The first film was, I think, This Was a Woman, but I only stayed for three… Riverside... there were three studios: Riverside, Southall, and Teddington. They all belonged to the same group, and I was for a week at Riverside on a film called This Was a Woman, and then they sent me to Teddington to work on another film which was called The Brass Monkey – they were great films! And, you know, I worked as a draughtsman, but what happened was really quite incredible: the art director of that film, The Brass Monkey, was somebody called Wally Scott, a nice man, but he couldn't get on with the American director and the Russian producer, so he came into the art department, there were six of us or something, and he said, 'I can't get on with these people. Why, if you want to design the set and so on, do it'.

And I designed the set, not knowing what the heck I was doing, really. It was supposed to be a radio theatre, you know, but I already was playing around with imagination sets and so on, and they accepted my design, so of course they didn't know that I... you know, I was Wally's designer. But the construction manager was a big Irish navvy called Peter Dukelow – he knew that I had done all that, and I think he really helped me more in my career in those days than anybody else in films, because... it was amazing that it should happen on the first film I'm working on that they are, in fact, using one or two of my designs.