May 1, 2008
Better Television
YouTube is great for stumbling upon my past.
Way back when life was simpler, my lovely friend Gareth Jones made a children’s programme for the BBC on the 25th Anniversary of the Moon Landing, called Afternoon On The Moon. He was lucky enough to get to talk to Buzz about his trip.
When Afternoon on the Moon was commissioned, I was overjoyed and delighted when Gareth asked me to assist on the film he made at Kennedy Space Centre. I’d known Gareth for two years by this point and about one year of that was spent talking about the Apollo Missions. To get to go to Kennedy together was a dream! When we were filming at the Apollo Graveyard, I’d rip things off the rusting bits of Apollo junk when Manny V’s back was turned… :)
At the time, I was doing some stuff for the computer/technology/internet radio programme Gareth was presenting on Radio 5 called The Big Byte, so along with doing stuff for Afternoon On The Moon, we took The Big Byte out to Florida for the week.
Our producer on the Big Byte was Julian Mayers (who you can see at the beginning of this video Phil, the BadAstronomer, filmed the other week w us at CERN). The other day, Julian and I were reminiscing about when we recorded the Big Byte in Florida. We were in a rented studio run by a guy who’d never, ever done an ‘as live’ radio programme before. We absolutely needed to finish the programme by a certain time so that we could get the tape to Fed Ex so that it could get to Miami the next day so that it could be beamed to London in time to be broadcast. Remember, this was in 1994…
We finished the programme by the skin of our teeth. Julian and I jumped in a rental car and frantically, desperately tried to find Fed Ex in some godforsaken dirtmall. They were about to close up as we arrived… but we got the tape sent off and the programme went out and peace descended on the planet once again.
A few years after all that, Julian was also the exec of The Kit which I did with Charlie Brooker – OH! Go on, just to finish this all off, watch a 10 minute cut-down of our fucked-up, baked-bean-phobia, incestuous, deformed baby, Gay Dad, forked-tongue-French-kissing, Little House On The Prairie themed Series One compilation show!
With all my heart, cuzzin.
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