Hugh Bonneville: YOU COULDN'T MAKE IT UP: BEHIND THE SCENES ON TWENTY TWELVE Written: Sunday, 08 July 2012 ARTICLE BY GERARD GILBERT FOR THE INDEPENDENT (HUGH BONNEVILLE ON LINE)

Gerard Gilbert is granted an exclusive guided tour behind the scenes of the award-winning comedy 'Twenty Twelve' – and discovers how sometimes life imitates art more closely than you imagine...

Visiting television drama and comedy sets can be a tedious business, with a lot of hanging around between takes and re-takes, but watching the first of the final three episodes of Twenty Twelve being filmed is a delight. I'm an admirer, anyway, of John Morton's award-winning BBC2 comedy about the Olympic Deliverance Commission (ODC), the fictional body tasked with organising the 2012 London Olympic Games, and this was like having a private live performance. And who cares about re-takes when a fantastic cast led by Hugh Bonneville, Jessica Hynes and Amelia Bullmore are delivering the sort of nuanced dialogue that almost demands repeat listening? Take five? Bring it on.

"You really do have to concentrate on the lines," says Bullmore, who plays Kay Hope, the head of sustainability, a role in charge of what happens to the Olympic venues after the Games. "It's speedy and feather-light; you don't sit on anything, you just bomb on through. If I had a fiver for every time John [Morton] said, 'Pace', I'd have a lot of fivers."

We're sitting in standard-issue partitioned offices on the 37th floor of the Canary Wharf Tower in London's Docklands – the previous series were filmed on the 29th floor, so this is a sitcom literally going up in the world – the windows affording a distant panoramic view of Olympic Park. As his character Ian Fletcher, ODC's head of deliverance, chairs a breakfast meeting to sort out the travel arrangements for visiting American VIPs, Hugh Bonneville is experiencing hiccups with his lines. "Obviously we can't have the First Lady sitting in traffic on the Balls Pond Road as Usain Bolt crosses the finishing line in the 100 metres," he recites smoothly after a couple of takes. "At the same time, we can't have Boris being mown down on his bike by a cavalcade of armour-plated Lincoln Continentals."

Not only is this a fiendishly intricate line to deliver in the midst of a rapid-fire ensemble scene, it's also very funny. Is Bonneville ever not able to retain a deadpan face? "You don't actually have time for corpsing because you're just panicking like hell to get it right," he says. "That scene took five hours and the challenge is to make it look effortless and accidental, but as you saw, it's actually very finely honed."

Bonneville is "zooming up and down the M4" to fit this filming into his ongoing commitments for Downton Abbey – his busy timetable one of the main reasons that this final series of Twenty Twelve was split in two; the first five episodes (screened in March) were filmed last summer, while this concluding trilogy has been left until nearly the last minute. "Trying to prise Hugh out of the arms of Downton Abbey is very tricky," says Morton, creator, writer and director of the series. "The good consequence of that is that I was able to leave three episodes to write closer to the Games, although actually they're not really fantastically topical. It's not like a stand-up doing a routine about this week's news about the Olympics. It's trying to make up things that haven't happened but you feel might have."

Indeed, Twenty Twelve has become renowned for its almost spooky prescience, going right back to the very first episode in March 2011, which featured problems with the 1,000-day countdown clock. The morning after the episode aired, the real-life clock in Trafalgar Square broke down. "I had no idea there was a countdown clock," claims Morton, "and then to find out that not only had they done a clock but... it's just a wonderful piece of happenstance."

Others might suspect espionage – but Morton denies he had a mole inside the offices of the real-life version of ODC, the almost satirically named Locog (the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games), which happens to have its headquarters a few floors down from the Twenty Twelve set. "There was someone in the costume department whose sister, I think, may have had occasion to go in [to Locog] and was able to give us a steer as to whether or not they wore ties," says Morton, "but I didn't want an inside track. These people are made up. I wanted to put some clear blue water between us and Locog.


READ MORE: http://www.hughbonneville.co.uk/backstage-articles-interviews-a-charities/item/you-couldn-t-make-it-up.html