Mike Eddowes Theatre photography

Meeting Report

For some time (years), I have been suggesting to successive fixture secretaries that I have a friend in Arundel who is a Theatre photographer who had said to me that he would come to camera club and give a talk on his work. This always fell on deaf ears.

However, we had a spare slot and Chairperson Di said “what about your friend Mike Eddowes filling the void?” And so I arranged it.

But sadly on the night ‘Sod’s Law’ was operating at full tempo starting with the non arrival of the projector. But in true showbiz fashion i.e. ‘the show must go on’, Mike started off (without his pictures) telling us all about his life as the son of an actress, and how actors and actresses had always been around at his home. So when he started out in the world to earn his living, he headed for drama school. Dennis Waterman was one of his contemporaries there; but sadly Mike had not got the same ‘in-built’ talent and he was politely told it would be better to find a different career!.

So then Mike started working for a PR company, Rogers and Cowan, who amongst other accounts, looked after Victor Kiam’s publicity in the UK and Mike got involved with the Remington razor “…so I bought the company” advertising. He left them and got a very good job at Capitol Radio as Head of Promotions for a couple of years, but the job did not really suit him and so he left and went back to PR.

Eventually he started his own PR company handling advertising for Whitbread and Nestlé UK amongst other well known brands, and he also arranged a lot of ‘Pop’ concerts and did work for Paul McCartney and Elton John amongst several other well known names.

Eventually he was offered a ‘pot of gold’ for his company and so he found himself with a lot of time for golf and watching cricket. But he decided that there was more to life and so he set out to do Theatre Photography.

That’s when I met Mike as we both attended Chichester college where we spent a couple of years doing a City and Guilds photography evening class.

So back to this evening. The projector arrived and was assembled only to find that a mains lead was missing. Luckily Di had one at home and she shot off to get it. Happily she lives very near by, as shortly afterwards she had to shoot off again to get another missing bit!!

Then, when Mike’s Pen drive was connected to the laptop it re-shuffled all his pictures into the wrong order. But Martin had the answer and persuaded the computer to put them back as Mike had arranged them, but this took more time, about the longest 10 minutes ever!!

Eventually Mike was able to show his brilliant pictures of some of the many shows that he has photographed. They were absolutely ‘Fab’. Mike also photographs festivals and sadly he had pictures of me at the Arundel festival several years ago after I had been ‘got at’ by some characters called the ‘fashion police’ who dressed me up with a blue wig and other stuff which made me even more awful than usual.

This caused great delight amongst club members as he kept bringing them into his presentation.

There is no doubt in my mind that we all enjoyed his visit enormously, and as his fee for his talk was free membership of our club for one year, we will therefore hopefully see more of Mike, and as he did not show everything that he had prepared for his talk, we may have the privilege of seeing more of his wonderful work another time.

Mike we are very sorry that things went a bit wrong but we are hugely grateful for a very amusing and great evening.

Submitted by Derek Grieve on