Bit tenuous this...
...as it's more 'when i was nearly on TV' but I like the story so there.

A few years back I was living with my future ex-wife and our 5-month-old baby in the first house I'd lived in after moving out of my parents. Not the greatest of two bedroom terraced boxes but reasonable (this will become relevant later). Being up early a lot due to said baby meant I often caught a lot of early morning TV shite, including at this point, Channel 4's RI:SE. While watching one morning, I decided to text in and enter a competition or something and after the show a researcher rang me back to ask my opinions on the show. I gave my views (can't remember what I said, I was probably just blandly positive as I couldn't be arsed to really listen) and at the end they offered me free tickets to a future recording. 'Great!', thinks I and then hang up and forget about it.

Cut to a few weeks later and I get a phone call from the show asking me to participate in a stunt! Super! One particular morning coming up they were having some TV interior designers coming on and they wanted to come and film my house. I then had to somehow get my missus up there to the recording on false pretences (I lied and said Justin Timberlake was on that day, which frankly was ridiculous; he was huge at this point and the chances of him coming onto a minor-league breakfast show were miniscule. She bought it somehow but seemed suspicious...) and then they were going to ask the designers to comment on a viewer's house (i.e. mine) while my other half was totally shocked at seeing her gaff on screen. Hilarious.

So the day of filming comes, I knew the F-E-W was out and I was confidently expecting a full on crew to turn up. I was however, disappointed by the arrival of some berk with a piddly camera who can't have been much older than me. But there you go (since working in corporate video for a little while, I expect some clients have been equally disappointed with my arrival). He films the rooms in my house, while a couple of mates of mine help me move all the shit we hadn't tidied up from one room to another to make the place look nicer.

A few days later I get a call, 'Sorry, the segment's been dropped'. Balls. They never gave a reason, I guess my house was just shite. And I never got my normal audience tickets either, bastards.

So there you go, I nearly surprised my fiancee on live TV. And I also nearly met Mel and Sue. Lucky escape there I guess.
(beanojam isn't really Ricardo Flange, Tue 16 Jun 2009, 14:11, Reply)