Fame at Last!

As you know, our girls get to go to holiday club and after school club run by a charity and although we pay for them to go , places are heavily subsidised to maintain the right staff ratios. It works brilliantly and provides a lifeline to a lot of families, sometimes it's the only form of respite they get.

The charity got a large donation form BBC Children in Need and to cut a long story short we got asked to do one of those "Why we still need your money" slots they show on the fund raising nights. By the way, Children in Need is 20th November this year.

Yesterday, after a multitude of questions over several long phone conversations with the researcher we spent from 9.30 to 5.30 filming with the BBC. What a day!

First they filmed us arriving at the holiday club venue with the girls. Scrumpy was good and walked in with Hot Hubby but Bear decided to go all camera shy and locked her arms around my neck saying "Hug you! Hug you!" so I had to walk her backwards to wards the door. Once in she took a moment to get her bearings and then she was off. Phase one (for us) complete, they continued to film the girls doing activities while we dashed home to have a meeting with the speech therapist and some of our support staff.

Just as we finished with the therapist, the film crew arrived and we barely had time to wee before they had us interviewing outside the house. We were really nervous but the crew were really good at putting us more at our ease and encouraging us to stick with it. Not sure what the neighbours thought but I did see one lot "happen to walk past" - we're going to kid them on it's for a reality TV show.

From the outside slot we moved in to the house and I had to do a little talk about each of the rooms we have specifically for the girls - wet room, Bear's chill out room, that kind of thing, followed by the "Oh yes, and here we have one of our many keypad locks....."

We then had to do sit down interview and got asked all sorts of questions about what autism means (hope I did it justice, I managed to get in that what it means to us is different to what it means to other families but I laid in bed last night and thought of so much more I wanted to say!) and what the funding from Children in Need means to us and the charity.

We just about had time to stuff back some lunch before collecting the girls and heading home to be met by the crew who filmed for another two hours - you know that chaotic time between coming home from school and tea? That's what they got.

All in all, it was an exciting, exhausting experience. Considering the finished article will only be a 4 minute slot there'll be an awful lot of us on the cutting room floor. I certainly wasn't prepared for it to be as full-on as it was and I'm not sure I'd want to do it again - for one thing Bear would DEFINITELY get the hairy sound thing, it just escaped this time....but next time.....

We will get a DVD of the final film after they show it on 20th November, BBC Scotland. I will post a linky thing if possible.