Eggs Marks The Spot

Friday 29th May, Central London

Lights, Camera, Action !

Rather unbelievably I am here to audition for the BBC2 quiz show "Eggheads".

I can safely say that I have no ambitions to be famous for 15 minutes, or indeed any number of minutes. I did not apply to be on the show. In fact I don't want to be on it at all, so why am I here ?

I had reluctantly agreed to be a 2nd-sub for a team that was put together by members of the Gutshot forum. It seemed a distant prospect that I would actually need to take part.

For a start, it wasn't certain that a new series of the show would be commissioned. Then, our team might not be selected even to audition. If the team were called up, then at least I would be a reserve reserve.

Well .... of course the 11th series was given the go-ahead, and "Team Gutshot" was selected to audition. It then turned out that I was first reserve (6th of 5, rather than 6th of 4) and that the team captain had (unbeknownst to me) promoted me to the front bench on account of one member being noticeably unreliable.

To be fair, this was still an audition. I can still hope that we do not get to appear on the real show!

The nuts and bolts of the reality of TV is pretty mundane. We had to fill our names & other details for the umpteenth time, and then we actually answered some general knowledge questions. Next, a practice quiz against another auditioning team.

I actually won my round on science which included the poser: "What tiny ocean creature makes up the main diet of Wales ?". Once I realised that Lauren was talking about "whales" I was able to find the right answer.

Finally, we were filmed talking about the team and chorusing "Hello, We're Team Gutshot And We're From London".

It was all pretty low key. The "Green Room" was more of a "Green Kitchen" really. Actually it was a kitchen and it wasn't green although the chairs were a pale lime colour. The coffee machine didn't work. We stars shouldn't be treated like this !

After our turn on camera we were not given the results of our written general knowledge quiz, we weren't shown the footage which was for the eyes of the producers only, and we were told "we'll call you". The "don't call us" was of course understood.