A few years ago, before the Nottingham’s Sheriff’s Lodge medieval banqueting centre was sold for redevelopment, December used to be my busiest time as Robin Hood, performing at banquets every night of the week pretty much for the whole month (and at it’s height, from halfway through November too).
These days I still do banquets at Center Parcs in Sherwood Forest but now a lot of my December work comes from the Digital Paparazzi, which luckily involves just as much dressing up and just as much fun too, so it was a great and rare pleasure to be able to combine ‘Hood-ing’ with ‘Pap-ing’ last Saturday at a very posh hotel in Nottingham to celebrate a client’s 50th birthday. He’d decided to have a fancy dress party themed around ‘heroes’ and had the Paparazzi boys doing their thing but he also wanted an MC to announce and help the guests, so I got to be Robin at what turned out to be the most excellent costume party I’ve ever been to – even if the next morning I’d lost my voice due to all the shouting!
Robin’s Twitter update
I’ve already mentioned the Robin Hood Twitter feed set up by the World Wide Robin Hood Society, it’s now up and running and you can read more about it at the Nottingham Evening Post article HERE.
(This Nottingham Evening Post photo from their article shows me with Mike Douglas and Bob White from the Society).
After being behind the camera on Tuesday I was in front of one yesterday, taking part in a film shoot in London with Rob and Ian at the Inner London Crown Court .
The Digital Paparazzi had been hired to play… er… some paparazzi (so no typecasting there, thankfully) and we spent the evening on location with a large crowd of extras snapping away at the very pleasant young leading lady portraying a successful actress arriving at a premiere.
Perhaps even more excitingly we’ve been asked back to appear in their next film too – a zombie movie! (Although… as undead paparazzi? Hopefully not!)
So I spent all of last week (10-17th Nov) in sunny Dubai, working with The Digital Paparazzi taking pictures to celebrate and promote the opening of The Dubai Mall, the world’s biggest shopping mall (really, it’s huge - it contains an Olympic-sized ice rink, a massive gold market and shops covering 5.9 million sq ft.) which is situated at the bottom of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Dubai.
One of the Mall’s most impressive features (and strangely directly opposite our changing room, an as yet unopened store) is the stunningly large aquarium, filled with vast quantities of sharks, stingrays, jellyfish and countless shoals of other fish, huge and tiny, all viewed through the world’s largest glass front – there’s even a glass tunnel you can walk through to look at it from inside too (have these people not seen Jaws 3? 
).
I took a panoramic picture with my mobile, but it really doesn’t do it justice – they have three divers go in to feed the fish at regular intervals, and it’s just astounding)! There were six of us spending long days charging around ’papping’ customers and staff for the Mall’s own website but we also got to have a lot of fun too, including visiting all of the ‘touristy’ places – the Palm islands, the beach, shopping in the old town, haggling for stuff in the souks, a trip on a dhow down the creek (where the pic above came from) and on our last day a desert safari where we raced in 4×4′s over sand-dunes (very exciting), went camel-riding, had henna tattoos (mine’s a scorpion) and even did some belly-dancing! I even got a tan for once, so it’s all good – let’s hope it lasts through December, which looks like it’s going to be a very busy month!
