Yet More LOM!

Apologies over the lack of output recently, I have an excuse. As well as being about as busy as we ever want to be here anyway I had another invitation to provide a car for the filming of the new series of the BBC drama Life On Mars sprung on me at short notice. You might remember that my mate Brummie Dave and his wife Julie kindly took along our 2.5 a few weeks ago whilst we were on holiday. Dave took his own TR6 up to Manchester last Sunday for a days filming, so that's another Triumph in the new series! The guy who arranges the cars for the BBC needed a cream coloured car at very short notice, could we help? A quick look around the fleet revealed one of our V8 saloons resplendant in just the right shade of 1970's beige! Only trouble was it had come off the road 8 months before needing a water pump, and having starting problems, and a serious missfire. Problems all sorted I volunteered to take the V8 up to Manchester on Tuesday as the wife had other pressing things to do here, besides she had been up several times with her own 2.5, it's a about time I had a day off. After a pleasant trip up the M6 dicing with the BMW's I pulled into BBC Manchester's car park just in time to join the queue at the catering van for breakfast. Whilst despatching my bacon rolls I had time to look around at the motors used previously in the series. One of the Allegro Panda cars bore the scars of a recent accident and was in need of some bodywork. There was a very nice white Rover P6S in the compound, and a Lotus Elan Sprint. The Lotus was slated to be the 'star' of that days shooting but was playing up. Robert (the car arranger) had asked me to bring some spark plugs up with me to try and sort its missbehaviour out, so we set to tinkering. Then the call came to move everything lock stock and barrel out to the set for that day some cordened off streets in central Manchester. There we spent most of the day watching the filming, and fixing the bloody Lotus as one thing after another went wrong with it! Had chance to confer with the other two car providers there that day, a chap from the Granada owners club who had brought his MK1 estate along, and a Imp owners club chap with a nice early example. Our V8 was used along with the Granny and the Imp as street dressing whilst the Elan was thrashed around by the stunt driver. I managed to look over the directors shoulder at his monitor whilst they were filming the bit with the V8 in, it should appear for a few seconds only looking as it does in my picture composed later on the car park here. Oh well at least that's another Triumph on the box!