The following is quoted almost directly from a chat I had not so long ago with someone who had been a guest on a well known daytime talk show. We were discussing talk shows and how they were quite dangerous experiences. The temptation is to believe that going on television will give you a chance to promote your cause. This can be far from the truth - most programmes go to air with a message already in mind, and it's rarely the one you would wish to give.
"The xxxxx show was a total farce. The show is so artificial, so made up.
They got us down under false pretences. They were going to ask about my work which takes me away with models and what my wife thinks of this. When we got down there they had changed the title to something like 'My Husband Doesn't Spend Enough Time With Me'.
Luckily we were above average intelligence and knew there was an above average chance that it might go wrong. So I took a friend down with me, and my wife took her friend down. Between the four of us and the model we took down with us we tried to work out what would happen if they said different things to us. So we role-played scenarios on the journey down so that whatever they asked us we could side step, or at least it wouldn't come as a shock. They looked after us well - they put us up in an over night hotel. We got to the studio in the morning and it immediately started to get really bad. They automatically split us. They took the girls away to one side of the building and the blokes to the other. They didn't let us speak or see each other until they went live to record.
It was nine, nine-thirty in the morning and they were trying to ply us with alchohol. What they'd do was have the researchers do a 'nice and naughty' routine - sort of good cop, bad cop. One guy would come in and say 'Thanks so much for coming and doing the show, we don't know what we would have done without you'. The other would come in and say 'Ohh - if you don't come up with something, my job's going, I'm going to be out of here by the end of the day'.
We weren't emotionally attached to this program, and we were prepared, but if we had been having real problems...
There was another guest, who was jealous of his partner and they just wound him up, he was on his own. We talked to him and had him quite calm - just by reminding him that he didn't have to say anything he didn't want to, he could just chat about it. Then the researcher came in and took him away to one side and he came back wound up again. I got hold of the script at that point and saw the title. I told the researcher that it wasn't what we had come to talk about. We told him that if he had any suprises that the five of us would just walk out - end of story. He told us at that point that they had hired five models to go with our model.
By then I had to go to the toilet and he asked my friend if I really meant it about leaving. He said that he'd never really seen me angry, but if I said I'd do it then I really would. We were talking to my wife and her friend on mobile phones and asking what they were being told. They couldn't believe what the researchers were trying to get them to say.
When we actually came on, everything was done live to camera. Everything they asked was a leading question to try and get us to say something that they could cut. We were really careful what we said and how we said it, but it was difficult.
We got away with it, but it wasn't as good as I would have liked."