(Published elsewhere originally as Blogger didn’t want to work for me for a couple of days – all sorted now though!)

Last night I had my 15 minutes (or to be more accurate ‘my 0.15 seconds’) of fame. If you watch ‘The Apprentice You’re Fired!’ tonight you might just catch a glimpse of me in the opening shots of the audience.

I am a huge fan of The Apprentice, one minute I’m shouting abuse at the television, the next I’m laughing out loud… and it’s a completely guilt free experience as I can write it off against career development. I have also have had my moments of wanting to apply to be on it (which is partially prompted by a number of friends telling me I should apply for it), however so far the applications have never quite come into fruition.

So a couple of weeks ago when my friend E informed a few people via email that she had two tickets, and might anyone be interested in going to watch The Apprentice a day early and see ‘You’re Fired!’ being filmed, I immediately shot an email back (without even checking my diary) saying ‘Yes, definitely yes!’

This is not my first television experience – if you watch Trinny & Susannah’s last series of ‘What Not To Wear’, for a split second I appear in the beginning of the episode in the middle of a crowd (along with my friend T who came along for moral support, thankfully when it was on we had replay TV and so could fast forward, pause and rewind to our hearts content until we could pinpoint ourselves!). I also went along to the recording of ‘The Album Chart Show’ as a friend’s brother had spare VIP tickets, unfortunately in some sorry mix up we ended up with the non-VIP people (i.e. paying for our drinks) and it is unlikely I was ever in shot, as we spent most of our time hanging around to the side of the camera where there was actually some breathing space (I have never got into standing in the middle of crowds at gigs, I’m too short, I get lost easily).

The ‘What Not To Wear’ (WNTW) experience wasn’t too bad (The sandwiches and biscuits took the edge off). The day consisted of doing more rounds of auditions, and filming the opening five minutes of the episode. The latter in all probably took somewhere in the region of three hours and involved lots of standing outside on a cold morning sometime in the winter month pretending to look warm, smiley and happy (which didn’t seem as much of an ordeal when we saw the poor bunch of middle aged women in swimwear doing the same thing for another episode, at least we were all fully clothed). The day also involved lots of waving videotapes at Trinny and Susannah. I even managed to get myself interviewed by Trinny, who told me that although I did dress like a student my style wasn’t completely awful – which meant a) I didn’t make it to the shortlist of people on the show and b) my interview with Trinny didn’t even make it into the first five minutes of the episode.

So despite the fact that this week I have been run off my feet at work (more of that another time), I am surviving on a minimum of sleep (a consequence of the work situation) and my previous experiences of television filming haven’t been so great, I still kept my plans to go watch ‘The Apprentice’. Based on WNTW ratio of filming time to edited screen time (approx 36:1 – I know I am indeed a geek!), working on the same ratio it looked like E and I could be holed up in the studio for 15 hours or more.

Thankfully all I can assume is that due to the biggest audience participation moment being to hold up the ‘HIRED’ or ‘FIRED’ cards at the end, the filming was not nearly so drawn out. In the space of three hours we had been ushered in, watched this weeks episode of ‘The Apprentice’, witnessed and participated in (lots of clapping and laughing, and the odd “Boooo”) the filming of ‘You’re Fired’ and safely returned to the streets of Hammersmith to commence the journey home. All in all it wasn’t painful or boring in the slightest, in fact it was a very entertaining experience (although E thought the chairs could have been more comfortable).

Obviously I am not going to reveal anything to do with the episode (because it would just ruin the show… oh and the BBC would kill me!) so watch it tonight (or if you’re reading this after the 25th April 2007 go to the BBC website for the episode guide!) and if you do happen to be a close personal friend, then check out ‘The Apprentice You’re Fired!’ on BBC2 tonight at 10pm and see if you can spot me!