With the commonality (is that a real word?) of period TV and films about the "old days" has anyone experience of being actually paid to provide a classic car to appear in Heartbeat/George Gently/The Royal/Life on Mars, etc, etc, they must get the vehicles from somewhere!

mmmm, i wondered if there could be a "revenue stream"* (they pay extras to stand about) for a car (and/or me) on a commercial footing, god knows theres not much else about, so long as i can get away with cheap insurance!

• its "posh" for "earner"

Not for much longer, there are proposals afoot to enact legislation that will probably prevent the use of your classic car as a wedding car, without being subject to the requirements of private hire licensing. This is part of the Law Commission’s proposals for ‘Reforming the law of private hire and taxi services.’

I would imagine that this would be almost unenforceable - the owner could say he/she was a guest at the wedding, and the fee could be paid in cash "on the day". Untraceable. The only problem would be if there was an unfortunate crash or other accident during the period of hire, when insurance documents may need to be produced.(BTW I'm not condoning law-breaking).

This was filming an episode of "Watson & Oliver" for BBC2.My car was "driving" through 60`s France and pulled up at a cafe.This was all done in a main road in Surbiton and a school play ground.It took all day to film and the sketch with my car lasted a few minutes.I had a very interesting day,full english brakefast,lovely lunch and £500,well chuffed.

So if the bride's own dad used his car instead of hiring one, he would have to have it licensed? This will be a real can of worms.

this is interesting as I'm thinkingof registering my Mustang for film/tv/magazine/book work. How did youget the job with the BBC? Are you registered with any agency for vehicles or what?

Licensed operators dont WANT extra competition from "wedding" car limos and are happy to leave them to weddings (and funerals under the same AOP), once plated a Silver Spur could do airports and prom nights too, but they DO object to stretch "tart carts" doing proms with no plate/ops licence or driver badge/CRB using the "self-hire drive" dodge, not many "stretch" limos can meet the requirements of private hire (side seats see to that) or a COIF (8-16 passengers).

Some weddings (especially asian) can last all day whereas a typical CofE affair is a few hours, and its home-church-reception-end....

Would you be happier with paying a % from what you get instead (like an other agency)?

This thread caught my eye as I've been thinking about setting up a website offering my campervan for weddings - it's an off-white splitty too which is helpful. Seems to be quite a demand nowadays and VW buses seem to usually command £250-£300 for 4 hours. Assuming you'd pay say £50 a pop to get a retired mate to chaffeur it, I figure that a couple of gigs a year would certainly cover the servicing and upkeep costs, when otherwise it would just be sat in the garage doing nothing.

However....I'm not sure I'd want to be dealing with (perhaps) all the enquiries, changes of mind, messing around etc that would clearly come with the enterprise, and suspect to do it well you'd have to turn up and tout yourself at the odd wedding fair.

Film work sounds good but there's not much call for it in this neck of the woods. Ideally you'd want to list on a database that provided cars to media companies generally, including fashion shoots etc.

ETA: slightly different type of "sitting" .... a family member had their car featured on a set of local stamps (the 50p e-type). Interestingly the Post Office over here commissioned an artist to paint the pictures for the stamps with reference to actual specific local cars, rather than just work off photographs of generic examples, so the cars had to be made available to him! The stamps are actually very detailed, although the picture doesn't show it.