 It was third time lucky for our Speaker this month as Faith Powell had twice had to cancel her talk – but 'Behind The Scenes at TV Quiz Shows' was certainly worth the wait.
Faith has now been on 12 such shows and brought us a host of amusing anecdotes from some of them and of course what you see on the screen may not be the whole story! She started by writing to 'Going For Gold' and was initially invited for an interview in which she had to get 35 out of 50 general knowledge questions to go forward. Faith scraped in with 36 so went on to the next set of 50 when she got 37 right. After two months she was called back to do the show, all the week's shows were recorded in one day so she had to take 5 changes of clothes – the phrase 'can you come back tomorrow' doesn't really mean that, it means later today so after several 'days' she was into the final which she won . Her prize, which she brought to show us was a glass 'golden nugget'.
Her talk was full of wonderful stories of shows and presenters, she has been on 'The Weakest Link' and told how at the interviews beforehand they tried to intimidate the contestants – presumably as practise for the show itself. She got through to the show and Anne Robinson asked her to demonstrate what she used to do as a children's entertainer. Faith's response was ' I would like to but I've left my magic wand at home or I'd make you disappear! ' The interesting snippet from this show was that the host didn't interact with the contestants either before or afterwards.
Faith had also been on one of my personal favourites 'Ready Steady Cook' as a Red Tomato and had the apron to prove it. I suppose I should have known but she then told us how the contestants were given the bags of food and the chefs knew what was in them before hand – and there I thought it was all worked out on the spur of the moment.
This was a really unusual talk and was much enjoyed by the members before they went on to a delicious tea provided by Phyllis Cherriman.
On June 1st our meeting will be at the earlier time of 12.00 for 12.30 , it's our Summer Buffet and our Speaker afterwards will be Graham King 'Thinking Of You'.
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