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" &amp;quot;Focus your attention over here. Clap when I give the thumbs up. And don&amp;#039;t forget to look confused,&amp;quot; the director orders. It&amp;#039;s a pretty easy ask, seeing as I&amp;#039;m watching a man wiggling his fingers and pretending it&amp;#039;s a musical version of Twilight. I really am quite confused. After giving the wiggly fingers a standing ovation (to be fair, they really emoted well), someone yells &amp;#039;cut!&amp;#039; before I, along with around 100 other extras, sit down again, ready to be confused for the fifth or sixth time that afternoon. I&amp;#039;ve infiltrated the set of Crims, one of BBC3&amp;#039;s last comedies before the channel closes in the autumn. *cue sobs* Set inside young offenders&amp;#039; institute Sunnybank View, newcomer Elis James stars as teenager Luke who, after being tricked into being his friend&amp;#039;s getaway driver, finds himself banged up with friendly-but-dim Jason (fellow newbie Kadiff Kirwan).  The series follows Luke as he struggles to negotiate life trapped within the same walls as snail-brained warden Creg (Ricky Champ), the confusingly named Black Elton John (Ed Kear) and prison kingpin Marcel (Theo Barklem-Biggs), a Twilight fan who&amp;#039;s inside for being caught with a policeman&amp;#039;s helmet in his glove box, &amp;quot;amongst other bits of anatomy.&amp;quot; Having seen the first episode, in which Luke waves goodbye to his girlfriend Gemma and settles into life at the mercy of an in-cell wanking rota, it&amp;#039;s apparent it&amp;#039;s going to be massive.  The action focuses on a group of lads whose sense of humour leans towards the lower end of the taste spectrum (&amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m absolutely thrilled you&amp;#039;ve managed to arrange me a two-year staycation in this bummertorium,&amp;quot; Luke tells Jason). But, like The Inbetweeners before it, it&amp;#039;s definitely not just one for the boys. So, pulling on my top-undercover-journo hat (pink with a bobble, FYI), I decide to go underground during filming of one of the later episodes to see what working on a hit sitcom is really like. Okay, so I didn&amp;#039;t go totally undercover. Thanks to Twitter, I&amp;#039;ve got to know Crims&amp;#039; charming co-writer-and-producer duo, James Farrell and Adam Kay, IRL. But what are meeja friends for, if not to exploit them mercilessly for on-set access? My journo credentials are immediately sprung by the other extras when they let me know in no uncertain terms that the term &amp;#039;extra&amp;#039; is considered way beyond the pale (the correct term is &amp;#039;supporting artist.&amp;#039;). Many of the other SAs do this full-time, so I feel a bit of a fraud as I take my place in the audience of Sunnybank View&amp;#039;s musical version of Twilight. Sitting beside me in the audience is my &amp;#039;husband,&amp;#039; an actor who also works as a children&amp;#039;s entertainer at the weekends. I shift away slightly and don&amp;#039;t let on I&amp;#039;m scared of both clowns and small talk. Crims&amp;#039; version of Twilight isn&amp;#039;t the most conventional take on the story - at one point, extremely creative use of the word &amp;#039;c*nt&amp;#039; is deployed, which I&amp;#039;m pretty certain wasn&amp;#039;t in the R-Pattz version.  Ed Kear, playing Black Elton John playing Jacob, also appears to have one ear hanging off, which is eventually fixed by someone in the costume department wielding a staple gun. But it&amp;#039;s certainly a lot funnier than the original - the hardest bit of the job is trying not to laugh. In between shots there&amp;#039;s a lot of sitting around while cameras are moved around (so marginally it&amp;#039;s invisible to the naked eye) for second, third or fourth takes. I also missed the memo about wearing plain clothes, so I&amp;#039;m having to wear my &amp;#039;B is for Burrito!&amp;#039; t-shirt inside-out and back to front, which quickly gets uncomfortable under the studio lights. But at the end of a ten-hour day, James tells me they&amp;#039;ve got around 11 minutes&amp;#039; material in the bag. Which is, apparently, a good thing. I can&amp;#039;t help thinking, &amp;#039;Is that all? I have sweat in places I didn&amp;#039;t know had sweat glands for 11 minutes of footage?&amp;#039; But overall, being an extra (sorry, SA) is a lot of fun. Especially when the crew comprises an awful lot of hot men draped alluringly with tool belts.  My day&amp;#039;s work also means I&amp;#039;ll appear, albeit fleetingly, onscreen (at one point my nose was powdered by a make-up artist, which means I was definitely in shot. Sweet.)  But best of all, I&amp;#039;ll never watch Twilight in quite the same way again - and that can only be a good thing. The first episode of Crims airs on BBC3 on 8 January at 10pm "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.co.uk/entertainment/a32356/be-tv-extra/>