Trapped in Thailand after the nightmare of a cancelled flight and, having spent most of the night in the airport with no sleep, now holed up in my hotel, I decided to honour my commitment to doing a NZ TV gig at lunch. I set up the zoom link they gave me, lifted my suitcase up on the table to get the right height and moved my equipment to the window to get light. Then I put makeup on, did my hair and clocked in early. They couldn’t hear me (their fault, not mine), so I am madly checking the equipment. Then the screen and sound just went blank. Was it me? Was it them? Next thing I knew, I heard they were interviewing someone else. I text the producer, “Am I doing this?” He gets back that yes, I am next. Then there was another huge silence (advertisements) before, 10 mins after I am supposed to be on, I am suddenly live. ‘Bang’, you are on. Be funny! Be informative! Capture listeners! And do it now! No one cares if you are tired. No one cares about your silly circumstances because here are the rules I have experienced with the media. - It can be cruel
- Of course, you have to know your material, but you also need a system under stress for your responses. And, of course,
- You are only as good as your last performance
Like Collingwood at the moment (did I bring that up again?), sometimes you lose form, but you can get it back. In the end, you never know personally whether it worked. On this occasion, I did tons of improvisation, but it felt OK, and I was relieved to get an immediate message from the producer saying: | 
