Tales From The Tavern

Richard Dormer is smoking Majesty cigarettes and wetting his throat with tremendous gulps of Picard 25. Between the brandy and the smokes there are shakes of the head plus theatrical snorts and tics that are funny and familiar. Dormer, you see, is now in character. He's got the long black coat with the CND badge, the impudent beard and the roving eye. He is Terri Hooley, record label boss, punk chancer and full-on fabulist of Belfast city.

Filming has started on the Good Vibrations movie and so we are in a bar on Union Street called The Tavern. Outside the main door is a functioning cage, a reminder of the bad old Seventies when bars were routinely blown up and paranoia was a regular state of mind. The upstairs room has the vintage funk of another decade and this is where Dormer has settled, amid the bottles of India Pale Ale, the Formica tables and the lumpen ashtrays.

His job this afternoon is to be Hooley, the bringer of tales. To get the Terri look even better, he has reversed the prosthetic lens that creates the effect of his character's glass eye. Now it looks a bit wonky. Like the man himself, on a brandy mission.

Richard/Terri will make himself at ease in the bar and will offload a series of his most requested stories. It's been many years since the narratives parted company with historical accuracy, but truth is often a servant to Hooley's desire to entertain. And so the guy will sit down with a female reporter and remember how it was when he met John Lennon in London and ended up throwing punches at the legend. Apparently there was an argument about guns at a Highbury garage and Terri was aggrieved.

The reporter is nodding but looks confused. A fellow drinker is glassy-eyed, oblivious. Likewise with the barman who has heard all of the embellishments before. And so the action moves across the room, to a robust customer on the Hot Dog fruit machine. He also dismisses the stories, determined to feed in the coins and batter the hold buttons.

Kind reader, this is myself, in my debut film role. If have endured and often ignored Terri's stories for over 30 years, and so I am most qualified for the cameo part. The film's wardrobe people have dressed me like a stevedore from On The Waterfront. Either that or a Village People rendition of a shipyard worker. I am hot and itching with the surplus of man-made fibres. But still delighted to be here.

Between takes, Dormer makes up a series of his own stories, jazz-style. Give him a famous name and he'll spin it into a Hooley yarn. "It's all a bit heightened," he remarks with a smile. Indeed so. We might be in a Belfast sink-hole around 1979, but equally it's like the Boar's Head in Eastcheap a few centuries back, when Falstaff was talking about a humiliating robbery, changing the details, revising and reworking the event into some gleaming and gallant action.

Therefore the glasses are filled, the characters reconvene and it all starts rolling again.