It has come to my attention* that someone on You Tube has uploaded the BBC documentary Godzilla: King of the Monsters (1998) in four parts. This is an excellent piece of work from producer Nick Freand Jones — not that you’d know that, because the You Tube version cavalierly disregards the ending credits. So you don’t get to see my name there as the staff translator, either, despite my four manic days spent with 24 tapes of interview footage, a laptop and a well-thumbed Nelson kanji dictionary. Well, 21 tapes — as it turned out, no subtitles were required on Alex Cox and Tony Luke. With motorcycle couriers periodically waiting outside, motors running, I waded through hour after hour of cinematographer technicalities and thespian reminiscences. And I was pretty pleased with the result.

When the documentary was in the can, Nick gave me carte blanche to do whatever I wanted with the translated interview material, used and unused, which is why several bits of it turn up later in some of the articles reprinted in Schoolgirl Milky Crisis.

*Thanks to Andrew Osmond