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adventures is close to your heart, tell us about some of the causes that you're working on this year. As always, Children In Need is something that's very close to my heart. We'll be doing the Countryfile rambles again this year, which are these huge big old sponsored walks where we encourage people to get out and do their bit. Unfortunately, The Rickshaw Challenge is parked for now, which is a real shame. It's something that I've done for years and years with The One Show and,when I left, they decided that they wanted to turn their attentions to other fundraising ventures. But I'm always on the lookout for ways that I can help and things that I can do.
How do you prepare for interviews and live broadcasts? Do you have any rituals or techniques to feel more comfortable on air? It's interesting because being dyslexic, I steer away from words that can be flying around on pieces of paper. I don't really deal in that sort of currency at all. I much prefer to listen to people. In my eyes, the best interviews really start with one question and then you end up just going off on it, on a fantastic conversation. I love reacting to what they say and creating conversation from that. So for me, I think that's how you do a good interview actually, you're guided by what the person is talking about or you're interested in. If you listen hard enough, you can hear all sorts of interesting questions within what people are saying. I'm fascinated by what makes people tick and why they do what they do .
Can you share a particularly difficult moment you've faced professionally and how you overcame it? Well, there's quite a few funny ones, to be honest with you. I don't like to heavily rehearse things because otherwise you end up trying to replicate what you've just done and it always goes wrong. So it's far better to just go with the flow and then roll with it. But there's some quite funny moments back in the day on Blue Peter where, gosh, I mean, anything could happen because you'd have dogs and kids and crazy things and pop bands balls flying everywhere and cars being driven into the studio.
There was one brilliant show that we did where we had the Royal Scots Dragon Guards and they were coming up the hill. And the idea was we had a professional violinist in the studio and they were going to play together. So we were going to open up the big dock doors, which are the big studio doors and the Royal Scots Dragon Guards were going to walk in and they were all going to come up, and then they'd convene in the studio and finish the whole song with the professional violinist.
Well, anyway, it was coming towards the end of the show and we were just about to open up these doors and we realized we couldn't get them open, the doors were locked and the show was going out. It was absolutely hilarious. We did everything we could, and we got the props guys in and all the technical people to try and get these doors open. And then we managed to get the
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