A Tale Of Two Channels...
The differing experience of appearing on the BBC & ITV when discussing homelessness
I’m used to chauffeur driven cars coming to pick him up in the early hours of the morning. Odd for someone who is homeless to say I admit, but due to my circumstances it also means I’m invited onto the media to discuss the issues of homelessness quite a lot.
It happened when I was invited onto TalkTV at their studios in London Bridge when I was at Premier Inn Hotel in Paddington. All the staff adored the fact a chauffeur driven Mercedes came and picked me up and thought it was great that whilst homeless, I was being treated like royalty. I was their famous resident who’d been on TV. https://x.com/LondonersLondon/status/1519291881326264323
Yesterday I was picked up from a friend's house where I’m currently sofa surfing and taken on a £60 journey in an Addison Lee BMW people carrier to the Good Morning Britain studios on Wood Lane. This wasn’t the first time I’d been there. A couple of weeks earlier, I’d arrived to discuss the Squatting issue surrounding Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant near Regents Park being occupied. Having made it to the Green Room with minutes before we were due on, David Cameron talking about Iran bombing Israel and the possibility of a Third World War bumped us off air, it’s a common problem of being on a live news show.
This time however, no such problems, albeit a close call with Sarah Palin talking about Donald Trump but I managed to share the screen with guest presenters (Judge) Rob Rinder and Ravi Singh to debate with the founder of Pride Birmingham, Philip the issue of Taylor Swift and her fans being ripped off for hotel room whilst those experiencing homelessness were not even offered the rooms they had once filled and kept the industry going through lockdown. This was probably going to be the easiest debate of my life and conceivably the hardest for Phil.
You see, the guest who was coming on to defend the indefensible i.e. a supporter of sheer and utter corporate greed (I presume a corporate hotelier) had bottled it and Phil was rushed in as his last minute replacement. Phil is nice and was clearly floundering to defend the position, nonetheless he did a great job under impossible circumstances.
This was GMB at 08:45, the highest watched part of the programme and the debate is the most engaged with segment, so I was expecting to have a bigger response than I did when I did the BBC
So far, I’ve only found two people who actually saw it live and they were the elderly parents of a friend.
The BBC piece by Anna O’Neil was an all together different experience last year.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-66019707
Admittedly this was covered on television on three separate bulletins, morning, noon and night, on radio and on the blog, but it was my TV appearance in the morning that everyone saw.
I was chased after by the owner of the Jamaican Patty company in Covent Garden who said how great I was and offered me some free food. People in a cafe over in Bethnal Green whispered and pointed before plucking up the courage to ask “Were you on the television today?” and even staff at my beloved Genesis Cinema had spotted me.
So why not with ITV I wonder? The reach was just as big. Maybe it was because it wasn’t about me per se, but rather the subject of homelessness, that meant the impact with the audience wasn’t as great, but I still expected people to recognise me?
That said, as I was leaving the studio Rinder was desperate for me to follow him on his social media channels so he could connect to assist. So hopefully in this instance it will be the presenter rather than the public that will make all the difference… we’ll have to wait and see.
As if experiencing some Alanis Morissette irony, I discovered whilst looking for the links to put in this Substack, that my Court Case against my former and then very dear friend Nichola Hartwell who was sentenced to four years in prison (suspended) last week, was covered in The Daily Mail two days ago - how strange nobody I know noticed that either.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13471069/Social-justice-entrepreneur-stole-lodgers-23-000-inheritance-left-mother.html