Saturday, April 29, 2006
Friday, April 28, 2006
Mork
I'm a very happy man. I'm having a very good day. So far today has been the best day of a very good week. I recorded two more pieces for The Daily Show this evening. One of the pieces will air tonight in the US and on Friday night in the UK and the other will go into another show some time in the future. I was excited to step up to the plate and record a correspondent piece for them on Monday but the pieces I did tonight are much more defined as my own so now it really feels like I'm a part of the show. The show that just happens to be one of my favourite shows in the world.
The guest on tonight's show was Robin Williams. As he was shown through to the back of the set before his interview I was weighing up whether it would be uncool to introduce myself. Well, not so much whether it would be uncool because it obviously would... but how uncool and whether or not it would be worth it. I didn't. He did his interview and was then whisked away. They then taped the rest of the show and then when that was done I went on to do my second piece at the desk with Jon. You can imagine I was pretty surprised to come off set to find that Robin Williams had hung around especially so that he could say hello and pass on his kind words about my two segments. You see what I mean about a good day?
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Happy Birthday Ma'am
New York is a very exciting city. Yesterday was a very exciting day. I'm here partly to discuss a few ideas with The Daily Show which is, amongst other things, one of my favourite TV shows in the world. I was expecting to film a short piece with them that might air on Wednesday night and there was a possibility of doing a couple of other bits later in the week also.
Then yesterday morning they decided to do something about the Queen's birthday on that day's show and asked if I'd be in that bit also. I guess they looked around the office wondering who could do the best English accent and I came out on top. (Which is fair enough really as I've been working on it for a long time.)
So that's what happened... and tonight I appeared as a correspondent who was supposed to be in London. Which is where I had been two days before. In the UK the show is broadcast on More4 a day later so it'll be on tonight and if the original piece I was expecting to film on Wednesday goes ahead that'll be on in the UK on Thursday.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Top of the Form
The documentary I presented about Top Of The Form was shown last night along with a few related programmes... a sort of Top Of The Form night for BBC4 with me as the host. I wrote about the filming of this in a freezing cold Neasden warehouse one day back in February.
The first time I saw the footage we'd shot was a few days later when I recorded the voice over, this time in a cosy studio. I remember at the time being struck by how red my nose was in most of it... real proof that the warehouse was indeed freezing. In fact, at the time I wrote "If you watch the show when it goes out you'll notice that I have a very red nose in most of it."
I was right. You did notice. Everyone seemed to notice. I got to work today (at the BBC where a band of bearded men are merrily working on the news series of Genius) and one of my colleagues instantly told me that he'd spent part of the night before staring at my red nose. Just as we started work a friend called me. His first words were, "My wife wants to know if you had a cold?" I've even heard reports hat Ken Bruce was talking about the redness of my nose on Radio 2 this morning.
If Ken Bruce is talking about something on his show surely that makes it a national talking point. Imagine your nose being a national talking point. It's hard to imagine isn't it? Even for you big nose. Crikey.
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