The Fashion Show - TV Taping

SuBoo scored some free tickets to be a part of the studio audience during the taping of 'The Fashion Show'. I was one of her esteemed guests. (Fanks SuBoo!) None of us had seen the show prior and didn't know what to expect.

We found out that we had missed the taping with Peaches Geldof. Damn. Not that I'm a fan. But our celebrity guest was someone I'd never heard of. Which is a bit hard to come by given the amount of TV I watch and rubbishy free newspapers I read.

We were taught how/when to cheer. Yay, that's always a bit of fun. Then we were told the taping could last 3-4 hours. Hmmm, not good. There were no seats! We'd have to stand for those hours! Given that I wasn't wearing extreme high heels, it wasn't going to affect me much, but there was an audible groan in the crowd. We were cautioned about fainting too. Err.. yay?

A few things I observed during the taping:

• Average age of the crowd was probably 18
• Female: Male ratio was about 100:1
• Is it me, or is there a slight chavvy feel?

There were three hosts for the show - one male, two female. It did seem a little unnecessary given that each episode only ran for 30 minutes. I later found out that the male presenter was George Lamb and the other two women were models, Michelle De Swarte and Abigail Clancy.

It was evident during the taping that Georgie-boy was the 'brains' of the three. He sounded like he could give decent banter and of course he was the one conducting the interview with the celebrity guest. I kept thinking 'Why is this guy doing such trite?' but hey, it must pay his bills, so I guess he can't complain.

Michelle seemed ok enough, but it was Abigail who was much less impressive. I mean, this girl just couldn't read an autocue for shit and reinforced the bimbo model stereotype. She fluffed every line after which it would be punctuated with an expletive. 'Oh, f&*king hell' was her favourite.

This was pretty funny the first time, less so the second and third time, frustrating on the forth and fifth times and then just plain worrisome for the remainder of the time. It was like she needed remedial reading classes. Anyway, she was annoying enough and put me off watching future episodes of the show.

We then got to see an 'exclusive' performance of boy band Avenue and their new single 'Last Goodbye'. Avenue? Who? Oh, right... a band discovered on X-Factor. They had decent enough voices. One looked disturbingly like Brian Harvey's younger brother and another looked like Seth from The OC. If you managed to catch the episode on TV, this is where groupies SuBoo and CL made their TV debut - for a full three seconds!

A few people had trickled out during the filming but we stayed until the end. They're having Sophie Ellis Bextor on next week. I felt a little jibbed with our celebrity guest but otherwise it was pretty cool to watch a tv show taping.