Jesmond

What? Are you mad? Are you out of your mind? And I mean, it got really kind of...

I said, lads, listen, you know, the thing about both of these dishes... which fundamentally, by the way, is bacon, fried, sliced potato, onions, carrots, celery if you come from Jesmond, which is a poor suburb of Newcastle, and a sprinkle of cheese on top with some stock in it.

So if you were the...

You know, the coffee sipping classes of Hampstead, it would be called boulanger potatoes.

Yeah.

And I worked in a gym in Jesmond, um, in Newcastle, and basically I was like, "Oh, I could have the half uni life, half personal trainer life." Um, and I was kind of influenced by people to do it, and it was a very bad decision.

It wasn't a very good year, to be honest.

[laughs]

And as I was coming along past

the cemetery at Jesmond on the coast road, I had local hero on.

And I welled up a little bit, to be fair.

I thought, you know, this is it.

The Black Velvet Gown, 10 million viewers, and won an Emmy for Best Drama in 1991.

So she moved back to Tyneside in the 1980s, settled in Jesmond, suffering increasingly in poor health, but was famously really welcomed back, like a sort of returning royal or something.

And she had a damehood.

She was awarded honorary degrees and fellowships.

I'd been working on the project for months whilst finishing off my other job and I'd visited a few churches, people I knew.

And on my first day in the office over in Jesmond, a letter arrived and there was a check for £1,000.

So that's 5% of my entire budget.

And it came from a couple who were the same age as me.