Fame at last ... ?

After all the non-excitement of yesterday (which was actually exactly as much as I needed), today got off to a flying start.

For a long time now, I’ve been desperately (and totally shamelessly) trying to grab myself a slot on a reality TV show. How hard can it be? I hear you ask. Actually – well for me, anyway – it’s pretty darn impossible. I was deemed ‘too happy, confident and unshakeable’ for ‘Faking It’ (which is, I guess, a kind of backhanded compliment) and I failed last year’s ‘Big Brother’ recall because I’m a journalist (why oh why did I choose that very moment to admit what I do for a living? Usually I tell people that my main job is ‘just getting by’). Even the ‘How Clean Is Your House?’ researchers declared my home to be ‘too clean’ to require help from Kim’n’Aggie (ditto previous backhander, I guess), Gok Kwan has yet to get back to me regarding ‘How To Look Good Naked’ and when I finally managed to get hold of tickets for a live recording of ‘Deal or No Deal’, nobody I knew was willing to accompany me, so I decided that going on my own was just … well, sad. But just as I started to accept the fact that being the star of my own reality show would have to suffice, I got The Call (or rather, the email) I’ve been waiting for. And guess what? It’s all thanks to this very blog!

A London-based production company are making a mainstream (get that? Mainstream: that means neither Channel 5 nor extra-terrestrial!) TV documentary about ‘the blogging phenomenon’. Now I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I would have thought that (a) the genre speaks for itself, (b) blogging is hardly a recent phenomenon, and (c) bloggers won’t necessarily make good TV. But the powers that be at the production company in question (who I’m not allowed to name – read on) disagree - and so, apparently, do the major mainstream (mainstream!) channel that they’ve flogged their idea (and, by association, me) to.

I’ve spoken to the researcher who sent the email in person on the telephone this morning - thus proving that no, this isn’t a hoax – and this is how we are to proceed: having set up links to the online waffle of five other UK-based bloggers (yet to be confirmed), the Animal Disco will ‘diarise’ on a regular basis and eventually be filmed doing so ‘to record the writing process’. Then we’re all going to be set up in a studio where we’ll be interviewed about our blogging whys and wherefores: the pitfalls (if any), our ‘Greatest Hits’, our ambitions, our motivations, any funny/sad/strange stories that have come about as a result of publicising our lives to a worldwide audience, etc (yup, it’s a bit like that recent Venue feature, but on tele).

Now it has to be said that, excited though the phone call was making me, I pointed out to (woman who’s name I cannot mention here) that I don’t get a huge amount of traffic visiting my site and, of my regulars, less than 2% on average (thank you Ben’s Dad, my friendly statistician) leave public comments. “That’ll all change soon,” she said, enigmatically. “The Animal Disco will soon have the benefits of a full publicity campaign behind it, which we’ll discuss in full next week”. She then went on to smear the icing on a cake that I can’t quite yet decide is tasty or not: “One of the bloggers who signed the contract with us last week has already been offered a publishing deal”.

Following that bombshell, I breathlessly whimpered down the phone as WWNICMH told me that I’m going to be sent a contract which (a) prevents me from posting details of the production company making the documentary, (b) the TV channel who’ll be screening it and (c) who the other bloggers are. Show me that dotted line! I’ll very happily walk it. I think. First of all, I have to decide if this particular gift horse is offering me a beautifully-wrapped parcel labeled ‘be careful what you wish for’. Watch this space …