What a coup by Lucy Cotter last night to get Robbie Williams live on the BRIT's red carpet! I've just caught up with her for all the gossip and despite her usual air of complete calm on telly, apparently it was a nightmare down there. These things can be a bit of a bun fight as the world's press scrap it out for interviews with the celebs. Lucy will have been running round for hours persuading the right PR person to deliver the stars she wanted to talk to at the precise moment she needed to talk to them. If they bring them over to her too soon, there's a danger they'll be dragged away by some unscrupulous, (non-London Tonight) reporter just as we're about to go live. If the guest turns up just a minute too late...well...they miss it. Very stressful!
Lucy was promised a chat with JLS - who went on to scoop two awards for London last night - and she knew there was an outside chance of getting the man of the moment, Robbie. But fifteen seconds before the director was due to cue Lucy to start speaking, she was on her own. Luckily, just as she started to speak - no doubt with her mind racing with various versions of the sentence, 'what the heck do I do now?!?!' - the JLS boys mobbed her and gave a great interview.
The next problem though, when you're broadcasting live to the capital with the hottest band of the moment, is how do you then grab the attention of this country's most successful male recording artist to also come over for a chat? Answer? You expertly wrap up JLS and throw to a pre-recorded clip of interviews with other stars to give yourself precisely 1 minute 34 seconds of breathing space during which Lucy turned on the charm. When she came back into vision, there was Lucy alongside the man absolutely everyone was desperate to speak to. Genius. Lucy...I mean...but Robbie's was pretty good too!
So - how do we follow that tonight? With the day's top stories, a belly-dancing 90 year old and a chat with Andy Townsend ahead of Arsenal's Champions League match against Porto. What's not to love?
See you at six,
Matt and Katie.
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