OK I’m rather chuffed today, as one of my best friends has made her big TV presenting debut. She’s a new main newsreader on the Channel 5 news, and while she’s been there a few weeks, this is her first time doing the flagship 5.30pm programme. So if you see ‘Barbara Serra’ doing the C5 news, you’re to wave at the telly from me.
When you work in broadcasting you make friends with lots of people, but Babs (as I call her) isn’t a work friend, we actually met (gulp… 11 years ago) at University. I was in my third year at LSE and she was in her first year; but we were doing the same ‘public international law’ class.
Now if I’m honest I did sit in the room for the first couple of weeks going “wow, who is she???? Though if you’re wondering, there’s no salacious gossip (well not between us anyway, yet I couldn’t dish the dirt as she knows too much about me!) and we ended up becoming close friends.
It’s pure coincidence we both ended up as broadcasters; neither of us went that way after graduating, but in 1997 I went to Cardiff to do a broadcast journalistm postgrad and she did hers at City Uni a couple of years later.
She did once interview me for a Sky news package, but I suspect the bizarre day will soon come when I get called in and interviewed by Babs. I may just have to kick her under the desk to see who loses concentration first – luckily I’m always in there as an ‘expert’ so we’re on the same side, rather than an adversarial grilling.
Funnily enough, it’s the fact Babs is doing what she’s doing that makes me think I might now be a grown up! How scary….
