Agency!

"The day-to-day life of the agency would make a great soap," said David. "You could call it Agency!"

That was in 1993, soon after I had started working for the actors' agency. It was then known as Direct Line but is now called Direct Personal Management.

In those days, things were different.

Our office was a tiny room in central Leeds with no window and, even more interestingly, no ceiling. This enabled it to be freezing cold in winter and unbearably hot in summer. Most of the actors smoked, so the air was usually two parts smoke to one part oxygen.

We had a telephone, which rang but rarely. We had an electric typewriter. We didn't have a computer of any sort.

We didn't have a fax machine either and we were thrilled when we bought one and could send letters by this miraculous method.

Casting information came to us laboriously, once a week, by post. We would spend the whole of Friday morning typing it onto a newsletter which we would post out to our actors on Friday evening.

The actors didn't have mobiles. Some of them didn't have answerphones. It made it hard to get hold of them on the rare occasions when the phone rang.

But I always found it interesting and gradually, in spite of the problems, actors began to get work.

Things have changed. Now we are in an office with a large window looking out onto the garden. We have two phone lines. We still have a fax machine - - though hardly ever use it. Most casting information comes by email - - dozens of times a day. We have three computers in a network and a couple of laptops that can be pressed into service if we're busy.

And the work's still fascinating. Susie, my colleague, and I are going to tell you about it.

We will follow some rules. Actors are always looking for their next job and we hope that this blog may help some of them to find the next job. We won't tell you anything in this blog that might jeopardise that. But we'll try to make it interesting, I promise.