Smash hit

The remaining two characters (a Scottish mafia boss, Haggis Munching Harry, and a rather utilitarian character, the Janitor) I resolved to play myself. In true Guy Ritchie style, I should probably also cast my girlfriend. This just didn’t occur to me.

My budget from The Times was £50. This was swallowed, very quickly, by props. Some fake blood, a beard and hat for Moshe and some plastic weaponry. “Don’t take the red bit off the end,” said the girl in Escapade Costumes in Camden as she sold me a plastic sawn-off shot-gun. “If you do and the police shoot you, they don’t even have to say sorry.”

We filmed it all last Saturday. We started at midday at Cage Rage, where Legeno was even scarier in person than he is on film. “If you don’t want to be playing tiddlywinks with the thumbs you haven’t got . . ,” he said to Watson’s Geezer, and Watson surely didn’t have to fake the fear. When Cage Rage’s equally terrifying promoter Dave O’Donnell did a cameo as the Pieman’s henchman, you could feel the testosterone singeing your nose hair. I was beginning to understand why Guy Ritchie feels the need to adopt that accent.

In a nutshell, Daily Monkey is a movie about a golden wink. From the comfort of his gym (the Cage Rage) the Pieman gives it to Geezer to deliver to Haggis Munching Harry in his nightclub (Stringfellows). For doing this, he will earn £500 (his daily monkey). En route, however, in a hustle gone wrong, Geezer loses it to the Janitor. In a fury, the Pieman dispatches Moshe the Mangler to get it back. One thing leads to another, they all rush around to the tune of Zorba’s Dance from Zorba the Greek, and then there is a tiddlywinks showdown in a cage that erupts into a bloodbath. It’s all rather convoluted and ill-conceived, but a voiceover can fix that on any film. Right, Guy?

We filmed at breakneck speed, but were still running over time. For the scenes requiring all five characters on-screen at one time, the Times photographer Charlie Hopkinson slipped into my boiler suit and beanie hat and acted as my body double. By four o’clock the cast and crew were squeezing into my Mini and speeding to Borough, near London Bridge. We chose quiet streets so as not to attract the police.

“I think we should just call it Monkey,”Gilbert said as we rattled over cobbles. “Snatch, Revolver, they’re all just one word. Why have we got two?” Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, I pointed out. “Good point,” he conceded.

In Borough Moshe the Mangler had to drag Geezer out of a car window, beat him up with a gun and hurl him into the boot. That way, Gilbert could get the interior shot he’d been waiting for. “I’m not sure I’m going to fit in there,” said Watson (6ft 1in), eyeing my Mini’s boot (2ft by 3ft). Forbes suggested slamming it a few times.

I have to say that Forbes as Moshe was sensational, even though his costume made him look a bit too much like Abraham Lincoln. “Do not mess with me,” he ad-libbed at one point. “I am highly flammable.”

Watson, too, made for a stunning Geezer, quickly deciding that this character wasn’t nearly as slick as I’d intended him to be. He ended up less Nick Moran and more Billy Mitchell from EastEnders. Perfect.

My own scenes were a little more clunky. In our final location, Stringfellows, all the scenes were mine. In order to display as crass a national stereotype as possible, I played Haggis Munching Harry in a kilt and a tartan hat with fake orange hair.

We are much alike, Guy Ritchie and I, in that we are just a little bit too posh. My innate Scottishness comes and goes in my speech, and on camera it was all sounding a little forced. In the end I settled on a rolling Morningside golf-club wheedle rather than the gruff Glaswegian I’d been planning. I think it worked better.

How I looked, tartan amid a sea of leopard-skin with JJ the stripper winding herself around a pole behind me, I cannot imagine. By then it was 9pm and we were exhausted, Gilbert in particular. This one-man crew had climbed inside car boots, had run backwards down streets, had lain on the blood-splattered canvas of a fighting ring, while we all fell about and pretended to be dead.

“It’s a wrap,” he muttered, and we staggered off to the bar. Normally a five-minute movie would take anything between a weekend and a week. We’d done it in nine hours. I wouldn’t have thought it possible. Given a fortnight, we could have made a feature film.

At the time of writing I haven’t seen it. Gilbert, holed up in his Soho flat to work on the edit, tells me it looks pretty good. Not quite up to Lock, Stock standards, but not far off. I confidently expect to be married to an Eighties pop star within months. Is Cyndi Lauper still around? She’ll do.

What’s that? When will it be in cinemas? You’re ’avin a laugh, ain’tcha? You slaaaag.

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