The BAFTAs. A February Sunday on the South Bank, and nowhere to park.

The Royal Festival Hall sits between the river and Belvedere Road, with the riverside walk in front of it closed to vehicles entirely. Belvedere Road itself is one way, running eastwards, so a car coming from the West End crosses the river and approaches through Chicheley Street rather than doubling back. On ceremony night the immediate stretch outside the hall is given over to accredited arrivals and the carpet, and everything else is held further out.

Waterloo station is next door, which is a mixed blessing: the roads around the IMAX roundabout, York Road and Waterloo Bridge carry the traffic of a mainline terminus on top of the event. A Sunday evening in February helps, but not as much as you would hope, because the arrivals window is narrow and every car in it is trying to do the same thing.

A car that has been staged nearby since the afternoon has a far easier night than one arriving into the middle of it. That is the practical reason clients hold a car for the evening rather than booking a drop and a collection: the collection is the hard part, at eleven o'clock, in the rain, with several hundred other people leaving at once.

For the people who actually work this evening, the ceremony is one fixture in a crowded fortnight. There are fittings in Mayfair, press and junket days in hotels around Park Lane and Soho, the nominees' party, the ceremony, the after party, and then, for many, an aeroplane. London's awards week sits a fortnight or so before the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, and the two diaries overlap for talent, publicists and press.

This is where having our own cars and our own chauffeurs in London counts. A schedule that changes four times in a day is manageable when the drivers are ours and the operations desk is answering around the clock. Where you need a car outside London and Manchester, we arrange it through operators we know, and aircraft are arranged for you too, so a Monday morning departure to Los Angeles or Paris sits in the same plan as the Sunday evening car.

Talent managers, publicists and studio production offices usually run this on an account rather than a booking at a time. It means the brief is given once, the chauffeurs are familiar, and a last minute change is a phone call rather than a negotiation.