17 November 2011

Now Now

I've been out every night this week and I'm a bit behind on blog posts but I just got back from a recording of The Now Show and I wanted to write down my thoughts while they are fresh. It was a fun evening but clearly, I should have read my own advice from the last time I went because we made some of the same old n00b mistakes.

Poor photo of Hugh Dennis and Steve Punt

We got there earlier than I did last time--6.45 (when the front doors open) rather than 7.15 (15 minutes before the studio doors open)--but there was a big queue outside Broadcasting House, with about 200 people ahead of us. Random security checking of Balham Babe's bag delayed us and meant we were the first people to enter the second holding room, rather than the last people to enter the first room. As all of the first room people got to go in first and there isn't a queuing system inside the rooms, this didn't work out too well for us, and we ended up in the second row on the balcony with two tall guys in front of us. We also missed out on getting to fill in an answer to the audience question: the woman in charge of our room asked why no one was giving her the answers and we explained we hadn't been given the sheets but apparently they had run out. The funniest answer (which probably won't get included in the show when it airs) was a hilarious example of someone missing the point of the question--or maybe just wanting us to think that...

That aside, it was a good show, with a couple of good songs, a reference to research I publicised, and plenty of naughtiness, although as ever, I found Henning Wehn's segment a little boring. One part, which described a wonderful new variety of a class A drug in the style of a Christmas advert for a popular, middle-class retailer, involved Pippa Evans reading out a number of long, jargony, science words, such as mesolimbic and "exogenous catecholamine transporter ligand" (straight from Wiki, I see). During the "retakes" at the end, Steve Punt made the mistake of asking if there were any chemists in the audience and of course there were, one of whom took the joke far too far by loudly correcting Evans's pronunciations four or five times, until the chemist was persuaded to pipe down. I know it's the Year of Chemistry, but still...

And yes, next time I really will try to arrive a bit earlier so that I can finally get to provide a supremely witty answer to the audience question of the week.

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