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I was on telly

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10:26 / 07.10.03

Guilty family secret: My mother's old company was responsible for Mini Pops.

Yep, that's right, Mini Pops. Early eighties horror involving very young children all dressed up, smothered in make-up and singing cutesy pop-songs.

Another guilty secret: The Runce and I were supposed to be on it, in fact we were offered £50 each - a shit load of cash for a six-year old - or a Starwars figure of our choice, just to swing our feet in the background. Understandably I went with Dengar.

In the end we refused to go through with it - I fell in love with one of the performers and was too embarassed - not sure about Runce. Still got my Starwars figure though.

More tales from stage and screen to come.

Tryphena Absent

10:40 / 07.10.03

Erk. I was an extra on What a Girl Wants. A very unfortunate film set, the crew were even more pissed off than usual and apparently walked out a few weeks after my day on the set but Colin Firth was very cool, he had the driest sense of humour on the planet.

Basically the whole thing taught me that I hate film sets and likely feel the same way about TV.

10:52 / 07.10.03

Never been on a film set - if it's anything like telly it must be fucking boring. That said, Mum, and my televisual media pals, always have a few wacky tales to tell.

My own sojourn into audio post production (film and TV) couldn't have been more dull and frustrating.

Why is it that advertising people insist on bringing a twenty man entourage into a tiny underground studio? Do you hear me Sauron, you fucking prick?

11:18 / 07.10.03

More people because we have more clients' money to throw around. A\nd it makes us feel important.

Anyway, thanks for calling me a prick, but I must pick you up on your maths. Star Wars characters retailed at c.£2.99. You were offered £50 or one of these. Next time- you are probably still short enough to feature on a Retro Mini Pops- take the cash and buys lots of Star Wars figures with it ...

11:24 / 07.10.03

Lol. I knew I could lure you out of lurkery.

Yes, I understand the maths, therefore at six I too was a prick.

You utter cock.

11:35 / 07.10.03

Shouldn't this carry on in the tantrum thread?

12:51 / 07.10.03

My hands have been on more than the rest of me, but I was "the Comfort Girl" : Small blonde-haired child who ran down hills and got wrapped in fluffy blue towels to promote Comfort fabric softener.

I did the ads when I was 5 but they stayed on air (and I was on the bottles) for eight years so I had to face my younger self in the supermarket regularly and realise how much cuter I was then.

My crowning moment was when on Eastenders Kathy Beale walked out of the Kapoor's store clutching a bottle with my face on it.

My brother Bizunth was in the first ad too as a very cute and chunky 3 year old!

Cheap. Easy. Cruel.

13:10 / 07.10.03

I have been in several local commercials. I was advertising High Speed Internet Service. The company I work for had an open call audition and I thought it would be fun to try. Much to my surprise, they called me in to shoot a commercial spot. Now I can't go to a bar here without having someone approach me about the commercial.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

13:42 / 07.10.03

I have done a pair of cable shows, one a movie review show in college that I was brought in to replace someone sick at the last minute and then just stayed around until I finished college. Then, for about three years, I was on a local show called "Collecting Stuff" where we talked about toys, comics, baseball cards and the like. We did all sorts of weird bits, such as the comics segment trying to take over the show, buring comics we didn't like on a hibatchi, trashing the set as the "New World Order Of Comics" and the like.

Now, I'm going to be an extra on the local "Horror Host" show that has host segments going into and out of bad horror flicks, and a friend of mine is doing a pitch to revive "Collecting Stuff".

So....people have seen my gianormous head on their TV before.

Tryphena Absent

13:46 / 07.10.03

Ohmygod! The Comfort girl's on barbelith! Why does that strike me as marvellously weird!??

14:02 / 07.10.03

god mine is going to sound quite pedestrian by comparision to the other tales of youthful celebraty. And also quite boring as I need to fill in a bit of background.

In my hometown we have a little shuttle train that runs from the bus station to the main train station. One day this shuttle train failed to stop on it's way back to the bus station and ploughed through a brick wall.

