"...Finally the day dawns when Carrie Fisher comes onto set clad in the bikini that she will be wearing for most of her scenes in the first third of the movie. She looks fit and appealingly helpless as she is chained to Jabba’s corpulent and oozing body as her punishment for releasing Solo boy from his slab. Naturally all of us voyeuristic green-blooded aliens, regardless of whose side we’re actually on, would love to free her and take her back to our dressing rooms for a bit of a towel down and a love session. Oh sorry, she’s acting! I did manage to say hello to her in-between takes, but it was slightly stilted to say the least. Her thought bubble read “Whoah, who’s the Polish labourer with the pinhead trying to make conversation?” I longed to say:

“Hey Carrie. Forget about this hirsute exterior. I’m an actor. Underneath it all, I long to stroke you all over in the privacy of my Bayswater apartment. Mmm -- oh, and bring the bikini.”

It didn’t happen. Life can be so unfair some times, don’t you think? She didn’t really hang around on the set when not required and so we never had the opportunity to make any contact with her. She may well have felt a little disconcerted by being the skimpily dressed lust object of at least 95 percent of the males present, hence the relieved scamper back to her trailer safe in the protective folds of a rather fetching blue bath robe at the end of a shot.

In-between set-ups, Sean and I are allowed back to the sanctuary of our dressing room where we doodle on our synths and plan little jokes to play upon any visitors brave enough to dare approach our hideaway. The main one is the old schoolboy trick of a paper cup about a quarter full of talcum powder balanced upon the top of the slightly ajar door, so when the unwitting one enters they get showered in residue that renders them looking like the bad part of a Head and Shoulders anti-dandruff shampoo ad. Oh, how we laughed! And oh, how they didn’t. We were just kids having the best time of our lives and who can blame us for grabbing it with our little clawed hands?

I vaguely recall that at lunchtimes each day we’d divest ourselves of most of the ungainly pieces of our costumes and head to the studio canteen for a nibble. That was a giggle too, as you’d be sharing munchy space with a cluster of Stormtroopers, a few scantily-clad dancing girls, an Intergalactic Heavy or two, some little people fresh from their Ewok set, some normal-looking crew people downing a few pints at the bar and anyone else who happened to be filming at Elstree that day. That should have been a movie in itself.

After some greasy chips and pies in ketchup one afternoon, some of us stroll over to visit the Ewok forest village currently in use as a second unit location on another sound stage. This was equally as authentic and gobsmacking as our own underground den of debauchery. All those high trees with their walkways, platforms and little huts were all for real and were actually about thirty feet above the studio floor. We thought that we were having a hard time of it on set until we realised just how difficult and dangerous it was for all those brave and petite fur balls with restricted vision being urged take after take to scamper with abandon so high up and without any safety nets or other precautions. I’d say that every one of those vertically challenged and valiant performers were the unsung heroes of the movie and they took it all in their tiny strides with good grace and humour. To this day, when I meet some of those Jedi veterans at Conventions all over the world, they are to a man and a woman some of the most joyful, open and well-balanced artists that I’ve ever met. Hey, if I was thirty feet up in the air and asked to run along a tree branch I guess I’d need to be pretty well-balanced too. Bless ‘em!

I’ve just found my original contract for my Jedi filming. It was in a dusty drawer in my studio, the kind of receptacle that contains the stuff that you never open and glance at unless you’re in a particularly nostalgic or morose state of mind, or are in need of back up info for a book like this. It’s dated January 18th 1982 and is signed by myself and someone named Douglas Twiddy, who apparently was the Production Supervisor for Chapter III Productions Ltd. It states that I’m billed as a Mime Artiste and I’m on a salary of £300 per week for a guaranteed minimum period of two weeks. And any other extra days would pay a fee of £65 each. That wasn’t too shabby for a young lad back in 1982 who was being paid to live out several of his long-held fantasies, believe me.

I’ve also found some other sheets which are called Residual Worksheets that seem to my (un-mathematical) mind to define how much all the artistes working on the movie got in terms of percentages for their involvement. Now, discretion forbids me from mentioning who got what exactly. Safe to say that the five principles obviously received an enormously greater whack than any other performers. There are some others that aren’t even listed on call sheets, payment statements, or indeed in the film's credits who nevertheless still attend autograph conventions and charge money for their signatures. But I know who you are and unless £1,000 in used notes is left for me behind the cistern in the third cubicle of the public toilets at Victoria station in London when this book is published, I’m going to the press. OK?

In the unholy gaps between set-ups for shots back in Jabba’s fun palace, we had time to be divested of the heavier and most heat-inducing elements of our costumes and were thus free to have a peek around the rest of the set. I saw Harrison Ford sitting off to one side in a canvas chair with his name stencilled on the back, studying his script and looking intense in an actorly kind of way. I wanted to go up to him and say: “Hey, Hal, old buddy, lighten up, huh? This is not exactly Hamlet, right?” But my natural courtesy protocols and the fear of a serious beating precluded that one, but I did have the courage to ask him for his autograph. He obliged in a surly kind of “Sure, kid” way so familiar from his portrayal of Han Solo, then looked me up and down and said: “Hey son, nice furry trousers!” I stammered out that these were actually part of my costume and that I was in the movie too! Was he impressed in any way? No. Did I just make up that last exchange? Yes.

His scribbled signature was clutched in my hand all the way back to the dressing room because it was supposed to be a kind of “Hey darling, look what I’ve got you!” gift for my girlfriend at the time. Girls like that kind of gesture believe me. The only problem was, I lost it somewhere between here and there, and costume donning, etc. Oh God, I can’t go back and ask him again, can I? He’s going to think I’m some kind of stalker. So I didn’t and had to bite my lip when “She Who Must Be Obeyed” asked me tentatively a few nights later if I’d actually met (gulp) Harrison Ford? “Erm…yeah, he was around. But you know, he’s very private and I er..didn’t want to intrude.” “Oh…”, which was followed by that silent kind of meowing thought that girls produce when they feel that their partner has somehow let them down. Whoops! And keep that little failure to your self, I thought.

Now it’s time to introduce Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker into the on-set action. He’s become a fully-fledged Jedi Knight since Episode V and as such has come to sort out old “Pizza The Hutt” once and for all. So now all of us featured creatures are back into our previous positions from Scene 1 and we settle down to watch the action unfold. Again. And again. And again".