Being a star for the day!

It all started a few weeks a go… last November 2008 I helped set up a Varsity Kickboxing Fight Night (I’ll give more details in a later post) to raise money for the charity Help for Heroes - Loughborough University vs University of Bath. It was a great success and a few weeks a go I received a phone call asking me to be in a television advert for the charity (in conjunction with The Sun newspaper). They said they would pay for everything (food, transport and accommodation etc). I just couldn’t say no!

So last Friday I caught the train down to London with five other Bath Uni students (the event organisers). When we finally arrived, we had a guy waiting for us with a sign with our names on and a tinted window van. Talk about feeling like superstars! We arrived at an extremely nice hotel and were greeted by one of the coordinators. He basically told us to help ourselves to room service and that there would be a short get-together meeting that evening. Anyway, being students we quickly found the nearest corner shop and started playing drinking games in the hotel room (along with room service). One of the guys went down to the meeting, but came back up a few minutes later saying it was pants. We continued to consume our beverages and then had a night out in Ealing Broadway (quite a rough area – we even had to go through a metal detector to get into the club!).

Bright and early Saturday morning (7 am) we had to check out and were meant to be driven to the studio, but the coordinator had made a mix up so we had an extra hour in the hotel, where we raided the breakfast buffet.

When we got to the studio, we sped through hair, make-up and costume (since we didn’t need to get much done). We met lots of other groups who had also raised money for the charity. There was a lot of waiting around for the different groups to get their shots in. By the end of the day we had had: individual head shots, a group video, individual and group still shots, recorded some audio and were interviewed by The Sun for their website. Phew!

I was called the “alpha male” of the group as I was the only kickboxer. This meant I was involved in some sparring and poesy techniques (I wasn’t impressed when the photographer asked me to drop my guard so the charity logo could be seen). We returned to Bath by train on Saturday night. All in all it was a great experience, we were well looked after and we even got to meet the lovely page 3 girl, Peta!