Berlin is a long way from Los Angeles but I watched those giant dominoes topple live on CNN, as I pounded away on the Stairmaster at the gym this morning.
I had a little tear in my eye watching the old TV footage. What a victory for the people that was.
Twenty years is nothing in history but seems like a lifetime to me, so much has changed. Back then I was a cub reporter on a local paper and to call stories in to the news desk we had to use phones in phone boxes. Try finding a working phone box on a Laindon estate when you’re up against a deadline – no easy feat I can tell you.
I won’t bore you with a self-serving retrospective but it also reminded me of the time that I went to 10 Downing Street the day after Margaret Thatcher won the 1987 election.
I was sent by my paper to pick up the New Year’s Honours list and was petrified when I arrived because the world’s press were camped outside her front door. They were eagerly awaiting her first appearance since the win so every time the door opened a million flashbulbs went off. I stepped inside and stood in the hallway waiting for an assistant to bring me the envelope (email, what’s that then?).
A door to a living room a few feet away was slightly ajar and inside I could hear the Prime Minister talking to Sir Robin Day as she prepared to give her first interview. I was enthralled – a cub reporter at the heart of a national news story. They didn’t call me Lois for nothing you know.
I wish I had an political ending of In The Loop proportions for this anecdote but I simply tucked the bulky envelope under my arm and was ushered out of the door, to be blinded by the world’s press. That was until someone muttered, ‘Oh, she’s no-one’, and I scuttled away to catch the train back to Southend.
That brief exposure to the world’s press was frightening beyond belief and last week at the AFI Film Festival in Hollywood, I watched as Colin Firth, Ginnifer Goodwin, Tom Ford, Cindy Crawford, Julie Delpy, Angela Bassett and Nicholas Hoult (amongst others) braved the cameras on the red carpet at the gala premiere of A Single Man.
It strikes me that you have to truly crave that kind of scrutiny to place yourself on that carpet. The cameras are in your face. They capture every angle. There’s no personal space. It’s horrible. And yet, everyone it seems wants to be famous, to be someone.
After the screening at the wonderfully gaudy Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, I wandered over to the Roosevelt Hotel for the after-show party. Clutching my press pass I was told by a very lovely, yet stressed out publicist that the party was being thrown by the Weinsteins and I didn’t have the right credentials.
‘That’s ok,’ I said lightly, ‘I fancy an early night.’
She looked at me as if I was mad, surrounded as she was by people willing to sell their grandmother to get into that room.
There was a slew of them: angrily punching their iPhones, yelling at the top of their voices that ‘Amanda told me it was ok!’ and generally kicking up a giant hissy fit.
I left them to it and wandered through the foyer of the Kodak Theatre back to my car. When I got home I sat down at my desk to work some more on my script. My own personal Berlin Wall.
