The great (Sun)day arrived – we were off to London to be Channel Four’s Big Breakfast’s Family of the Week!
Big Breakfast (Photo credit: kaige)
But not before a hundred phone calls from the production team: bring family videos (all twenty of them)/ photographs/your jar of buttons/the soap maker/as much crap as you can carry on a train with a suitcase each and two kids. The idea was that we would have everything with us that they might need to illustrate how interesting/funny/weird we are.
We arrived at Stockport station forty minutes early (there was no way I was missing that train). On board, we discovered our reserved seats were four separate singles. Tory Boy was eleven and Spud six and we are not the kind of parents to leave our kids alone and so, according to my notes of the day, I complained loud and long and several scared-looking passengers quickly vacated a table area, making four seats together suddenly available.
I’d forgotten that handsel moment. Thank you, note-taking younger me.
We spent the whole journey shushing the kids because we were in a quiet carriage. That was back in the days when mobiles were only madly popular instead of ubiquitous and people still obeyed Be Quiet signs. I did manage to chat to some people and tell them – to the Hub’s intense irritation – that we were traveling to London to be on Big Brother. Little Spud made us laugh by saying it was an easy mistake to make because they both begin with ‘The’.
We arrived at the hotel – basic but clean – dumped the cases and popped next door to The Beefeater, as instructed, to avoid being the Famished of the Week. We and TBB had forgotten it was Mother’s Day. There was no room at the inn.
GUESS I’M NOT THE ONLY PERSON TO GET CONFUSED (read the caption carefully) English: Replica Big Breakfast House. In May 1994 the Big Breakfast caused national mayhem when it ran a competition to win an exact replica of the Big Breakfast house being built in Telford. Gillian Baker from Grimsby who won the house spent a two week holiday there before selling it for £64,000. It has now been converted into three flats. Click on the link for the real Big Brother House: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/289540 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
We informed them we were Channel Four’s The Big Breakfast’s Family of the Week and, as they wanted Channel Four’s The Big Breakfast’s business, they squeezed us in. It’s easy when you have connections.
But still a long wait – we finally ate their leftovers some time after ten p.m. It was average but filling and we weren’t paying so no point complaining.
We fell into bed around eleven, exhausted, and slept for at least four hours before being woken by the alarm…Telly day had arrived!
As a matter of interest, which I only discovered on digging out the scrap book, it was exactly eleven years ago today that we first appeared on The Big Breakfast. How weird is that? Eleven years ago today, it was also a Monday.
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Yesterday’s word was gangrel: I took the second meaning, wandering beggar; vagabond; vagrant.
The first meaning is a lanky, loose-jointed person. So not me, in any of those descriptions.
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