Silver Linings Chokebook
Yeah, no.
About a month ago I filmed an episode of the quiz show “Hot Seat” and I BOMBED (you may have seen it, it was televised about half an hour ago, ah whoops, no heads up). I had a particularly spectacular brain-fart on national TV. I even knew the correct answer (contrary to popular opinion, I was NOT overawed by Eddie’s baby blues), but decided to second-guess myself and lock in the wrong answer. BUH-BOW. You lose.
Ordinarily, I would have been furious at myself. I take my brain power seriously and have a tendency to beat up on myself when Brain lets me down. I’ve been on TV quiz shows before and have done really well, so I expected to go so much better than I actually did. It’s the curse of having extraordinarily high expectations of myself. Before I went on to set, I thought “as long as I get ONE question right, I’ll be happy”. Mmmmmmm. No.
But I was surprisingly fine with it. Embarrassed yes, but I’d already witnessed many brainfarts during the day—musos getting music questions wrong; english teachers getting grammar questions wrong, so I knew I wasn’t alone. The episode I was on was hilariously funny as all of us bar one bombed out in similar spectacular fashion. During filming, we were all pissing ourselves in the Loser’s Corner, goading each other good-naturedly with “We SUCK!” and cheering on the bloke that went on to win $10,000. Poor bastard, as the rest of us choked, he never got a chance at the mill.
That’s not to say I didn’t have those infernal moments afterwards of “couldashouldawoulda”, “WTF just Happened there?” or “Why couldn’t they have asked me a question about country flags or Benedict Cumberbatch—why did it have to be about chess“, because I sure as f*ck did, but for each abject failure comes silver linings aplenty:
- Even though it was a long day of filming—10 hours—it was also an amazing day. I made some new friends, bonding with a couple of top-shelf girls—Maryanne and Shelly—but also had other great conversations. There was such a sense of camaraderie amongst the 36 of us. I laughed hard. Mostly at myself, but with others as well.
- I love the vibe of the studio. I love the lights, the cameras, the sense of anticipation. Alright, just call me a Studio Whore OK, it was worth the pain to lock in that experience.
- This sh*t is perfect fodder for a blogger.
- I was motivated to lose a stack of weight in the month between filming and the episode being televised so no-one would recognise me in the street.
- At the moment, we are dealing with my kids’ resilience, so they could see their mum “fail”, and be able to laugh (grudgingly) at the slapstick comedy of it.
- I shocked the bejesus out of Husbando, who had assumed there would be dent-marks on my shins from all the self-flagellation. Knowing how ordinarily competitive I am, this made him go all silent and confused. It was quite nice, come to think of it.
- Apparently my hair looked really lush on camera.
Most humbling was when we left the studio at 6pm, we passed a soup kitchen on a quiet Docklands corner serving up meals for the homeless. The whole day had been about MONEY and WINNING, so that was a perspective grounder. We have it damn good. Brainfarts and all.
Have you ever had a spectacular fail/brainfart and recovered?
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