My Fifteen Minutes of Fame

My fifteen minutes of fame has so far arrived at different intervals in my life. Nothing to get too excited about, but it was fun for me at the time:

1. I WAS ON BBC NEWS

The small village in which I used to live had terrible problems with its water supply. It was brown and undrinkable. South West Water arranged meetings with the villagers to sort out the problems, but nothing seemed to be achieved. One meeting was filmed by the BBC .

One Sunday morning, the filmed meeting was shown on the news and the film crew came to the village again to film people in the pub watching the news programme. I was there!!

So I was filmed by BBC TV, watching a news item on the tv about our village. It was shown on the lunchtime news that day.

2. I WAS ON BBC2 WORKING LUNCH

BBC2 has a daily programme called Working Lunch. When Stakeholder pensions were started about 4 years ago, Working Lunch came to our office and filmed us talking about them. We are a bunch of accountants, so they filmed my boss and all his staff and our opinions on Stakeholder pensions and whether or not we would be taking one out!

3. I WAS IN THE SUN NEWSPAPER

I got married this year in October and prior to that we had been refused by the Register Office to have Martine McCutcheon's song Perfect Moment at our civil wedding because it has the word "god" in it. I argued that it was not a religious song, but this did not matter. See separate review "rules and red tape at civil weddings!).

The Sun featured an article about how a couple's wedding was ruined because they could not have Robbie Williams Angels at their civil wedding. I sent The Sun an email telling them of our problem. The next thing I knew, a reporter was on the phone and he wanted our story and picture. So a couple of days later, we were featured on Page 18 on The Sun newspaper, with a photo of us and a story saying how we could not have the song that we wanted. I was then contacted by several local newspapers who also wanted to run the stroy.

I even turned down the chance to be on Westcountry television as I felt that the story had got a little bit out of hand, but see, I could have been on the telly again!!

So there you go. my fifteen minutes of fame. Nothing too exciting, but I have been famous, if only for a little while.............