It was all pre-recorded.
It was all pre-recorded but it was recorded as live. So we had the schedule and when you saw it, it looked as though we were telling you something that was happening at the time. So, yes, we just had lots of fun and frolics, basically. And in the early days it was really difficult because there’d be people saying ridiculous things to you. The producers with ideas that really were hard to transfer to camera. I’m trying to learn the job and the cameramen are just a bunch of naughty boys.
They’re trying to catch you out.
Yes, but at the time I didn’t think it was funny because I was just trying to do my job and it was just all a bit too much. In 2009 when Cerrie joined there was a bit of controversy from parents complaining her disability was scaring their kids. What was that like with the team at the time? Well, Cerrie was kind of removed from the general studio scenario because the BBC had to do their job of protecting her really; they were very good at that. So she wasn’t removed for her own good, she was removed from the working environment because she needed to be taken to other places to do interviews, to talk about what she felt, to give her some time to consider what approach her and the BBC wanted to take and how they wanted to respond. The volume is far greater, the spotlight becomes much greater. It’s magnified 50 times for preschool. Cerrie’s a brilliant spokesperson for people who live with that type of issue but she’s a normal girl, she has half of her left arm missing, that’s the only difference. So, yes, with Cerrie the issue we just talked about it normally, it didn’t kind of become a big deal for us. There were so many things. I mean, Alex [Alex Winters – Cbeebies presenter], for example, he had an issue due to his religious beliefs, which came up,
and someone made a comment. The letters that we get at the BBC, they’d just make you laugh, they really would, what people write about and what they say, absolutely ridiculous, almost as ridiculous as some of the names we get on birthday cards.
Yes, do you think some of those are made up to try and catch you out?
I’m sure the kids are wonderful children they’re just going to have to grow up with a rather unusual name. Tell me what this name is [takes pen and writes ‘L-A’]. I kid you not, this is genuinely a name on a birthday card that we got and it actually was read out. What does that say? La… Leah. Ledasha. That is Ledasha. And, just to make it even more comical, they had to cheek to spell out how you say… so they spelt Ledasha to tell us how you say L-A! I don’t know if it says more about them or more about us.
All of the time that I’ve been working as a presenter I’ve considered myself an out of work actor
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So how well do the presenters get on when the cameras are turned off?
Good.