he was telling us about on the BBICA shoot.
The bulk of filming took place at Rauceby Hall, the home of an old friend of ours, Jonny. We had the BBC Look North crew covering it, as well as the local radio station. I took on my usual role, which is something I love doing: shove a camera in my hand and I’ll film all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes, all the goofing around, all the ad libbed sillyness (and with these guys there’s usually a lot). When you have Basil and all his friends on set, there is never a dull moment. This converted into a little edit called Boom! Boom! Let’s Try That Again which you can see here:
As it happened, I didn’t film all the shots on this video. For one of the sequences of the music video, I was entrusted to shoot it on the fancy-pants new camera Chris had got for the production, so I had to hand my camera over to someone else (thanks, Sadie who got some great shots of me appearing as if I know what I’m doing).
A couple of times I also found myself in front of this camera. I have absolutely no dance skills whatsoever, but in the party scene at the end, I’m one of those folk boogieing away (fortunately my face was cropped out of shot so no one will know it was me). On another shooting day, down in a scout hut in Watford (or thereabouts), I was in a shot playing a film crew member.
And here’s an interesting thing about that: although it appears I’m a sound operator in that shot, that’s not a boom pole I’m fiddling with, but a microphone stand. We did have a boom pole, something we’ve used on many a film shoot, and I distinctly remember bringing the boom pole along for the filming at Rauceby Hall in April… but I haven’t seen it since. The irony! Boom! Boom! It’s Christmas Again stole my boom pole! It was Basil, wasn’t it? That rascal. I’m sure it will turn up at some point, but yep, for that filming day back in August, we had to improvise with the mic stand.
I literally didn’t realise this until I wrote this blog, but that Christmas jumper I’m wearing is THE Christmas jumper from that Christmas music vid we made in Sleaford town centre way back in 2011!
So is Basil finally going to do it and crack the Christmas music chart? Things have been moving along well in that regard. You may have seen Richard Madeley and Susanna Read talking about the single on Good Morning Britain. You may also have read about it in the national newspapers. And I don’t think we’re done there. This might be our best stab yet.
All proceeds from the sale of the single go to charity, Save the Children and Shooting Stars Chase Children’s Hospice, so please do support us. Watch, share, like the video, and download the single.
And have a boombastic Christmas!
