ITV CREWS CATCH BANKERS ON CAMERA FOR NEW LEGAL DRAMA
LUNCHBREAKS for the employees of Bank of New York Mellon Asset Management will never be the same again, after ITV rolled into the firm’s neighbourhood last Thursday to film its new legal drama The Jury.
The ITV camera crews have been filming on location just a stone’s throw from BNY Mellon’s Queen Victoria Street HQ – firstly in the bankers’ favourite coffee shop on the historic Carter Lane, L’Express Coffee, and then in the corner shop opposite the Rising Sun pub, St Paul’s Tobacco (pictured right).
Lead actress Julie Walters was not on set on the day of the shoot in question, but a City observer did spot Land Girls actor Stephen Mackintosh, who graciously stepped aside to let BNY Mellon workers go in and out of the shops between takes.
The “gripping, dark and emotionally charged” five-part drama from ITV Studios – which stars Walters as defence barrister Emma Watts, who battles against the character played by The Thick of It actor Roger Allam to free a man convicted for the violent murder of three women he met on the internet – will hit viewers’ screens this autumn.
So make a note in your diary to tune in to see if any senior executives, unintentionally made it into the final cut as an extra – perhaps when the camera crew moved on to William Hill on Ludgate Hill. As they say, the camera never lies.
REALITY CHECK
MARTIN Winter, the UK senior partner of law firm Taylor Wessing, has just returned from Dete in Zimbabwe, where he completed a “warm-up” 10km run in aid of the Jane Bubear Sports Foundation ahead of his London Marathon effort this Sunday.
“All the money raised will go towards buying sports fleeces for the area’s primary school children to protect against ground frost on winter mornings,” Winter explained.
“Death from pneumonia is too often the outcome for those with low resistance – often from being HIV positive – in a country where life expectancy is in the low 40s.”
Winter (pictured above awarding the medals after the race) also visited two of the schools in the area, where he reported it was on a “knife edge” whether the children received government funding for their place, in a system where no primary education is paid for.
“The children’s need has to be at the highest level before they qualify for a grant,” he said of one primary school where over 200 of the 550 students were orphans.
“It is a serious reality check because none of the children are moaning about things, they just get on with it.”
TAKE A BREAK
NO-ONE could accuse Nick Bubb, the well-respected retail analyst from Arden Partners (pictured below), of shirking his work responsibilities. But is it really a coincidence he managed to be out-of-office in one of the busiest periods of the retail year?
During the two weeks that Bubb was away skiing in Colorado, he missed the Mothercare and M&S fourth-quarter sales and the Halfords pre-close announcement, as well as a string of profit warnings from HMV, Carpetright and Dixons.
“We have a bit to catch up on,” he confessed to readers of his first post-holiday email bulletin yesterday.
When The Capitalist finally tracked down Bubb, he confessed: “It’s a fair cop. But even if I was bone idle, at least things did work out my way, since I predicted there would be profit warnings before I went away.”
Bubb said he “made every effort” to keep up with developments back in the UK by checking his BlackBerry from the slopes but, given the seven-hour time difference, he made an executive decision to sleep through the daily morning briefings.
“I draw the line at doing conference calls at 1.30 in the morning,” he said. Fair enough.
FOOT IN THE DOOR
GOOD to see the City is taking action in an area where the Liberal Democrats are procrastinating by offering 75 internships paying up to £400 a week this summer to help school-leavers get their foot in the door of the world of finance.
The 20 firms that have signed up to the business traineeship scheme – including Lloyd’s of London, Clifford Chance, Royal Bank of Canada and UBS – will pay students “the standard competitive graduate salary for the role” to give A-level school-leavers from some of London’s most deprived areas a head start on the career ladder. Clegg, take note.