Next door the cramped dining tables are littered with half-eaten meals and dirty glasses, while five emotional restaurant staff are trying to lock up for the night. I half expect to see a poisoned corpse quietly swelling in the corner.

Welcome to the set of I Really Hate My Job. It’s a miniature vision of Hell posing as a respectable Soho diner, and the working conditions are immaculately awful.

This is only my second visit to a film set in ten years, for the simple reason that I needed therapy after the first. In 1997 I set off to Los Angeles to do a location report on a musical called The Isle of Lesbos, directed by an American war correspondent named Jeff B. Harmon.

While I was flying over the Atlantic, the catering chef on the film managed to get himself eaten by two guard dogs after losing his keys and hatching the bright idea of crawling through a drain hole into the lock-up where he kept his van. The dogs ate him piece by piece.

When I landed I was driven to a film set traditionally reserved for the making of porn and chop-socky movies by a press representative still recovering from the electric shock treatment prescribed by his parents for being both gay and a Mormon.

Harmon greeted me in the blistering heat wearing an unflattering catalogue of S&M gear. His designer had nearly expired from a heart attack and was in intensive care. His production manager was in a room down the corridor with a suspected broken back. Facilities for visiting journalists — basically me — were an ironing board that doubled as Jeff’s massage table, and my ability to foot the bills in the local restaurant.

Two days later, while I was waiting for the flight back to London, a television news station launched a poll about whether the “canine cannibals” should be put down.

For the record, The Isle of Lesbos was a success at the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, but I have no idea what happened to the dogs.

The security at Three Mills Studios in East London brings back some of these weird memories, mostly because it was the original prison for the reality TV programme Big Brother. You can’t walk past a corrugated iron warehouse without being shouted at through a loud-hailer.

But I’m in awe at the unfussy professionalism of Oliver Parker’s shoot of I Really Hate My Job. His team is two days away from the final wrap of a new British comedy and, apart from an 8ft Scotsman who yells “Would everyone who has nothing to do with the next scene please leave Planet Earth”, they are all as cool as cucumbers.

Parker wears a black porkpie hat and his dark caterpillar eyebrows put one in mind of a jovial Denis Healey. “I was asked to play him once,” he confesses with a breezy twinkle. He is an effortlessly charismatic director with an appetite for chunky British projects. His most famous titles include An Ideal Husband, Othello (starring Kenneth Branagh and Laurence Fishburne), and a movie about Orson Welles called Fade to Black, which has yet to be released.

That said, Parker also has a great deal of experience with small budgets, which is precisely why he fell in love with Jennifer Higgie’s script. I Really Hate My Job is a £1.2 million labour of love that has attracted some extraordinary talent, partly because of the script, partly because of Parker, and mostly because it has proved so quick to make. It took just three-and-a-half months to greenlight and complete this movie, including 21 intense days of shooting. The secret, needless to say, is in the preparation.

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