When I was on Trisha, and instead of being about committment, it was about Porn...

Being asked to be on Trisha was one of the most exciting things ever to happen to me near the bus station in town. I flatter myself that I was so stunning that they couldn't let me walk past without securing my TV debut, but the truth was that at the time I was with my housemate and he had a shaved head with a tiny blue tuft of hair at the front, which they clearly thought would look 'edgy and exciting' on television. And I was there as well, so they let me come along. Either way, we were told to meet at the very same bus station at some ridiculous time in the morning to be bussed to Norwich to be on Trisha (this was in the old days before she started using her surname and getting dropped from TV schedules left, right and centre). Apart from a mustard factory there isn't a huge amount to do in Norwich from what we could see, but it didn't matter because we were going to the TV studio to be in the audience on Trisha. When we got there we were shown into a room with some other people and a very serious-looking studio person came in. We had been told that the programme they were due to record today was about people with serious commitment problems, but she came in to break the news that the commitment problems were obviously a lot more serious than even the highly qualified mental health professionals on Trisha had realised as nobody from that show had turned up. Instead, she was sorry to tell us, the show would be about porn! Rarely has a formal announcement been so amusing, and Big Gay Housemate and I were chuffed to be involved. We wandered in to the studio to be greeted with a stripper, a woman who was still making porn at 8 months pregnant and a hooker who was paying her way through university. It was quite interesting in fact - I couldn't decide whether we were lucky to have a better quality of guests and/or audience than normal, or whether selective editing really can make anyone look like a complete spanner, but there wasn't really much of the shrieking 'You don't know me, you can't say anything' that was a feature of the show every other time I saw it. The only real problem was that there wasn't really much to say to these people - the stripper had all the stereotypical women all hot under the collar, and seemed like a genuinely friendly and pleasant guy, the woman who was pregnant was saving to take a break when her baby was born, and the hooker was so well spoken and matter-of-fact about her position that it was pretty hard to get riled. The pregnant woman came in for most of the stick, but I suspect that secretly most people were thinking (much like myself) that they had never realised there was a market for pregnant lady porn, and contemplating the high model turn-over there must be in such an industry. We were asked to make sure we always had our hands in the air to look like we were bursting with questions, which was fine until a slightly flushed looking Trisha came over to me and I asked the hooker an ill-thought-out question about having a career to 'fall back on' which I would have still said had I realised the pun, but would have been better prepared for the sniggers. The worst part about the whole experience was that they didn't tell us when the episode was going to be aired, and as a non-fanatic watcher of the show, the chances of me seeing it were minimal. However, this was while I was still working at the pub, so whilst I was prepared for a few people to ask me about it, I was distinctly not ready for the crazy lady who came in a few months after it was originally aired, pointed her finger at me like something out of 'Tales from the Crypt' and said 'It was you - you were at my house at 3 o'clock this morning. It really freaked me out - I thought I was still at the pub'. That was when I found out that the episode had been repeated in the grave-yard slot as well, and I spent an entertaing couple of hours trying to convince her that there was no reason to be worried, that I was actually on her TV and not in her head, and that although it seemed unlikely that I was in the audience on Trisha as opposed to another hallucination, on this occasion she could rely on her recollection of events without considering upping her dosage.