TV Stars

I have to admit that I'm jolly glad to be back home again despite a very relaxing break in Annecy.  I had forgotten just how beautiful it is – well it is 40 years since I was there whilst working as an “Assistante Anglaise”!

We had a bit of a mixed bag of weather whilst we were away – warm sunshine some days and torrential rain and thunder and lightning on others. Still what we most needed was a rest without worrying about what was happening at home.  We certainly got that as far as our alpacas are concerned, since we had Paul and Rachel farm sitting for us once again.

 

 However, we were a bit concerned about what our TV appearance would be like.  For those of you unaware of this, we featured on Ronnie’s Animal Crackers on Friday 18^th October on BBC1.  I suspect that most people would have been concerned if they had been in our shoes, given the somewhat wacky preceding episodes, which is why we didn’t let many people know about it in advance. We had thought that we would have been able to watch it on i-player but apparently you can’t do that abroad!  Anyway we started to relax when we got numerous messages saying that it was good – but you never know if people are just trying to be kind!  There were quite a few inaccuracies but despite all of that we were fairly pleased with it.  Where dear old Ronnie got the idea that we were former townies, I have absolutely no idea!

Filming was quite fun in some ways but pretty stressful at the Northumberland Show, since I was the Chief Steward and really had enough on my plate without being wired for sound all day and constantly being interviewed.  I’m really not at all keen on having my photo taken at the best of times, never mind being filmed for about ten hours in total.

We did have a bit of fun whilst the film crew were here as Paul Vaclik was filming them, filming us.  Though as you can so clearly see, not only was Gallica's halter training going pretty badly but all of our alpacas were looking particularly scruffy - bear in mind that this was only 5 days before the Northumberland Show.  Fortunately, both the weather and the alpacas' appearance and behaviour improved greatly before show day.

Would we do it again - absolutely yes!!