Local TV news turned up to film it at the same time my school bus got in. I was seen at the end of a sweeping shot.

My other brush was three years ago, again local TV news, this time at the ISP I was working at. For the entire interview in with the MD of the company, right behind him is the back of my head. And you can tell it's my head as I have a dark circle on my scalp that appears when I have my hair shaved down to a grade one.

Like I said pretty pedestrian.

14:14 / 07.10.03

Local TV news turned up to film it at the same time my school bus got in. I was seen at the end of a sweeping shot.
Same happened with me, but it was for the background of something about drugs. WHen one particuarly stupid girl saw the cameras, she cried "OH! They must be from Moray Firth Radio!"

Apparently I was on the news when I was 7, singing you cannie shove yer grannie off the bus in front of Prince Charles.

Can we see a PIC of said comfort-bottles Spid?

14:20 / 07.10.03

I've been on Blue Peter because I came second in a poster competition. I've got a badge and everything. Obviously not recently, but still.

And when I was 4 I appeared in a BBC programme which was filmed in our village. I was somersaulting around a bar on a fence, showing off my knickers.

14:34 / 07.10.03

Chunky?? Screw you guys, I'm going home.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

15:04 / 07.10.03

Top of the Pops a few times...

[schmooze]

Sauron, are you an ad man?

[/schmooze]

15:12 / 07.10.03

Me? There was once a dire incident involving The Big Breakfast when a group of Druids, having stayed up all night drinking (we'd had to be at the studios at 4.00am) and sooo not in a good state, were required to behave so idiotically that several of us just did a runner. Some were coerced back by ghastly coked-up meeja people, including me, but I think I managed to hide my face pretty well and even if I didn't, who cares? No one whose opinion I care about is up for a 6.00am breakfast show.

Stretching the topic title somewhat, there was another, even more embarrassing incident involving me working for a well-known UK telephone info line and receiving what turned out to be a prank call going out on live radio. "What have you got to say to six million listeners?", the sadistic bastard DJ asked when he had eventually revealed his true nature. Well I dunno about you lot but I couldn't think of a damn thing to say to six million people I'd just made a complete and utter tit of myself in front of, other than to lie about my real name so no one could take the piss.

And to think, between them, those two incidents comprised my fifteen minutes of fame.

15:33 / 07.10.03

I was on Tv at a football game. I was told I took looking bored to new levels. You can buy sushi at football games..just like peanuts and crackerjacks. That rocks.

15:51 / 07.10.03

Sauron is indeed an ad man. You know that Fosters' campaign, the one with the heads? That was 'im.

Right then, here's another guilty secret. The Runce and I starred in a David Essex video. Can't remember the name of the song, but if you ever hear David's dulcet tones over a couple of young boys playing with their grandmother and a dog, well...

The dog was in fact our old dog Freckles, an oversized, mutant King Charles Cavalier Spaniel that bit me between takes. Needless to say, there were tears.

Every good video needs some cute twins.

17:26 / 07.10.03

I am an ad man, like Jefe, but with bigger hair/ bigger braces/ bigger head.

Maybe not bigger hair.

My ear has been on TV, the rest of me fortunately has not.

17:42 / 07.10.03

Being on TV at a football game is the dizzy heights of stardom compared to this, but I'm in a Manics Live video. For about five seconds, when they were taking shots of the people queueing, but I still bought the video just because I was on it...

This is is still something which I tend to tell people who will listen, even though it was six years ago and I don't like the Manics any more.

18:03 / 07.10.03

I once advocated shooting facists rather than censoring them on Welsh television during a music discussion show. I was 16.

Nowadays, I'm usually trying to stay out of shot on Welsh news items, rather than get onto telly...

That Fosters ad got loads of stick, didn't it?

19:28 / 07.10.03

I remember that ex-board superstar Gibreel was in a piece of stock footage of a crowd, thus freaking a couple of Barbeloids out when he appeared in a documentary just after David Attenborough said something like 'And what is the future of humanity...'

Whisky Priestess

22:34 / 07.10.03

I've been on several gameshows, all of which went out at some half-past lunch hour on crap TV channels when I thought no-one would be watching.

