13th May I’m quite hardened to the sort of stuff that might make some people leap up on stools and scream. This project is, in effect, an anti-squeam boot camp. Last weekend Barney came in thoroughly grumpy from a failed fishing session, he’d taken a box of maggots out of the insect fridge to use as bait, on his return he stuck the half-full box of maggots in the food fridge … and it wasn’t properly closed … and during the course of the evening the box was knocked over … I discovered this the next morning…
For the cockroaches we made a sort of Barbie Doll House set in a three-sided box, this had to look like a corner of a kitchen with tiled sides and formica base, accessorised with a chopping board, a knife and food items. Before we let any cockroaches loose we had to devise security:
A large wooden box was lined with thick black plastic and filled with water (a sort of square paddling pool), there was a platform island in the middle of it, here we placed the set and then we airlifted in the cockroaches, any actors wanting to leave the set were thus slowed down by the moat.
Cockroaches are my final frontier, I don’t like touching them if I can help it, but all the other stuff; flies, ants, snails I’ve got terribly fond of. How can you not love creatures like this?
One of the programmes we are making looks at the human desire to destroy insect life and the quantities of products on sale to that end. We can’t show real brands so we have thought up some product names Bug-R-Off, Zap'em Dead, Flies Undone, Ultimate Doom etc., then we printed out labels and used them in our shed set.
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