Mrs. Mangel

Imagine you’re watching Coronation Street.

It’s almost the end of part one, The Rovers Return is packed full in celebration of Tracy and Seth Armstrong’s marriage. Present at the bar is a drunken Mrs. Mangel, who lets slip sordid gossip about Tracy’s former lovers, one of which is nursing a lonely drink in the background. Watching events unfold with jealous rage, Tracy’s ex-lover challenges Mrs. Mangel to take back her words, but Amos Brearly intervenes and a fist-fight ensues.
Suddenly it’s the end of part one. The advertisements commence and you’re about to venture into the kitchen to make a cup of tea when something stops you in your tracks. From the television you hear a familiar voice, you look at the screen and see a person with blue hair and Pasquale-esque features, you see an on-screen caption explaining the terms and conditions to a British Gas Homecare package, you see Nigel tapping a pipe with a screwdriver whilst offering the merits of Homecare cover. You see Nigel, on an advert, on television.

This nearly happened!

Geroge Clooney

For this year’s winter marketing campaign, British Gas wanted it’s own engineers to sell its Homecare product to the public. This included having real-life British Gas engineers take part in a new television commercial being filmed later this month. A circular was distributed throughout the company offering engineers “the chance to be the next George Clooney” (provided we could get ourselves to London at very short notice, us engineers could get the chance to get our arses out in Solaris). At the bottom of the circular was a mobile number to call if you were interested in being cast for the commercial.

I phoned the mobile number.

On Wednesday the 2nd August I found myself wandering the streets of North Kensington looking for the premises of Tomboy Films, the location of the casting session. The trusty A-Z took me to a quiet street off Ladbroke Grove where I found a small, unassuming building occupied by several Phil Mitchell look-alikes Not expecting media types to resemble brick-outhouses, I correctly identified the collection of Mitchells (the collective noun for Mitchells escapes me) as fellow gas engineers and took my place among my kind in the building’s reception.

Including myself, there were eight engineers waiting at the casting session, one of which was an old college chum from Stroud. Expecting a large influx of local engineers, I was surprised to find only one Londoner sat in the reception, the rest having travelled from as far as Manchester and Birmingham. As we waited nervously, we were handed various documents to complete, one of which was a casting sheet. Cue the sound of mobile phones chirping into life as my colleagues hurriedly called wives/girlfriends to remind them of their collar and chest size. We were also given a copy of the script to digest as we waited for our call.

Unfortunately I never kept my copy of the script, otherwise it would’ve been posted here for your delectation. To summarise, the commercial consists of various shots of an engineer in normal working conditions (fixing a pipe, testing a radiator, carrying a toolbox) whilst selling the Homecare product:

"The engineer is running his hands across a radiator testing its temperature. The engineer looks to the camera and asks, "Could you survive the winter without your central heating?"

We sat with our scripts and joked about how stupid we’d look if we were chosen to be in the commercial. We started wondering why, given the scripted nature of the ad, it would require real engineers in the first place.

We were called into the audition in pairs. We were sat at a small table in front of two cameras, the director, a representative from British Gas and countless other media types with forgettable names. Our scripts were taken from from us and we were asked to perform a role-playing scene. In this scene, one of us had to play the part of an off-duty gas engineer visiting his friend’s house, the other had to play the friend. During a chat over a beer, the off duty engineer notices his friend’s boiler is making an awful noise. The engineer fixes the boiler, then sells his friend a Homecare product using the line, “could you survive the winter without your central heating?”

Not a real engineer

When it came to my turn I felt my rectum relax, the butterflies in my stomach started stirring and my mouth dried up. Now, I’ve been on stage before, I’ve sang in front of strangers so I thought I could handle this. Alas, my nerves got the better of me and my “performance” was hardly worthy of being called a performance. Still, myself and my colleague gave it our best and in hindsight, we really enjoyed ourselves.

The whole session was over and done with in ten minutes. Afterwards we gathered outside the building for a quick smoke, discussed our performances and went our separate ways, save for myself, my college chum Neil and Jason, a chap from oop North who decided join us as we spent the rest of the day shopping for vinyl records, quaffing ales and arguing about tube routes.

A week later we each had a phone call from the director thanking us for our efforts, but regretting that due to time constraints, real actors will be used in the commercial. This came as no surprise to us as we suspected this outcome, having questioned the use of real engineers when we first read the script. Despite this, I’m glad I took part as I’ll probably never get the chance to something like this again.

It would’ve been nice to see me on the telly though, wouldn’t it?