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Symbolic Forest

A homage to loading screens.

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Specialist Subject

In which I get on the telly

No blogpost yesterday, because – well, I was rather busy. Regular readers might remember this post from last week, in which I speculated vaguely about auditioning for a TV quiz show - I didn’t say which one, but it was fairly easy to guess. Those auditions, as it happened, were yesterday.

They were open auditions, so I just turned up. And, really, it was all rather painless. They weren’t busy; I sat down, answered some general knowledge questions, and had a bit of a chat about potential subjects. All very friendly. The interesting bit, though, was after I came out. “Would you mind hanging around for a while,” someone said, “the local news would like to interview people.”

Happy to oblige, I waited around, before going outside, getting miked up, and answering a few questions about what I’d just been doing. And then: “could we have some setup shots of people queuing outside the audition room?” So, the news team commandeered a corridor with a likely-looking door at the end, sat us down, and told us to try to look nervous. I found it hard not to laugh, as the cameraman zoomed in on our anxious faces from somewhere around floor-level. We acted out arriving at the audition, for the cameras, and I suddenly realised how hard acting is: how hard it is to make scripted actions feel natural.

The whole thing seemed far more complicated than the audition itself had been. And even if I don’t end up on any quiz shows, I’ve had my 2 minutes of stardom on the local news now.