No Vera but Miliband bingo show goes on
I'm just writing this in a gap in our filming schedule with David Miliband in South Shields.
It's the second part of the film we started shooting at the Foreign Office a couple of weeks ago.
We're looking at the challenges of combining the role of Foreign Secretary with being a constituency MP.
And you couldn't have got a starker contrast in the two days of filming.
A fortnight ago David Miliband was meeting the South African foreign minister, answering Foreign Office questions in the Commons and getting briefed on Iraq ahead of an appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry.
Today he's been opening a pub, calling bingo numbers at a day care centre and leading a group of five-year-olds through a maze!
And on top of that he had to cope with a tinge of disappointment at some of the venues.
He was originally supposed to complete some of his engagements with - or to be more precise , the actress who played the Coronation Street character.
She's a keen Labour supporter, .
She would have been the one calling the bingo numbers had she not been ill and advised not to travel.
But actually most people took the news of her absence well. The Foreign Secretary even had a few autograph requests at the day care centre.
His bingo calling generally went well too although curiously when the number ten came, Mr Miliband mentioned Downing Street but didn't call it Gordon's Den - but then he did confess to being an inexpert caller.
We did though encounter two disgruntled women who'd turned up at the pub opening hoping to see Vera.
When we broke it to them that it would just be Mr Miliband, they sloped off before he arrived.
But he did manage to duck one dodgy moment.
A photographer at the pub wanted him to appear in a "fashion shoot" for a regional magazine appearing in his words "arm in arm with two women".
Now it has to be said both women were very respectable and tastefully dressed, but it probably wasn't the lasting image a Foreign Secretary would have craved, and after some discussion the photo op was turned down.
So he went on to the next engagement - a little weary perhaps, - but then that is the nature of the dual role of MP and minister.
We're catching up with him again at the local South Shields' party dinner. You'll see the results on the on Sunday as well as hearing from his rivals in the forthcoming election.
Conservative Karen Allen and Lib Dem Stephen Psallidas are his two principal opponents in the South Shields seat.
I'm Richard Moss, the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's Political Editor for the North East and Cumbria. Welcome to my irreverent - but hopefully insightful - northern take on reporting politics for Look North and the Politics Show.
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