My US visa renewal hell… becomes a dream

I was determined it was going to be a nightmare. Certainly getting up at 5.30am and cycling to the office to drop off all my worldly goods was. I was bent upon securing a renewal of my journalist’s visa for the United States.

The nightmare dawns once every five years. It so burdens your passport that you almost inevitably have to get a new passport as well, to make space for it.

Add to that the raft of form-filling, dredging up details of former wives, names, identities, nationalities, and downloading barcodes from US government websites. It is not a thing of joy.

You may not carry any electrical equipment with you. No bags, nothing that could be used to assault so fine a building as the US embassy.

I even had to take the battery out of the tiny torch that lights the key of my bicycle padlock.

But when I finally arrived – as you are now allowed to – half an hour before my 7.45am appointment, my nightmare transformed into a dream world.

Far from joining the maddening crowd, I was wafted by an ample blonde-haired lady from some visa-processing agency to join the cast of a West End theatre production.

Why, at this unearthly hour, here was the great Alan Rickman, here too the gorgeous Anna Chancellor.

I see Mr Rickman at Christmas parties, he lives nearby. And Anna and I had done a gig recently for a big charity.

Although the entire process took the usual tedious hour-and-a-half, we all talked so much it seemed to be over in one-and-a-half minutes.

I still think the EU should try it on American visa applicants, I’m sure the entire charade would be ended in a week.

I did have time, pursuant to our piece on Channel 4 News last night about the new US embassy next to Battersea power station, to examine the hideous old.

It’s actually more Stalinist from outside. The inside is potentially rather grand, and I can see that the Qataris who have reportedly bought it, could turn it into a rather elite club – which will require as much security as I went through to say to gain entry to.

There was, however, a sting in the tail. When I came to pay for the visa services rendered, the American embassy does not accept American Express. That will not do nicely.

(Alan Rickman will be directing The Creditors, by Strindberg, in Brooklyn, New York, from late April)