TV Show Tapings

There are a lot of TV show tapings taking place in London and it's quite easy and free to attend one. Sometimes you have to be lucky, because they always send out more tickets than they actually have. But in that case (and it happened to me once), you get priority tickets for the next two shows you apply for (okay, I think that was by accident and you usually get only one).
Thanks to that, though, I was sitting a few metres away from Cameron Diaz on The Graham Norton Show and also from British comedian Micky Flanagan on The Marriage Ref. As a result of that, I thought I knew Micky very well, when I bumped into him in Covent Garden. I was sitting in a cafe, he passed by, we smiled at each other, greeted each other, and then both of us went our ways. When I was at home, it dawned on me, though, that I don't really know him and that he doesn't know me at all. We just had a parasocial interaction.

A TV show taping is always fun. I particularly like the warm-up guys. It's usually a comedian who brings the audience into the right mood before the show starts and practises the clapping and woohooing and aaaahhhing with them. At the taping I attended yesterday, we had quite a lot of breaks since they were filming three episodes. So the warm-up guy, called Stew, did some quizzes with us. One was: "Name the 11 body parts with 3 letters" and go! How many can you think of?

If you are interested in attending a TV show taping in London as well, check out these websites:
http://www.sroaudiences.com/
http://www.applausestore.com/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/showsandtours/tickets/

And maybe you'll sit here soon:

Marmite

Yesterday morning, I had breakfast with a friend and ordered toast and jam. The waitress, however, said they don't have any jam anymore, only Marmite. "Marmite? Nooo, gross! I can't eat that!" was my maybe a bit OTT reaction. But at least she brought me some jam from some hidden corner in the end.

She is probably used to such reactions, though, because no other foodstuff has ever provoked quite as much heated discussion as Marmite. Love it or hate it, no one is actually allowed to have an apathetic reaction to the savoury spread in this country. By the 1990s Marmite's distinctive and powerful flavour had earned it as many haters as it had fans, and it was commonly notorious for producing a polarised "love/hate" reaction amongst consumers.

Modern advertisements play on this, and Marmite even runs a dual skinned website with two URLs: www.ilovemarmite.com and www.ihatemarmite.com where people may share their experiences of Marmite and are actively encouraged to fuel this debate.

Even celebs join in. Apparently, Madonna's worst nightmare is eating a Marmite sandwich and Chelsea striker Nicolas Anelka has a fear of Marmite, even though he has never dared to actually try it.
However, Britney Spears is a surprise fan of Marmite after trying it on a UK tour and both The Rolling Stones and Dido ask for Marmite when they are on tour.

All this resulted in the coining of the phrase "Marmite effect" or "Marmite reaction" for anything which provokes such strong and polarised feelings. The most recent example was Margaret Thatcher. Whenever I asked British friends or colleagues about the extreme reactions in regards to her death, they told me: "She was political Marmite":