Saturday, February 11, 2006

Top of the Culture Show, Mr Robinson

I've really enjoyed this last week. Every day has been different and fun. Yesterday was spent in a freezing cold warehouse in Neasden recording stuff for a BBC4 show about the old school's quiz Top Of The Form. The channel will be having a Top Of The Form theme night which I'll be hosting. They'll show a couple of (highly entertaining) shows from the archive, a modern day revival made with current schoolkids, a documentary about the show and some other related programmes. I'm sure it was important for the whole look and feel of the evening to record the links in a freezing cold warehouse. In Neasden.

The first part of today was spent in Clapham filming a short piece for The Culture Show. It's a short piece that's longer than the short piece I filmed for them two or three weeks ago. It's all to do with a feature they're running called Design Quest which aims to find the public's favourite piece of classic British design. The first recording I did was used as part of a programme in which various people discussed 25 different classic, British designs. Then viewers voted for their favourites and these votes have whittled the list down to a top 10. Now longer films are being made to represent each one.

Mine is about the world wide web. A new tranche of voting opens next Thursday and this will get them down to a shortlist of 3 and then there is presumably more voting to select the winner. Trying to explain it is exhausting enough. How anyone is meant to compare an angelpoise lamp to a routemaster bus to the world wide web is beyond me ... but if they do I'm sure they'll agree with me and vote for the web.

After that I headed into 6Music to take part in the venerable broadcasting institution that is Roundtable. I've done this a couple of times now and it's always mischievous fun. It was nice to pop in because for the next two weeks I'll be pretending to work there when I deputise as host for the Tom Robinson's Evening Sequence. I'm looking forward to that.

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