#8 BAFTA diary - Fame

Blog posted by Ste Pickford on Fri, 30 Mar 2012

Before we had a chance to drown our sorrows we were whisked backstage to get ready to give out the award for best Online / Browser game.

We had a script given to us in advance, which said a bit of guff about how great online browser game were, and finished with a truly terrible joke about them all being better than a 'poke' on Facebook. Does poking even exist on Facebook any more? It's only ever mentioned by crap comedians, so I shudder to think who wrote it. That was John's line, and he insisted straight away that he wasn't going to read it out. Instead, he came up with a great replacement - after introducing the category, and just before the videos of all the nominated browser games played, he was going to say, "and here's a preview of Zynga's 2013 line up."

I thought that was a great joke, and Zynga weren't up for any awards so probably weren't in the audience or likely to beat us up later, but we bottled it. We almost got the autocue guy to add it to the script, but he thought he needed to check with someone if that line was OK, and then we chickened out of just saying it without it being on the script.

Bah, we might have kicked off a bit of controversy with that line.

While waiting backstage, the guy giving out the very next award was stood next to us - it was only Asher D! Right, this was my chance.

"Did you tell me to fuck off earlier?"

"What me? No, never!"

John explained that he saw him say it under his breath, and he burst out laughing, and then John and I joined in. He feigned a sigh of relief and said "phew, I thought the computer geeks were going to kick off with me." We're best mates now, but I'm sure he was worried there for a second. (And so ends my Alan Partridge anecdote.)

As I've said, everyone who gave out an award before us was famous, and they all had intros saying what they were famous for, so we had no idea what they were going to say to introduce us. We were stood backstage, shaking with fear, and holding the super heavy BAFTA award while Dara O Briain read something out about us, but I was too nervous to listen properly, and it's not on the YouTube video clip, so I've still got no idea what was said.

Once the video of all the games started playing I stepped back to talk to Dara, and after telling him how weird it felt to be up here as a non-famous person I then asked him if he'd played our game yet.

"What, no, what, Magnetic Billiards, no, what, erm, no, erm, no, sorry." I felt a bit bad for putting him on the spot, but hey, a sale's a sale. He promised to download it, so I'm hoping to see him shooting up the leaderboards very soon.

» Read the whole BAFTA diary

Tags: bafta diary, awards, indie, anecdote, fame

Follow up post: #9 BAFTA diary - Obscurity

Predecessor post: #7 BAFTA diary - The Winner

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