Bridget, you left me a broken man

Jeremy Paxman jumped at the chance to appear in the new Bridget Jones film with Renée Zellweger. Alas, filming was not quite as romantic as he expected.

What would you say if someone were to ring you up and ask if you would like to appear in the new Bridget Jones movie? Meet Renée Zellweger and Hugh Grant - and get paid for it.

You would, wouldn't you? I mean, you pick up a magazine and it's full of someone called Abi Titmuss who gets to open supermarkets just because she once dated someone I've never heard of, who got ousted for not doing something or other with someone else I've barely heard of. That's the spirit of the age: nobody actually does anything any more, they just get photographed.

So who could resist an invitation to appear in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason?

I admit it is not exactly a starring role. For a fleeting second or so I entertained vague fantasies about billboards. "Bridget Jones: the Edge of Reason. Starring Hugh Grant and Renée Zellweger. And introducing Jeremy Paxman as..." As what? The man who didn't quite know why he was there? The man the costume department forgot?

I never truly expected above-the-title billing; I knew I wasn't going to get my own feng-shuied Winnebago with personal masseuse and as many Belgian chocolates as I could eat. But the North Circular was not the departure point I had anticipated either. And certainly not at 7 on a wet November morning. I felt slightly less excited than Adrian Mole when being invited to be the guest speaker at the Melton Mowbray Creative Writing Circle.

The scene in question - my scene - is shot 42A, a slow tracking shot through the offices of the television company where Grant's character continues to lay siege to Bridget. At least, I assume that's what is going on, because the only page of the script I am allowed to see is the one on which my line is printed. For all I know Hugh Grant might already have taken a chainsaw to his mother, and Bridget might have been revealed to be Osama Bin Laden's body-double.

Shot 42A requires me to stand behind a Coca-Cola machine and then to walk out as Daniel Cleaver (played by Grant) passes. He is telling Bridget (Zellweger) that he never watches television. But - vain, egotistical and sadly plausible figure that he is - he loves appearing on it.

At this point, a busty blonde in the shortest imaginable mini-skirt passes, and speech is rendered impossible because Grant's tongue is on the floor. As he recovers and continues his walk down the corridor of the office block on the North Circular, I am to emerge from behind the soft drinks and utter the deathless words: "Ah, Daniel. I thought the Madrid piece was outstanding. Full of insight. Really original."

It's not Hamlet's soliloquy. But even Laurence Olivier must have started somewhere.

So far, my acting career has been restricted to say the least. At 14 I had a part as, literally, a spear-carrier in Romeo and Juliet. I peaked at 17 in the school production of Under Milk Wood, in which I was required to walk on stage, cross my arms and intone "I am Evans the Death" for no obvious reason. The rest is silence.

So here we are, on some ghastly winter morning in a glass and concrete office block on the North Circular. The Big Break has arrived.

On arrival, there is a limo. It is 100 yards to the make-up caravan, but they are insistent. One must use the limo to get there. And being feeble-minded one acquiesces and then sits in the trailer, where a platoon of make-up artists has been deployed since 6am, as a bit of powder is dabbed on my face. I have a sneaking suspicion that they think it's a lost cause.

Then it is back to the limo and down to the office block. There are an awful lot of people. There is a man to direct you into the car park. There is a man to direct you to the lift. There is a woman to direct you out of the lift. There is another person to point you down the corridor. And then there is a room full of dozens of people, most of them watching television.

(Altogether, it turns out, there are 105 people on the set. Most have been there since 6am.) And then we are at the Holy of Holies. It is like no commercial television office I have ever been in, for the simple reason that it is clean and organised. It is also full of people, when we all know that the main hobby of media bosses in the past few years has been replacing people with machines.

I feel like a solitary prune at Harvest Festival. Everyone else seems to know what they're doing. Evans the Death rings echoingly around my head.

The director, Beeban Kidron, emerges smiling. She is wearing the obligatory black, with a bare midriff. We exchange pleasantries. I like her. She says Newsnight's diplomatic editor Mark Urban is a friend, although she thinks he has "a curious line in suits".

Privately, I have always been rather admiring of his suits, although I must concede their originality.

