Jean Heard who presents most of our Doris Visits cruise port guides, visits Mark Blackledge who writes music for our TV and Movie productions. This film is introduced by Stuart St Paul. (during the Covid lockdown a few years ago) He explains where the music used in much of Doris Visits comes from, then Jean interviews Mark Blackledge.

• 0:00 – intro by Stuart St Paul
• 0:58 – The Scarlet Tunic
• 2:42 – Mark Blackledge
• 5:22 – Working with orchestras
• 7:11 – The Control room

Although we occasionally use YouTube-licensed music, as we have on the Brazilian films that require sambas, we normally opt for music we freely own. We often use it in the Doris Visits travel videos because we travel with a drive with it on. It doesn’t always fit as Mark would want it, but it is how it cuts in at the time of the edit. Mark worked for Disney for years scoring cartoons. He also did all three Nativity films as well as Stuart’s and has done countless adverts. Mark and Stuart met when they were to make a version of Macbeth and that was about 30 years ago.

Jean interviews Mark Blackledge over the piano in his studio. He wrote the theme music for a web TV series that his son Anton directed, and Jean starred in and played the character Doris. It is a little like the crazy mad humour of the CBC show Schitt’s Creek. Anton is now doing a masters degree in futuristic engineering at Imperial after obtaining a high first. Well done, Buster.

When he was 17, we took him to Fiji as a camera assistant. Then, to give him directing experience Mark and I funded the series Doris, Shades of Bad which he directed. The web TV series Doris, Shades Of Bad won international awards and Jean was voted Best Actress twice in New York by We Love Soaps. The show topped the online soap chart for many of its 60+ episodes. The end was to feature Francis and Rick from the rock band Status Quo as the two villains behind the nanobot-take-over-the-world daft plot. Sadly Rick became far more ill than he was in Fiji when we shot the movie BULA QUO for Universal Pictures. The last three episodes were never shot. However, we did do some funny cameo performances …

• Manuel Martinez appears as a fixer in Barcelona
• Radio DJ James Whale turns up as a policeman
• Nick Simons as the old jeweller, and nanobot buyer
• The late and sadly missed child star, Ricky Beaumont played the old local councillor
• Donna Flinn who had a number one single as PussyFoot in Australia in the seventies plays Doris’s mother-in-law
• Derek Redmond comes in for a few episodes as the smuggler… or is he?

Oh… it was never meant to be anything other than mad, but that was where Doris came from. I will post the videos back up in the near future.

Mark has scored and orchestrated for our films; Freight, Devils Gate and the Status Quo film Bula Quo.

Mark also scored the music for all the Nativity movies. He has worked for Disney many times and has done endless US cartoon series and UK commercials. His relationship with Doris’s film company dates back to the dark film about family incest, Devil’s Gate starring Breaking Bad’s Laura Fraser and Tom Bell.  He also scored the music to the film on UK sex trafficking, Freight and the Status Quo film Bula Quo shot in Fiji. In fact, it is Mark Blackledge and guitarist Tim Dodd who play the unplugged Fijian Quo tracks in the movie, not the band. Other incidental guitar music they wrote and played for that rock-romp makes for a marvellous piece underscoring films like the Mijas film. The Botanical Gardens collection is also a good place to find Mark’s music.

When we upped sticks and went to Fiji to make a feature film with the rock band Status Quo, Mark asked if his son could go as a trainee. The young Buster was taken and worked with the camera team and shot much of the Behind The Scenes footage.

Somehow Buster the camera trainee, and Jean who was playing a news anchor on that Pacific Island in the Universal film, came up with the idea for a web series.

Mark and Stuart funded it and Buster was a one-man film crew most of the time. This music also comes from Mark. This is from the start of a sequence in Bula Quo.