We are at the hub in Sleifert where we are having one final filming day on Shadows of Australia. We have our mini blue screen set up and we are having an extra day bringing lots of people to populate our environments. This very room is where we held our casting sessions two years ago now and there was on a couple of cold winter days that we were up here with our late friend James Orbury. Recently we've been reflecting on Jimmy and I've been talking to some of the cast about him. I'd personally known Jimmy for about four years and for me it was strange but exciting living in this market town, the antifacist of the film world and being friends with this actor had been in all these big films. So I got working with Jimmy on a few different projects but for various reasons they weren't going anywhere. So there's one last effort to bring his talents at the big screen. I presented him with my own script and I had a role in it he was perfect for. It was during the second casting session at the hub when in-watch local actor Ian Mude with Jimmy's death two months later this audition turned out to be the passing of the baton. It was great to meet him and I'm as an actor or enthusiastic film buff and acting sort of person. I'm always a bit star-struck when I meet my heroes and Jimmy didn't disappoint. He had a wonderful fund of anecdotes and great theatrical stories with which I can identify completely. I think Jimmy said at the time or I was told after I'd left the room that he said he'd devoted far too much time talking to me and I was very flattered and complemented by that because we were a similar age and maybe similar background both from a military family and I'd followed Jimmy's career ever since I first saw him in the film version of The Great William Goldings book Lord of the Flies. I was very moved by the movie and slightly terrified as well. This is easy to say with the benefit of all these years hindsight but I did think of the time because he was only a couple years older than me how great to be in a film. In a rather wonderful way taking over from James in this movie has been like the completing of a circle or it has a kind of symmetry to it which is really quite quite moving and it made me all the more keen and passionate to do his memory justice and do it just the very best I could. So Jimmy died the month before began filming and or remember it was on the St. George's Day that we had his funeral in Cranford and it was there that I met his French daughter for the first time Sarah. Jimmy had talked to me a lot about Sarah. I was aware that she was an actress in Paris and that she'd recently gotten in touch with him. However, they were never to meet in person. It was when we were having our pick up filming for shadows that Sarah contacted me and asked if there was anything she could do as a tribute to her father so we arranged for her to have a cameo appearance and so she came over to Sleaford to do some filming. I know he was a wonderful actor everybody told me that and I saw some of these movies. Spy Game and the Hunger with a French actress Catherine de Neuf and Lord of the Thies when he was 14 years old I think. I met his friends and he had a lot of friends so I have a lot of stories and he was a wonderful person. Everybody's 72 was very funny, was very friendly, like to get out and have some drinks like in English. Everybody has a very good memory of him and it's a very a chance for me to know that because I didn't have the chance to know him. He passed the wait two months before after we get in touch. I understand much better who he was. Now what was even more magical about this filming with Sarah is that we brought in one of our old friends Oliver who had actually acted with Jimmy in one of these unfinished film projects about. I remember I came home and I said to like my family and things. I'm acting with this guy who used to be in something to do with barbed wire in flowers and my mum was like, okay, barbed wire, okay, barbed wire. I thought, yes, that's the one. So she used to have posters of him and stuff on the walls and told all her friends how amazing it was and I was big into that really. But yeah, it was really nice to act alongside him and we stay up drinking whiskey till six in the morning and he was turning me into a bad boy in that film. I think he brewed my nice boy image and I ended up just getting pissed and acting. Not at the same time. I'm not very good at pissed acting. It's really nice experience. You're a really nice guy as well. We did keep in touch after the film as well and we'd meet up and things and go for drinks and took him down to his local haunting ground I think around here and I was always driving. So bastard. But yeah, it was nice to hear his stories and things and stuff he's got to say. And when I got a few other roles in other films and plays and things it was nice to run them by him as well. But yeah, it's really good input from him. I wanted just to pay tribute to the great humour and the great experience of Jimmy just to be in the same room with him and to see that characteristic twinkle in his eye. The laugh lines around his eyes and mouth was a great experience and I'm very pleased that I had a chance to meet him because he didn't live much longer than that audition a couple of months longer. Jimmy, this is for you. I'm sure Jimmy was disheartened having ended up here, out of the limelight on his own deserted island. But on a purely selfish level, it was great for me that our paths had crossed in this filmmaking wilderness. My favourite memory of Jimmy is one evening on a film set. We all sat down after the shoot and watched Lord of the Flies with him. I believe he said it was the first time he'd watched it properly since it was out. We were treated to a live actor's commentary of the film, as he told us all his stories about the production and what was going through his mind at the time. Jimmy once lent me a documentary about a reunion of the Lord of the Flies cast and I remember a very revealing moment in it where he's saying how, between roles he would feel so empty sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring. The ship coming to rescue him from his island, with another film or stage role they have stepped into. And in the last four years of his life, it would appear that's the Jimmy I knew, except he knew by then the phone was no longer ringing. It was just some local who was stuck in the same place.