But then Hugh Grant arrives. He appears to be wearing one of Urban's discarded corduroy suits, which have obviously gone up in the world from wardrobe shorthand for polytechnic lecturer. I see Kidron's point.

And then comes the moment of truth. There is a cry of "Action!" People - most of whom, as far I can discover in conversation later, are Australians bumming around Europe on some gap year experience - pass to and fro. And Grant and Zellweger emerge from what is evidently supposed to be a videotape library.

The only time a video library has impinged on my life in the past 10 years is when it emerged that two colleagues had been overcome while preparing an obituary of the Queen Mother and had been caught there in flagrante.

On this occasion, though, the deed has clearly yet to be done. Grant is giving Zellweger a lot of male nonchalance. I emerge from behind the Coke machine.

"Ah, Daniel," I begin.

It goes fine. Words are delivered. Expressions are exchanged. The cry goes up of "Cut!" I go to get my coat.

A few seconds later comes the shout: "Would you like a cup of carrot, apple and ginger juice?" This is code for the fact that there will have to be another take.

Grant and Zellweger emerge, I pass. We exchange words. It seems fine.

But it is not, of course. Maybe it was one of the Australians carrying a tripod past at the wrong moment. Perhaps one of the microskirted blondes, sitting decoratively drinking coffee, showed too much thigh. Whatever it was, we must do it again.

Between each take, Zellweger retreats into the video library with her Walkman leads plugged deep into her ears.

And off we go again. "Ah, Daniel," I say, and he replies, and continues down the corridor, deep in conversation I do not hear. It seems perfect.

Except that, of course, it is not. And so we do it again.

This time I collide with the busty blonde that Grant has been ogling. The next time something goes wrong at the other end of the set. "Boring, isn't it?" says Kidron.

She takes the words out of my mouth. One-hundred-and-five people. One shot. The North Circular on a wet November morning. And not a whiff of a bacon sandwich, which I always thought was what kept film crews alive.

Kidron is tireless. Zellweger is wordless inside her headphones. When she opens her mouth at all, even to ask for a glass of the ginger and carrot thing, she sounds as if she comes from Eastbourne.

In one of the endless longeurs, Grant admits he has had enough of it all. "I can't go on playing romantic comedies all my life," he says. "It's too demeaning." Well, maybe. But as Trevor McDonald says of his Tonight Show, "think of the money". And then he adds, astonishingly, so utterly implausibly, "and it's far too stressful."

Too stressful? Repeating the same line until the cows come home? It's more stressful - far more stressful - waiting for some automated halfwit at Barclays Bank to tell you why your cheque has bounced.

And then Grant discloses something. He wants to become a director or a writer. And in the meantime - joy of joys - he would like to appear on University Challenge. Or Top of the Form as he persists in calling it. He has, it seems, never recovered from the sheer exuberant sense of triumph of his schooldays appearance.

And on we go. Take five. Take six. Take seven. Give me live television any day. The mistakes may go out to the viewing millions, but at least we keep going. This is like some hideous Groundhog Day. Sisyphus was condemned to roll a rock uphill all day, every day. But at least he wasn't on the North Circular.

By Take 10 everything has gone wrong. The Australian gap-year tripod-carrier is the only one who manages to get his part right. Behind him, the dumb-show mini-skirted gossipers have fallen off their chairs. Or something. Somewhere.

By now one is beginning to wonder why film companies imagine that television companies are full of girls in miniskirts and reporters who dress as if they teach at FE colleges in Rhyl.

On Take 12 Grant loses it. By Take 13 I've forgotten my lines. On Take 14, a battery goes flat. On Take 15 someone laughs and, with a sinking heart, one hears the cry "First positions" again.

Zellweger's attachment to her Walkman now seems the smartest strategy of the day.

And so it goes. Until finally, on Take 20, the director calls it a day.

Is it always like this? I ask Grant.

"Oh no," he says, "this is fast. If we'd done it as separate takes it might have taken several days." Instead of a mere four hours.

I am, at last, released from the make- believe world of beautiful television people to return to my grubby little alcove in White City.

It was only on the fifth take that I heard what Grant said to Zellweger after I had uttered my deathless 14 words. I distinctly heard him say: "Tosser!" I expect they have cut the scene from the final film. I am beginning to hope so.