Fresh from the neck of the bottle comes an interesting and poignant narrative on events surrounding the filming of last night’s BBC2 television programme Oz and James Drink Britain.
This was the best in the series so far but editing means we never get to know the half of it. Bruichladdich’s Managing Director, Mark Reynier, however, saw it all, so he takes up the story:
‘We had a lot of fun. To end the programme, the two of them were going to set off in a rowing boat, seemingly pissed, as if to row to Ireland into the setting sun etc. But the BBC’s Health & Safety, insurance, risk assessments and PC brigade made it impossible. Instead we had a jolly good dinner at my place. Without drinking much at all, May was rather ‘tired and emotional’. I don’t think he can handle much. (Yes, Mark, but we saw him down a lot of X4 so let’s be fair – and Oz lost his voice on the same dram.)
‘The whole day had started off disastrously. We had the use of the runway for the car but when the filming started – the car wouldn’t. It just smouldered. Embarrassingly, there was a wiring problem, a short circuit. Not, though, as short as the circuit we had to perform to repair it – and our honour.
‘In its journey up from Radical on a trailer, the car’s bodywork had chafed through a starting engine wire. Abandoning the airport, we came to the distillery where in true Hebridean tradition, the high-tech racing car was repaired in our distillery workshop by our engineer Douglas, saving the day.
‘The Police then kindly shut down the road for a few hours and the filming took place. Then it rained.
‘However, for me two sad things are inextricably associated with this event.
‘One, a local miseryguts ranted in the local paper accusing us of being too macho, not being serious enough, disrupting the locals, and having ‘too much fun’.
‘And secondly, with us in the crowd watching the event was a farmer, Dugald Mactaggart and his 11 year son. Four months later they would be dead, killed on the same stretch of road in a head-on collision with a cow and a lorry’.
While we don’t intend to give the game away, here is a bit of a photographic tease, courtesy of Mark Reynier, Managing Director at Bruichladdich. There is a narrative here – but you need to see the real thing tonight for the whole, mad story.
See it live, record it or use the BBC’s great iplayer – but do not miss this programme. It’s the third episode of Oz Clark’s and James May’s drinkfest odyssey through Britain and Ireland. In this one they do some blindfold whisky tasting, meet some controversial beer brewers in Edinburgh, deal with the breakdown of their un-trusty caravan – and end up in Islay.