My 15 minutes’ of fame!

If you’re a news junkie you can’t have missed me last week.  BBC Radio London, BBC London News, Daily Telegraph and BBC Breakfast!  What a cornucopia of media attention for a Chiswick marketing consultant.

The reason for this celebrity?  The King’s Speech.  Despite the spin put on Lionel Logue’s speech therapy for George VI in the movie, The King’s Speech, it turns out that perhaps his speech impediment was not as ‘cured’ as we are led to believe.  Back in 1941 my father, then a lowly sound engineer at the BBC, was called on to edit out the fluffs and stutters in the King’s Christmas Day broadcast to the nation.  Winston Churchill heard the live broadcast but passed a message down the line to get it ‘doctored’ before being broadcast to the Empire.  Morale in Britian was low at the time and Mr Churchill was determined the King should sound a confident leader.  My dad, then aged 19, was the person to whom the task of editing out all the pauses and stimbles fell.  This little story, first published on our excellent local website, chiswickW4.com, caught the attention and imagination of the BBC, hence my few heady moments of fame.

I loved being on national TV and must just note that Charlie Stayt and Susanna Reid, the BBC Breakfast presenters last Saturday, are absolutely lovely. I had huge fun and only wish I had another story to tell.