How I stood up Edgar Wright, director of Hot Fuzz

Regrets, I’ve had a few… certainly not too few to mention. With my financial settlement with my ex-wife nearing completion today I looked back on some of the biggest mistakes I’d ever made in my life and surprisingly getting married wasn’t the biggest.

Oh yeah, I’ve made a bigger one than that before.

When I was 17 I made a series of what can best be described as spoofs such as Juliana Clary and Batman with the intention of getting these short films onto the TV series Beadle’s Hotshots. We never quite made it on (though did get Batman screened on Adam Buxton’s Takeover TV) but the researcher on the show would phone me regularly asking me how the shooting was going and what ideas I had for new videos.

He was a nice chap, and even edited all of the videos for the show himself. Even though we didn’t make it onto the show they gave us two tickets for the recording of two episodes, so myself and Steven Gane went down from Newport to London, to Waterloo, for the filming. As we walked in the same researcher called me over as he’d recognised me from Batman. He apologised for not using any of our videos and said we should meet in the LWT bar afterwards to discuss ideas for the next season.

Sadly, Gany and I had to travel back to Newport on the last train, which was 11:00pm so we couldn’t meet him.

If only I could go back there now. That guy’s name was Edgar Wright and he went on to direct both series of Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

Oh dear god. What did we pass up? As young film makers we were undeterred at the time, and even when the producer of the show, Liz Costellas, telephoned me and asked me to get in touch with her prior to the new series starting we were still a little casual. We never got back to her.

So we stood up the director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, and we didn’t bother getting back to the producer of Beadle’s Hotshots.

That’s a mistake, my biggest to date.

Darren Jamieson

Darren Jamieson, aka MrDaz, is the Technical Director and co-founder of Engage Web and has been working online in a career spanning two decades. His first website was built in 1998 and is still live today.

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