Scottish Television very kindly kept on employing me and asked me to join their soap opera Take The High Road to play evil woodcutter Jim Hunter.
It was a really good way to learn very fast about acting for the camera and also for dealing with dialogue and story lines that weren't always plausible!
The show was shot at the Gateway studios in Edinburgh, and each recording day we had to do the scenes as live, meaning that if we made a mistake we had to go back to the beginning. Also we had to finish by a certain time because the equipment or the signal was used for the nightly news (I didn't understand it at the time either). Anyway, this meant that there was always a tension to get it right and do it fast.
One day we were against the clock and I was in a scene in Mr and Mrs Blair's living room. There was some glare from the pictures hanging on the walls and so to avoid it someone placed tangerines from the fruit bowl under the pictures so they would angle up a bit. Then the scene started and Mr Blair came in rather angry, slammed the door, and loads of tangerines shot out from behind the pictures. It was insane.
They decided to live with a bit of glare!