The Arrival

Richard Parrott outside the MTV ex-TVam studios in London’s Camden Town.

He’s another ex-TVam editor mate who now runs his own t-shirt company.

London, July 1996: the so-called summer. I was renting a pokey bedsit in Muswell Hill, north London, freelance directing for MTV Europe, which was located by pure co-incidence, in the ex-TVam studios in Camden Town. This fact will become more significant later in this serendipitous chain of events. The point is, work was dropping off and after nearly seven years in London, I was bored, spiritually, mentally and creatively, and seriously considering packing it all in and jumping on the next plane back downunder.

I had become a carbon copy of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) at the start of ‘Apocalypse Now,’ pacing my room and going slowly insane, “Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another.”

And just like in the movies, my next mission came clean out of the blue.

One evening I met up with an old colleague, Chris Wood, for a few beers in a hotel bar in Piccadilly Circus. Flashback to five years earlier: we were both freelance editors at Bruce Gyngell’s highly successful ITV breakfast network TVam. When its ten year broadcasting licence came up for renewal in 1992, Thatcher changed the rules and turned the whole shooting match into a bidding war. The GMTV conglomerate emerged as the highest bidder, so a tearful Bruce folded the company and we all scattered in separate directions. The halcyon days were over.

At that time, Chris was the TVam Moscow bureau’s cameraman-editor, so instead of returning to London, he bought the camera and edit gear and continued on there as a small TV production company servicing mainly the Dutch and Belgian state broadcasters, as well as any visiting producers or crews that required Western production values and an English-speaking production crew. Now he was in town looking for a new cameraman-editor.

Three days later, the phone rang. Chris offered me the gig in Moscow, said the job was mine if I was interested. You bet I was, I took all of about two seconds to consider it.

“Can you be ready to leave within a month?”

“Sure, what should I bring?”

“Warm clothes, waterproof boots and gloves.”

After we’d briefly discussed the details, I put the phone down and sat in stunned silence as the reality slowly sank in. I was off to Russia. Just like that. Straight into the belly of the Beast. To work in Moscow. Fuck me. I danced around the flat for a few minutes, punching the air victoriously, shouting, “Yes! Yes! Yes! I’m going to Russia!”

That night I called my closest friends to spread the good news. Due to the time difference in Toowoomba, Queensland, my mother was last on the list.

“Oh heck,” was her response, “You’re getting further and further away.”

“Well, if you look on the map mum, you’ll see it’s actually a few thousand miles closer to Australia than London.”

The next few weeks was a mad scramble to sort out all my packing and storage, paying my phone, gas and electricity bills, recovering the bond on my flat, a quick check-up at the dentist, and all those other annoying details that clog up one’s life.

In next to no time at all, my last day in London arrived. I dragged my suitcases into the Underground, caught the early morning Tube into Heathrow, checked in at British Airways, and slipped quietly out of London. Little did I know that my last glimpse of civilisation was the terminal four departure lounge.

Appropriately, the in-flight movie was a cool Charlie Sheen sci-fi called ‘The Arrival.’ Another Sheen connection. Weird.

Just under four hours later, the plane touched down at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Two international airport. Like herded sheep we all filed into the ominous, dimly-lit Passport Control area, already crowded and filling up fast with weary passengers from two other flights. I stood patiently in the ‘Foreign Passports Only’ queue, staring up in horrified wonder at the filthy dust-covered ceiling ‘decorations.’

Every Western visitor who flies into this airport remembers it; the entire airport ceiling appears to be covered with the surplus from a cake tin factory. There is no other rational explanation for such a distorted concept of aesthetics.

None, except that this was Russia.

Forty minutes ticked past, feeling like eighty. Finally my feet reached the faded yellow line. I stepped up to face the steely-eyed Immigration Officer, a peroxide blonde in a stiff military uniform. No smile, no “Welcome to Moscow sir.” I handed over my passport. She scrutinised every page, enviously eyeing visas and stamps for Thailand, Malaysia, Peru, Canada, India, Mexico, Switzerland, Sweden, all exotic places she’d never see. With a sigh, she stamped it, almost reluctantly, and handed it back to me without so much as a hint of a smile. She muttered something in Russian, and waved me through.

I looked around. I couldn’t understand anything; every sign, every advertising poster was written in Cyrillic, the Russian alphabet. Right there and then I experienced a mild panic attack, I started having second thoughts, paranoia set in. What the fuck was I doing here? Isn’t this an international airport? Why is nothing is written in English? Why is nobody smiling? Why is everybody staring at me?

No time to worry about it. I grabbed a trolley. A porter rushed over and took control of it. I stood back while he grabbed my cases from the groaning carousel. He whizzed me through the green customs channel, flashed my declaration form at the bored-looking officer and sped off, ploughing through the sea of waiting faces, mostly the local taxi Mafia shouting at us.

Chris had explained that taxis from the airport to the city were all about fifty dollars US, which is of course, very expensive by local standards. (At this time there was no rail link to the airport such as there is now.) I knew that if one wanted to travel for less than fifty dollars, one could catch a bus or walk beyond the airport to the main road, and someone would stop and drive you into the city for, say, twenty dollars. I had read of a foreigner who had tried this once a few years previously with a Russian friend, but as they were getting into the car, a tough-looking thug ran across the road from the direction of the airport and asked the driver what the hell did he think he was doing? The scared driver apologised to the goon, who insisted on taking them into the city for fifty dollars. None of them, including the first driver, dared to argue.

We forced our way through as people shoved and jostled each other around the airport exit.

I’d made it into Moscow. Just.