5 AUGUST Oxford. Most of the cast of the stage play are taking part in the film, though some of them in much smaller roles just for old times’ sake. I have been given the part of a loquacious MP who happens to be addressing the Commons when news arrives that the King, whom everyone believes still to be mad, is actually outside in Palace Yard. The House rapidly empties, leaving the MP (MP2, as he’s known in the script) addressing the empty benches with only the Speaker left. Eventually the Speaker tiptoes out too.
   The House of Commons has been set up in Convocation, with the adjoining Divinity School representing the Lobby. Coming on to the set, with Pitt and Co. on the front bench and the place crammed with two hundred extras, I am struck, as one often was in the stage production, by how like an eighteenth-century illustration it looks.
   ‘Do you do much extra work?’ says my neighbour on the back benches. ‘Not really,’ I say and am thankful for it, as it’s swelteringly hot and more humid inside than out because of the vapour machine pumping out steam to make the scene more photogenic and blur its edges a bit. The extras, some of them undergraduates, others local amateurs, are far more tolerant and unprotesting than their professional London counterparts. Despite the heat, they seem actually to be enjoying themselves, strolling about between takes in the Sheldonian quad, showing off their costumes and being photographed by Japanese coach parties, who maybe think that this is all a normal part of university life.
   Between shots I sit around chatting with the actors, John Wood, Geoffrey Palmer, Jim Carter and Barry Stanton, whiling away the day in a fashion I still find powerfully seductive.