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No news is good news. If you don’t mind spending your days as a talking head.

I’ve never got the hang of charging my phone, so it’s usually run down and switched off for at least a day before I start to wonder why I’m not getting calls. So plugging it this morning after two days of silence it wasn’t an enormous surprise to find two missed calls from ITN. One left yesterday morning at half seven about online shopping and another from this morning about piracy. Both for radio, and both expired.

Ho-humm. Not that I was particularly in the mood for radio today.

So anyway, an hour later it rings again. Channel 5 this time. Could I could do a pundit spot on a wooden stool that swivels just a bit too much for comfort? No probs. Two thirty, Grays Inn Road? Fine.

So I walked the mile or so to the grey ITN building on Grays Inn Road where I spent every Thursday evening for two and a half years. Not a single thing had changed. Same Big Issue woman on the corner out front. Same fish in the tank. Same smell from the canteen in the atrium. It was interesting to see the inside of Channel 5 News, though, which I’d only ever seen through the glass doors before.

Inside it is a disgusting mess. The guest-greeting couch is a nasty beige/pink monstrosity with a sharp pointed back that digs into your spine, and the set itself is battered and chipped. Around the back of the day-glo pillars that look so good on the telly the paint is peeling off, presumably where they have been knocked by ladders, feet and cameras.

And it’s all so small. I know things look bigger on TV, but the whole newsroom and studio was about the size of my flat. Even the stuff I used to do for Sky looked better behind the scenes, which I found very surprising.

Anyhow, they perched me on the stool in front of a big green backdrop on which they projected an iPod and then fired fifteen minutes of questions. I’m pretty sure it went well, although I never saw it. I was in pilates when it went out, doing all I could to absolve my gym guilt. They seemed happy enough, though, which I guess is a good sign, and as they probably only wanted 15 - 20 seconds tops there must have been something usable somewhere in the middle.

If I’d known, I’d have dressed up smarter, but then Channel 5 is a very jeans-and-t-shirty channel so I guess it looked OK.

Then again, it was immediately followed by At Home with the Eubanks and as we all know, Chris Eubank is, apparently (bizarely enough) Britain’s Best Dressed Man.

I think I let the side down.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2003 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.