I was on the telly today!

It all started a week or so back, when I read my regular e-mail up date from the BBC Working Lunch programme and saw this:

WORKING LUNCH NEEDS YOU!
Some of you have told us about incidents of falling slightly into overdraft and then being hit by disproportionate penalties from your bank. If you’re in the same boat we want to hear from you.

I had exactly that experience a few weeks back and so I dropped them a quick e-mail, never expecting to hear anything more. Then this morning, I got a call from one of the producers – they wanted to interview me and asked if I could come in to a local studio for a live link up!

After a couple of quick calls to clear it with my bosses (nothing about IT, no links to my employer, only an hour out of my day – call it my lunch break), I was off to the BBC’s Northampton studios. Everything seemed to go okay although I was thinking that I probably sounded like a right bumbling fool because the link from Northampton to London went via Cambridge and Norwich making my voice echo in my earpiece (which is really distracting). Then when I got home I saw this on the Working Lunch website [my underlining]:

“One viewer’s unfair bank charges” – that’s little Me! I thought they’d have loads of stories and I’d be the good news one because First Direct did at least drop the extortionate £105 they charged us for a minor error on our part. Imagine my surprise when I was featured in the very first piece on today’s show!).

None of this is anything to do with technology – but it did make me happy! The next bit is the techie thing (and hence the reason for blogging it here)…

Of course, I recorded the programme but only on VHS cassette which is not fantastic quality so I decided to find out how to get the online version down to my PC (the show is available on the web for 24 hours after broadcast, but only as a Real Media stream). Thanks to the advice on Swen’s Blog, I have a copy of my two minutes of fame to keep for all time (although I still need to convert the .RM file to something which doesn’t need a bug-ridden piece of spyware to read it).