Needless to say, several people came up to me the day after 100% was screened, and the "women talk sex" documentary I was in got shown at 8pm on a Saturday night in my cousin's pub ...

I've also been an extra in Inspector Morse, but then who hasn't?

22:44 / 07.10.03

Did ya win anything?

23:44 / 07.10.03

I was on an episode of Camila Scott (Canada's Ricki Lake), where they had a psychic doing readings. They played a tape of the psychic giving me a reading, and then a few seconds of me busking. Pretty awful as the 'psychic' got all the answers out of me first, then turned on the camera...

I was also on an episode of 'Speaker's Corner' (where almost anyone with $1 can get 60 seconds on TV.. you put the money in the slot, the camera turns on, and every week they take 30min and broadcast it). My bit was a plea to support your local buskers, again with a few seconds of me fiddling away. They even had me on the commercial for the show for a few weeks...

Any other appearances were just me in the background of a MuchMusic broadcast (Canada's MTV)...

09:21 / 08.10.03

Foster's ad got quite a lot of stick. New even more ridiculous one featuring a pelican out this Saturday ...

09:43 / 08.10.03

Brief interview at an income tax protest, local news.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

12:03 / 08.10.03

Flogging cheesey wares in which part of the world?

12:23 / 08.10.03

Tiz Woz!

That's right, I was on Tiz Woz - the infamous Saturday morning show for kids.
Well, to be precise I was in a Smurf pop-video that aired during the show. We spent an afternoon on the top floor of Harrods going round a merry-go-round holding Smurf puppets.

I have no idea what the finished result looked like. Shit I'd imagine.

Whisky Priestess

21:09 / 08.10.03

Bobossboy: yeah, I won about eight grand, but I spent it all on gadgets.

uncle retrospective

23:10 / 08.10.03

God, I have some shameful stories of being on TV.
The first 2 were singing with the school choir (one where I got to meet the president of Ireland!)

The others were while I spent a week being a reporter for L!ve TV news Newcastle. I even got a lead story.

Never got to meet Tiffiny Banaster, though they tried to dress me up as News Bunny.
Burr!!!

23:54 / 08.10.03

Gadgets are good. I'm jealous.

21:38 / 11.10.03

I was on the local evening TV news yesterday!

I went to see finding nemo at the odean & outside there were people from PETA people protesting about cruelty to fish. they interviewed me about fish and i was filmed eating a soy snack! it was extremely embarrassing. i think they wanted me to comment on how good it tasted, but it wasn't really that nice. i heartily agreed with them that fish are treated with extreme cruelty at the hands of people.

i didn't know who would see that footage of me eating a faux-finger, I thought probably PETA would use it on one of their promotional videos. But NO! It was on the goddamn news! I was scared the voiceover would say: "proof that fatties will eat anything" but it didn't. My friend called just after i was on TV and said I looked really cute. I am very glad i didn't see it.

ONE.

21:46 / 11.10.03

I've been interviewed about weblogs for International Herald Tribune TV, Barbelith's been reviewed on that late-night TV show that reviews websites and has been featured in an episode of Disinfo Nation and you can spot me in a blue santa hat in an old episode of Mel and Sue's Light Lunch - specifically the Christmas episode with the cast of Men Behaving Badly in it. Also I was at the Eddie Izzard performance which was recorded for The Definite Article, but I wasn't filmed because I was in the audience, OBVIOUSLY.

The Natural Way

13:03 / 12.10.03

My own memories of the David Essex video involve the nice old lady who played our grandma smashing our heads together during the *cuddling* sequence. That really hurt.

I was in love with the Mini-Pops girl too. It must have been so obvious - Mum's PA started shouting about how our mouths were gaping. I can't remember ever having been so embarrased before or since.

She was the girl in the Rice Krispies ad. Y'know, the girl sat in front of the bowl. My heart skipped a beat every time I saw that bloody ad. I think her name was Emma or Sarah or something.

If only she knew how much I loved her.......

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