Pinch me! It’s real! I can finally talk about it completely openly now that I have actually done it. Up until now I didn’t want to jinx it by talking about it too much but I can reveal officially here on the blog, that we have just finished recording a 13 part series for RTÉ, which will be shown this spring 2011. EXCITEMENT!
The show will go out around the same time as the new book and will feature lots of recipes from the book along with some from the blog and a few from Good Mood Food too. The whole emphasis will be on recipes that everyone can try, nothing to fancy and just real hearty food that hopefully will inspire people to cook. Each episode is based around different themes, food for a crowd (we ended up feeding the cast of the Tivoli theatre panto!), comfort food, sunday dinner etc, so basically real life situations.
The actual recording process was really full on, we were working from 9am to 9pm most days and were getting through about a show a day. I have done a bit of tv work before but nothing as long term as this sort of non stop recording so it did take a little getting used too, but luckily we had a great team working on the programme so there was constant jokes and some serious slagging going on! Actually being on the camera all the time and not having someone prompting and asking the questions beside me was a little bit nervewracking but I think I finally got into the swing of it.
I don’t know if you know this, I certainly didn’t, but most tv cookery shows record two passes. Which is to say that the first pass is the presenter presenting the recipe and then the second pass is to take close up shots. So essentially each recipe is recorded twice! Madness right! Ann our continuity lady is solely responsible for making sure everything is in the same position on the kitchen counter when it comes to recording the close ups. I wasn’t complaining though that means twice the food and twice the leftovers!
We still have a few episodes to record, which are going to be finished off in March and then it’ll be off to the cutting room until it’s debut on Irish TV screens in April! YIKES!
