So last week I had the pleasure of shooting Sheila Hancock and Jenna Russell for Grey Gardens at the Southwark Playhouse.  But with a twist.

The brief was to make it all look like bad 70s snaps.  Well, assuming your name’s not Juergen Teller, that’s quite a big ask.  The risk is that you don’t just end up with things that look deliberately like bad 70s snaps, you might actually end up with plain bad snaps.

So I got myself a headache, popped a couple of stomach ulcers, worked out what I was going to do, and prayed.

It turned out I didn’t need to.  A phenomenal location (Asylum in SE15), amazing wigs, hair and makeup from Diana Estrada, some equally amazing costume design by Jonathan Lipman, and, most of all, two amazing actresses who gamely did in seconds what most people can never do — namely, pull poses and make it look so spontaneous they don’t look like poses at all — did all the work for me.

An utterly brilliant shoot.