Great plot for a movie . .

. . . a character or maybe even a TV series!! There he is, above – Jasper Maskelyne stage magician; he was born in 1902 and died in 1973, and that's who the film or TV series would be about. It would run for years on TV but would be an equally good film.

Some writers, ideas men, producers, etc, get their ideas in certain ways. They sit in cafés watching how people eat, how they talk to each other and how they generally behave. I don't do any of that; I'm an actor - I go to the zoo but I 'people watch' all the time; I very rarely read when I'm out as I like to see what's going on. If I have an idea for a story it kind of comes to me; I don't write scripts all the time and I suppose if I had to rely on it I might change my MO; but I write this all the time - good or bad.

I like quiz shows; I like Mastermind, University Challenge and I am trying to like Eggheads – these are all shows in the UK. When I lived in Los Angeles I would never miss Jeopardy. Apart from anything else it kept my mind working.

When you buy a computer you look for RAM (random access memory) and that's why I liked Jeopardy. The quiz-master, Alex Trebeck, would give an answer in a particular category and the contestant would have to press a button and give you the question.

Lots of times I could answer before the contestant – but I didn't have to press a button!!

I didn't mind if I didn't know it in the first place but if I knew the answer I would try and bring it to the front of my mind quickly – my random access memory.

The other week on Eggheads the question was 'who invented the coin operated lavatory?'

Now the trouble with Eggheads is that they show you 3 answers so it's multiple choice and I guessed the right answer – a magician; in fact it was Jasper Maskelyne whose picture is at the top of this page.

Magicians, conjurers and illusionists are a mystery to scientists – the clever people, the neuroscientists (I think that's what they are) are fascinated by them.

A magician does something with one part of his body which make everybody who is looking at them look at that part of the body whilst they trick you with the part of their body they are distracting you from seeing. It's amazing what they do.

An American act, Penn and Teller, actually show you how they do their tricks and you still can't figure it out. The 3 cup and balls trick is one of them, and they use see through cups at some point in their act and still fool you.

However, one of them, never speaks; he stands there like Harpo Marx and performs the tricks and on one of the TV shows he was being profiled by a clever fella who filmed him. On one of the takes they hid the magician's face (Penn or Teller) and we could see how he did the trick. It was something he was doing with his face that was distracting us.

Which brings me back to the main point of this post with Jasper Maskelyne – the inventor of the coin lavatory. I have never seen a coin operated lavatory in America, by the way, so my pals over there will just have to believe that they charge you for a pee over here.

During the Second World War, there was a double agent operating in Britain called Eddie Chapman whose code name was agent zigzag. In order to satisfy his German handlers, whom he was supposedly working for too, he had to bomb the De Havilland Aircraft Factory in England.

So the powers that be enlisted the help of Jasper and he made the factory look, from the air, that it had, in fact, been blown up by Mister Chapman.

He did this as an illusion; in fact that wasn't the only thing he did during the war.

The powers that be, of course, was MI5 and after the war they denied all knowledge of his deeds when in fact he virtually worked wonders and shit miracles.

After the successful bombing of the De Havilland Factory he was sent to the Western Desert where he formed the 'Magic Gang' which consisted of an analytical chemist, a cartoonist, a criminal, a stage designer, a picture restorer, a carpenter – oh and one soldier to fill out the military paper work; I mean talk about 'The A-Team.'

Churchill praised their deeds which included building fake submarines, Spitfire aeroplanes, dummy tanks and trucks and at one time they actually hid part of the Suez Canal using a system of revolving mirrors.

They also helped win the battle of El Alamain with magic illusions and tricks; they convinced Rommel that the British counter attack was coming from the south as opposed to the north.

In 1942 they built 2000 dummy tanks and constructed a false pipe line to water the bogus army. This convinced Rommel that progress with the counter attack was slow so he went home for a month and Britain attacked whilst he was away.

Some of the exploits of Jasper Maskelyne are now coming to light but he is dead now and died in Africa where he ended up as a drunken driving instructor; another interesting character.

These pictures are of the De Havilland Factory, then some dummy heads and then dummy tanks.

The movie Argo is getting its just praise and is about something similar – it's about the springing of the American hostages that were trapped in the Canadian Embassy during the Iranian Revolution. They were sprung in the pretence that they were film makers setting up a film.

Not as good as the movie After the Fox, which was directed by Vittoria de Sica, where Peter Sellers played the leader of a gang of thieves who, under the pretence that they are making a movie, persuade the population of a village to be in their film and actually help unload the 'Gold of Cairo' – he plays a Fellini type of Italian film director and there is also a great performance from Victor Mature who sends himself up wonderfully.

Of course the film they make turns out to be a masterpiece when shown in court at the end.