CATHOLIC LIVES

On Friday the excellent international Catholic TV network EWTN took over a room at Brompton Oratory and turned it in to a TV studio, where we worked all day on CATHOLIC LIVES, a new series. I interviewed a selection of people representing different strands of life in Catholic London: Charles Cole, who runs the superb Schola Cantorum at the Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School and also the Junior Choir at Brompton Oratory, Sister Chiara of Holy Ghost parish in Balham who used to run a riding school (her description of instructing Princess Anne and a horse bolting halfway through a lesson was a highlight of that interview), novelist Piers Paul Read, and Fr Timothy Finigan of Hermeneutic of Continuity fame. It was great fun but I was glad I had done plenty of preparation work, briefed everyone thoroughly, worked carefully on questions and on the theme and "feel" of each interview, etc, as holding together a good TV interview of reasonable length (each was half an hour long, in two 15-minute segments) and ensuring that it has real shape and purpose, is worth getting right and not as easy as it sounds...afterwards Fr Tim and I had tea at the Victoria and Albert Museum and you can read all about that on his blog. We talked and laughed about lots of things but a good bit of the time was spent talking about getting the technical side of my blog right, and I took lots of notes. Which was scary because he's now going to notice to if I have managed to get some things done, starting with the headlines, and I haven't, I haven't. I can't make some of the things work, and I'm worried about simply clicking on to various things in case the whole thing goes wrong and I lose my entire Blog, or something.