Shadenfreude

Wow!  You know how Four in a Bed - the programme where lots of B&Bers get together and make each other cry - is my favourite, after Downton? 

Well I've just received a very polite email inviting me to be on it!!  I am absolutely chuffed to bits that they've found and targetted Wydemeet, out of all the millions and millions of B&Bs that are out there, especially since we're not on any official lists except for TripAdvisor.

I have often daydreamed about what being on Four in a Bed might be like, as I embark on my fourth pre-recorded episode of an evening, once my guests are all cosily tucked up in bed upstairs.  And now the offer has come direct!

As a professional PR, my advice to me would be that going anywhere near it would be complete madness.  The only reason ever to get involved with the media is if you think they might be able to help you in some way, eg marketing something for you that you want to sell.

Well call me complacent - but judging by last year I will already have sufficient demand for B&B this summer, without putting myself forward for more.  So why would I proactively wish for the ritual humiliation endured by every B&Ber who goes on that programme, purely for the entertainment of the great unwashed, as they get a buzz out of my distress? Schadenfreude, my clever 15 year old Revered Son called it, as he bent over his congealed baked beans at lunchtime earlier today.

Because I'm a show-off, and it's a long time since I was last on telly, are the reasons.  Also I would be very interested in watching the process of making the TV programme, and finally, hopefully, there might be some money in it.

So I've emailed them back, questioning their assertion that Four in a Bed 'Celebrates the Great British Bed & Breakfast and its owners' and giving them all of the above with both barrels, and we'll see what happens.  I think the idea of lots of fat suburbanites falling off stepping stones into the river, and off tussocks into bogs, will be too tempting for them to resist, but I may be being far too arrogant and simply wrong.

I will probably live to regret this, but at the moment Beloved Daughter and I think it will be a great wheeze, and hopefully hardly anyone we know watches  the programme anyway.