We knew he had a new book out this year (the Good, the Bad and the Multiplex) and that he was doing another book tour in the Autumn and had talked about going again. I had a message early in September from Lizzie asking when he was coming to Oxford, and when I got round to looking it up, after some difficulty I found he had been in Oxford the night before. A little disappointing but the film he had been going to show after sounded a little scary so I hadn't been entirely convinced!! But we found out he was doing two nights in London (and Lizzie is currently living in London for her final OT placement) and one was a Friday night at the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley, a cinema we had heard Mark talk a lot about as the cinema 'he grew up in'. We decided this might be rather fun, so we bought tickets for pretty much the same spot of the cinema as last time.
Friday night came and I drove to London listening to Mark and Simon podcasts on my phone/laptop depending on power! I was very behind on podcats - back to May so in the end I just tried to listen to the most recent one. There was an added complication that I was also trying to listen to Simon Mayo's All Request Friday show on Radio 2 which I love. And I had sent a text to it saying I was off to hear Mark Kermode so I was listening out for that, but I didn't hear anything :-(
I found my way to East Finchley via the North Circular feeling like it was quite an adventure and drove around for a while sussing out parking situations. I was also looking for somewhere to get food and decided to pick the tickets up first from the cinema and discovered there was a cafe there so thought that was the best place to eat so settled down. Lizzie joined me later and we managed various surreptitious excitement moves (like high fives) and couldn't understand why everyone else in the place wasn't as excited about being in Mark Kermode's homeland!!!
Lizzie kindly bought a copy of the book for me from a stand there for my birthday (don't think Mark would like that word order) and we took some excited photos from the outside of the cinema. (Feel I should mention we were in the middle of an extraordinary Indian Summer, hence the strappy tops on the final day of September! Well, maybe it was coupled with a little Mark heat excitement too!)
We took our seats in the cinema and waited. There was lots of nudging and squeezing when he arrived - seemingly out of a broom cupboard at the side! He was just like last time in such a good way! He never seemed to stop talking and it was just like he was having a natural conversation with himself. As a listener it didn't seem to have any structure as each anecdote seemed to run into the next, but I am sure he carefully worked out what topics he was going to cover and in what order. There was some stuff that we had heard on 5Live before and some that was new. We liked it when he mentioned Simon and his all request friday show. There was questions and answers at the end - I don't remember being quite as in awe as last time!
Then once he had finally finished it was time to leave the auditorium for the book signing. We were pleased to be at the back so we could make a quick getaway. We followed the crowd downstairs but then when we got there Mark turned around and headed back upstairs and we ended up really close to him! I was right behind and brushed his jacket - wasn't quite bold (or crazy) enough to forcefully touch his back!! We ended up quite near the front of the line, and had the same chats about what we were going to say and would we take photos. It must have been funny thinking about it if someone was listening to our hushed awkward conversations!! The people in front of us spent a long time chatting so that left us thinking we should go for it...maybe?!
Whatever conclusions we had come to it definitely didn't come close to how amazing it actually turned out to be. We went along the lines of we'd seen him in Oxford before and how much we had liked that and we got in to a big discussion about showing films after his talks and balling our eyes out at It's a Wonderful Life and being too scared to go the the Oxford film this time. And he signed the book and we got photos and it was great. AND THEN... I mentioned how I had txted Simon and Mark said 'Oh I had a text from Simon saying an all request friday listener was coming tonight. Let me see if I can find it' and he got out his phone, and not the most expertly, found his texts and the one from Simon and showed it to us!!!! And then he send a reply, again a little awkwardly back saying we were there. MARK AND SIMON TEXT EACH OTHER ABOUT US!!!!!!!! or at least they each did once!!! Woah - can you ever begin to imagine what Lizzie and I were like after that????????????? :-)
Coming down a little from our high, we decided to quickly see if we could buy tickets for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy which was showing at 9pm and we were both fairly interested in seeing and thought it would be quite something to say we had seen a film at Mark's favourite cinema. So we settled into that and it was a nice relax though can't say I fully followed it - mega exciting when Mr Wu came on in the background.
Well. We thought our first Mark encounter incredible but boy was this an epic one!!! Thanks Lizzie xxx
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