Gareth Jones: The Ford Cortina And Me
What car did your family own when you were growing up?
When we got asked to make this film, it had a working title of ‘Dad Had One’ and was always going to be a nostalgic look back at the cars of our youth.
Cortinas, Chevettes, Dolomites, Cavaliers, that sort of thing. Essentially, any of those mundane mass market motoring classics that were ubiquitous at the time but are as rare as rocking horse shit these days. Unexceptional motors that were part of the family and would feature on our sepia-tinted photographs from yesteryear, like a much-loved Labrador or Aunty Sheila from next door. The problem we had was that we actually had too much ground to cover. How were we going to deal with Fords, Vauxhalls, Triumphs and everything with a British Leyland badge in just over 5 minutes! The answer was we weren’t, so we needed to streamline it and have somebody tell us about their own personal motoring story, and we found the perfect man for that in the brilliant Gareth Jones.
