On Tuesday, I attend a meeting with BBC Education who will make Tod's script "I'm a Juvenile Delinquent - Jail Me!". We hope.

The next day it's off to Dublin. I'm met at the airport by a charming Irish bloke who dresses exactly like an American teamster - draped with gold jewellery that would break my neck were I to attempt to wear it. He drives us to the set of "King Arthur", a Jerry Bruckheimer movie being shot in the country not far from Ardmore Studios.

The location is magnificent, and the crew extensive: British, American, German, Eastern European. The art department have built a mile-long replica of Hadrian's Wall at an alleged cost of 20 million Euros. The director [Antoine Fuqua] has clearly seen and enjoyed Kurosawa's films: the burning battlefield resembles that of "Ran", and Arthur and his Merry Men, lined up, look like the "Seven Samurai".

My goal here is to see Ray Winstone, who plays one of King Arthur's Russian assistants. Everyone who knows him has told me that Ray is a nice chap, and lo! it proves to be true. Ray looks great, is eminently likeable, and would be a sound hero for "Helltown".

He also likes a bit of a laugh. Right before they're ready to shoot (eight cameras, pyrotechnics, you know the rest...), he strolls up to the director - seated behind a bank of monitors - and says, "You see where the sun's setting, over there behind the Wall?" The director does. "Well, the sun sets in the west, doesn't it, and that would mean that if that was Hadrian's Wall, we'd be on the north side, which would make us the Scots."

Deadpan, Ray proposes that they relocate the company to the other side of the wall, or wait till dawn to get the shot.

No doubt his director has an explanation to satisfy him. (My own would be that we could flip the film in the projector.)

After 'wrap', a drive through the Wicklow Mountains is followed by liver and bacon and a discussion of the finer points of the script for "Helltown". My take is that it's really about doing one's job, and overcoming the endless and often unnecessary obstacles that this entails.

He gets it, and says he's up for doing the picture. We shake on it. Tres bien!

On the way back to the airport the next day, my taxi driver tells me that the studio behind "Artemis Fowl" (a combo Harry Potter-meets-Indiana Jones kids' book turned multi-billion-dollar movie) has said it will only come to Ireland if the Government renews the tax breaks for foreign productions, and that the Government has agreed.

I say I assume this is good. "It's good if you run a hotel or a restaurant, but not if you're a cameraman or a crew person. They bring everybody in from outside - even the drivers, sometimes." It sounds just like Liverpool, where I am bound.

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