My Interview Adventure - Embarrassed to Acceptance

This post will just be about the actual interview portion of my CTV News at Noon adventure. Later I'll post about the whole experience.

Being on TV is a little nerve wracking. My interview time came and I went up onto the stage and sat in the chair. Jeff was gone today so Jennifer Jellicoe was filling in for him. She put the mike on me and then we sat there and chatted briefly while we waited for the commercials to be over. She told me we had 3.5 minutes so we'd have lots of time to talk. Suddenly the camera guy gave us the finger countdown and our interview was happening...LIVE on TV!

As Jennifer started talking I glanced towards the camera and could see myself sitting there in the chair, but then I devoted my attention to the interview. I had spent a lot of time figuring out what to say and trying to remember all the different aspects of our run, but somehow that all seemed to disappear out of my head when the interview started. "Oh great," I thought, "it's just me and my memory now" and trust me, if you ask any of my friends including my wife they will tell you that my memory is not that good. Needless to say I forgot all the main points I wanted to get across.

Jennifer started off by mentioning that our run suited perfectly right now with the Olympics. That threw me off right away because I thought she would just start off asking me to talk about the event and I had a little speal ready, but suddenly I was talking about the Olympics, etc. You can tell I was nervous because I stuttered a bunch in the beginning and it took me a few seconds to get talking in an actual sentence. I felt as the interview went along that I was repeating a lot of the same things and was sounding really stupid. I hope it didn't sound that way.

There was one answer I wish I could take back. Jennifer asked me just before we went live if it was ok to ask why people should attend our run instead of the many others in Saskatoon. I told her to ask away and I figured I had an answer all ready...and I did. The answer is that our run is to help Canadian athletes, it's a national running event held in 10 different communties across Canada so the runners are part of a really large event, each participant receives a free technical running shirt and a finishers medal that has the Olympic rings on it. My big line was I was going to say, "It's probably as close to winning an Olympic medal that a lot of us will ever get! (cue laugh track now). However, instead of saying that I rambled on about how the other runs in Saskatoon have supported us in our run and how our run is great because there is something for the whole family since we have the 10K run, the 3K family walk and the 1K kids run. And if you don't want to run you can always volunteer. It probably didn't really sound that bad to the average person, but to someone who really knows the event (like my bosses in Toronto) it is obvious that I missed many key elements.

Suddenly Jennifer started talking and I could tell she was doing her wrap up speech. I was panicking on the inside because I realized that I hadn't mentioned a lot of stuff. So just as she is ending I blurt out that we also have prizes like $1000 for the top finisher and also prizes for each category (I forgot to say "age category".

As I drove back home afterward I felt like an idiot. I was wishing I hadn't told anyone else I was on TV because I had just made a fool of myself. However, after watching it again at home (yes, I taped it) I didn't feel I sounded too stupid.

So, did anyone out there see me? How do you think I did? (It's ok, you won't hurt my feelings!)