On Good Friday ( about two weeks ago now) I was invited onto Shine -T.V. to talk about my book with the girls. Even though it was only for 15 minutes it's still longer than any other tv appearance I have done. The invitation came via our brand new PR manager Michele Hart who managed to achieve in 2 minutes what we have been trying to do since the launch of the book - and that is get more people to realise we exist.
I shared the show with a real hero Alison Halstead who despite having a rare diabetic condition - has not let it get in the way of supporting the Rays of Sunshine Children's Charity and raising over 16 thousand pounds to help other childrens dreams come true. http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Rays-of-Sunshine-Childrens-Charity/60569121064 .
Before the show I got to meet both her parents and sister, and after Maya and Arisha turned on the charm in no time at all we were all sat off screen digging in to coffee and biscuits. The girls and I signed a copy of the HPM and donated it to the charity and I offered to come and visit at some point in the future, which I hope comes true because rumour has it that there is a rather good chip shop.
The show itself was a bit of a blur, and I was looking forward to posting a link - but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a DVD of the show anywhere as the station one was having "tech probs" on the day, so for all you know I could be making this up.
Last week I had an altogether different booking after being invited to be part of a live guest audience to comment on the political debate for the forthcoming elections....blimey talk about being out of my depth, I was told by the producer that there would be a cross section of the public in the room. But when I got to Dukes bar in Manchester and entered the Brindley Rooms upstairs, I almost wanted to turn around.
As well as Tony Livesy from Radio 5 live, there were a host of other leading political analysts and commentators from several newspapers to ensure "fairness and then the audience was made up of graduates, professionals etc, and on my table there was a medical pharmacist, a language and speech therapist, a professor of politics..........and me.
It was quite strange because normally you would think that spending at least 6 hours in a room solely focussing on political debate would be enough to put you to sleep....but I manage to concentrate for almost all of it. And although I had made up my mind to refrain from making any outlandish comments or jumping into an arguement that I would obviously lose, I couldn't help voicing an opinion on the fact that the three leaders did look a bit like they were on Blind Date with their opening statements. I had come to the conclusion that making a non political statement would hurt sales - afterall a voter is a potential "bookbuyer"
Inbetween the Radio and T.V show came Easter and again I wasn't really able to do anything worthwhile with the HPM...there was a brakedown in communication with the director of Zombelina, which is now resolved and I spat my dummy out at the Swerve Record label owner at his apathy - which is now also resolved.
Perhaps one of my major achievements is the fact that I have learnt to embed HTML code onto the blog, so for the first time you are able to hear a very rough recording of "Theme Music to the Hairy Plug Monster"... while on our sisterblog http://zombelina.blogspot.com/ you can hear the opening bars of what is going to be a moving soundtrack.
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