…sixth-formers from Bryanston teamed up with local grammar schoolgirls for a joint production of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and the director devised a great publicity stunt.

In Hardy’s story Tess (on the run for murder) and her lover are pursued by the police and arrested at Stonehenge. So the Bryanston English master took the cast to the stones to absorb the atmosphere, and we filmed them acting out the climactic scene for Day by Day.

The result wasn’t bad, but the point I’m making is this: we didn’t need anyone’s permission to film there. We just turned up and, like anyone else, wandered freely round the unfenced site. Anyone trying the same thing today would presumably need to obtain script-approval from English Heritage, submit a risk-assessment to the HSA, ensure the crew was CRB cleared, provide a chaperone for the cast and pay somebody somewhere a fat fee.

Fencing off Stonehenge has always seemed a bit pointless to me: it’s survived for 4000 years and it’s not as if you could steal it. OK, the access tunnel, shops and loos are useful, and the car park needs enlargement. But spending £25m of our money on a Visitor Centre a mile away was always a silly idea, and the Government’s right to scrap it. If that kind of taxpayers’ money is going spare there are far more deserving causes.

Dumb and Dumber

What is it about Wiltshire Council engineers and traffic-lights? First there was the fiasco of erecting them at Old Sarum to permit non-existent traffic access to an empty housing estate. Now they’ve appeared on the A30 London Road near the old Pheasant Hotel, and they’re dangerously confusing. You have red lights straight ahead and green lights on either side. Local residents have reported several near-misses. So have the engineers done the obvious thing and just turned them off? No sir: instead they’re “working with the developer to look into measures to stop any possible confusion”.

Well, I can suggest the “necessary measures” right now. To stop the traffic straight ahead you show a round red light. But if cars are allowed to turn left or right, you show green filter arrows. If the engineers find this concept difficult to grasp, there’s a useful illustration of such signals in The Highway Code.