"Sopranos, can you take a quaver out of your bitch in 300?"

When I arrived at the TV studio in Little Hulton (yes, really) this afternoon, I was ushered in through a different door to last night, and this led me through an empty studio that had Narnia in the corner. I was very impressed. You can't really tell from the photo, but all the Christmas trees (and there were a LOT) had snow on them. Very pretty. I couldn't quite work out why anyone was doing Narnia for TV when there's just been a successful film made of it, so I asked, and was told it was actually just for an Argos advert. How disappointing!

We finished the recording today, and there was a bonus - turns out TPTB were so impressed with us yesterday that they want us in another of the operas, so we sight-read (and then recorded) two bits for The Apprentice. One was called "Veni Vidi Gucci" and the other included the line "speccy four-eyed slag, rancid skanky bitch was her nickname at school". Hence the title of this post :-) This section had the altos singing the tune and the sops doing a descant - but the tune started on a top G and went back up there several times. And that's not as bad as the end of Question Time, which had us going up to a top Bb. Ouch. (I apologise to Sheena and the other people who had the misfortune to be sitting in front of me when I tried to do this!)

(The picture below is my view of the conductor. (Did I mention how lovely he is? In particular, he has an amazing smile. I very much enjoyed staring at him!) That's Sheena on the right. (And Tessa and Fanny in front of her.) I don't know the name of the lady on her left, but she shared my delight at today's most significant football result. Go Rooney! (My football results service was very popular today, although not everyone wanted to know how great United were - I was asked about Everton, Liverpool and even Chester.)



Another Jeremyism that amused me was: "A note from Richard, cos I think he's had too many KitKats - more Cookie fanaticism!" (Cookie Bear is a major character in the opera. It was supposed to be Nookie Bear, but apparently Roger deCoursey's people wouldn't allow this!)

I should stop writing, because I need to be at the studio for 7 a.m. and I still have a ton of work to do tonight. (Can you tell I'm procrastinating?) But one final thing: there was quite a bit of enthusiastic discussion, during the tea break today, about Green Wing (also about the Archers, but I don't listen to that so I wasn't interested!) So I thought it was worth pointing people towards James Henry's blog. James is one of the writers of Green Wing, and his blog is one of the best there is. It's been at the top of the list in my sidebar for quite a while, but it's possible that people don't realise who writes it. (Also, he's commented here a couple of times, so clearly he is a man with excellent taste!) There have been several occasions when a post of his has had me literally crying with laughter. A few selections to see if you share my sense of humour: James Henry on fruit, swimming, ninja attack scenes in non-ninja films, restaurant menus, and hotel laundry. Enjoy :-)