{"id":567,"date":"2007-08-07T10:45:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-07T16:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=567"},"modified":"2007-08-07T10:45:00","modified_gmt":"2007-08-07T16:45:00","slug":"fake-phone-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/08\/fake-phone-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"Fake phone friends"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcaps\">A<\/span> final personal <a href=\"http:\/\/adrianmonck.blogspot.com\/2006\/12\/strange-christmas-experiences.html\">anecdote<\/a> to re-tell in the TV fakery saga&#8230;A few years back I was the phone-a-friend for <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Michael Aspel<\/span> and <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Carol Smillie<\/span> on the Xmas \u201cCelebrity\u201d edition of <span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;\">Who Wants To Be A Millionaire<\/span>. <\/p>\n<p>Someone from the production team called me before the show. They told me to let the phone ring three times and sound surprised in case host <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Chris Tarrant<\/span> should call. So when he phoned I said \u201cBlimey&#8230;\u201d with such a lack of conviction that my wife had to hold a cushion to her face to stifle the laughter.<span id=\"fullpost\"><\/p>\n<p>So that\u2019s pretty modest on the fake scale. What was really odd was that I had never met Michael or Carol. And when I finally saw the show (repeated a year later on ITV something) I had the unnerving experience of watching them say something like &#8211; \u201cLet\u2019s ask Adrian &#8211; he\u2019ll know,\u201d before hearing my unconvincing \u201cBlimey&#8230;\u201d Still, nobody died. And under Michael Grade, I\u2019m sure any fake friends will be given the kind of grilling normally reserved for marriage partners in immigration cases.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A final personal anecdote to re-tell in the TV fakery saga&#8230;A few years back I was the phone-a-friend for Michael Aspel and Carol Smillie on the Xmas \u201cCelebrity\u201d edition of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Someone from the production team called me before the show. They told me to let the phone ring three [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[61],"class_list":["post-567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}