How about that; I was minding my own business again when the doorbell rang and two police officers demanded...well, asked politely...if they could come in. I must have looked like a rabbit in the headlights, as the male of the two assured me there was nothing wrong. Apparently, an "incident" had happened up the road before the weekend, and they had some questions. To be honest, even though I was in all evening I didn't hear nor see anything out of the ordinary. Could this be the usual way the English welcome their newcomers? I think not; two hours later they were still roaming the building. We went down to Leicester Square.

After deciding we would not wait one and a half hours in the crowd by the Odeon, we instead went to have a late lunch/early supper at TGI Friday's. Great meal. Just the right portion; I was full by the end of it and still didn't need to send anything back to the kitchen with my apologies (which happens frequently).

By the time we were out of there the Odeon crowd had (naturally) grown even larger, and we just stood further down the road in order to see anything at all. It was the European premiere of Batman Begins, and who knew which celebs would bother to turn up.

The first one was the Batmobile itself. Many of us laughed as it drove past, because...well, it looked kind of silly, to say the least. We soon got used to it being parked right in front of us and noticed it only when the unknown driver revved the motor every time someone from the cast came by.

Some of the minors in the audience were a bit more updated on the first cast member that appeared than we were, but it could have been the young Batman/Bruce. We just don't know. The next cast member was Christian Bale, goatee and everything. He spent quite a lot of time signing autographs. But the lesser of the six top-billed cast members (Katie Holmes, who else) was the one who stayed on forever and ever in order to please the fans and eBayers. She came out of a car just as Tom Wilkinson had started signing bits and pieces, and I was much more happy about seeing him than most of the others put together. Morgan Freeman excluded. Seemed like no one had expected he would turn up, so the surprised "yay" by a collective crowd outdid any of the other shrieks from the audience. Apart, perhaps, from when Val Kilmer came walking down the road, an hour after Bale had come and gone, and was really nice to his fans by spending around ten minutes signing just about anything.

Other celebrities I spotted were Alexei Sayle, Rupert Grint and Sir Michael Caine, and then some boyband that no one seemed to recognise and hardly anyone bothered to ask for autographs. Don't think they'd expected that kind of a welcome, because they lingered on for a while before shifting inside.

More later.

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Labels: film, name-dropping, tom wilkinson