Emmy wrote:Aled, was the upcoming seemingly spontaneously planned trip to Essex really as spontaneous an idea as we are lead to believe? I don't really think there's much point in me asking this question (but I have done anyway), as I highly doubt you'd answer 'no' to it, for understandable reasons. I'm sure it'll make for entertaining radio either way.
I have my own opinion on it, which I doubt will change according to any answer you give tbh, much like I had, and still have, my own opinion on the amazing coincidence of Sara going down so well whilst filling in on the show recently and now being given a week's holiday fill in for the first time ever I'm not complaining about that either though, that's something I'm really looking forward to!
Hi Emmy
We DON'T do fake. We didn't before everyone else made it their policy and we'd be very stupid to start now! We'd start talking about things a few days before we did an event (otherwise having all our projects discussed weeks or months ahead would become very boring - and confusing for our listeners) but they would begin with 'we've decided to go to...' as you'll hear on Friday re the thing we're announcing then.
Essex was first mentioned at 9:25am (off the top of my head) on Monday morning on air, the requests went out to our management, to the BBC in Essex, to Michael McIntyre who's our guest on Friday, to the Live dept to request hotel and transport and to the Operations dept to request an engineer and the equipment we'll need.
We'd had a tentative thumbs up Monday afternoon from everyone except Piers (who was off that day) - hence why we weren't too sure yesterday on air. We've now had the green light so today on the show we're going to talk about where in Essex we should go.
Love it
Vernon was our only fill in with the team until he had to film 'Family Fortunes' for two days while Chris was off. Chris has requested time off that needs to be next week, Scott also applied for leave which needed to be next week. Vernon is unavailable to do it so following from the enthusiasm that surrounded Sara's shows with the team they asked her.
No conspiracy. If she'd said no, then someone else may have had breakfast or Radio 1 management would have said no to either Scott or Chris.