James almost backed out of Countdown when he realised he was no good and was going to ‘get destroyed’
A man who has appeared on some of the biggest shows in the UK has revealed how he cheated to get on Countdown, almost backed out of the show atthe last minute and eneded up being banned from The Chase. Surrey bus driver James Belshaw, 46, has been applying for TV shows since 2010, and has appeared on over a dozen of the UK’s favourite gameshows, including Pointless, The Weakest Link, Tipping Point and Lingo.
Speaking to Spin Genie, James said: “The first thing I applied for was a paper application for Weakest Link but I didn’t hear back for a while. I also applied for Countdown, that was my first online application – there’s no face to face audition for Countdown. It was done over the phone.
“They said to me, ‘Right, we’re going to play the game now, so play it honestly’. I’m not bad at Countdown but I thought I was better than I was. I had my keyboard, anagram solver and numbers solver on my computer. I’m going to say it, I did cheat.”
He added: “They told me I was on. [It was filmed] in Manchester. I remember I got to the hotel in Manchester and I sat down on the bed and turned the TV on and the Countdown was on. I watched the whole episode and I just thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m no good at Countdown, what am I doing here?’
“I phoned my wife, then girlfriend, and I said, ‘I’m going to bail, I’m rubbish. I’m going to get destroyed’. She told me, ‘No no, go through with it, because if you’re seen as someone who turns up and flakes off… you’ve applied for other stuff!’ A lot of these people [working on TV] are freelance. I’ve met people on these shows who I don’t remember but they remember me from other stuff, so it does make you mindful.
“People who apply a lot to shows tend to be quite liberal with the truth, because you don’t want them to think you’ve done too much [TV].”
James’s first TV outing was on Coach Trip, he said: “My wife and I used to watch it quite a lot. The first series was in 2005 or something, and then they cancelled it and brought it back in 2010 and I thought, ‘Let’s do that’. Then we applied and we jumped through all the hoops and then we got on it and after that I thought, this is brilliant.
“Then I just got into a zone of applying for things. Back then, it was paper auditions, sending a form, it was old school, obviously now it’s all online forms and Zoom, which does take something away from the audition process, because it was so much better going into a room of all different people and watching how they behaved as well, because it does something to people, it’s like they’re selling themselves, so they’ve all got different tactics.
“Some people are on it the whole time, whereas, you really need to just turn it on when they get you to do a little piece of the camera, you just play a game based around the show. The reason I was so successful getting onto shows, I think, is because my tactic was to apply for new shows that have never been on because they tend to cast people who’ve done [TV] a bit.
“There’s quite a few of us actually. They can see how we behave on TV and they know you’re not gonna be like a Bullseye contestant from the 1980s where they’re all like, I work in the mines. That in itself is brilliant, I love Bullseye, I love watching all those old school style contestants.”
James said one trick to help you get onto TV is having an interesting story. He said: “Me and my wife, we held the Guinness World Record for the longest kiss, and that was quite a popular story. But now that we’ve used it quite a few times, it’s probably less interesting. I think you can make an interesting story out of something quite mundane. If you think about what you like doing, there’s always some sort of quirk to it. If people go oh, so I like fishing, golf and breathing, you’ve got to really find an angle.”
But he hasn’t always been succesful, and one huge show wouldn’t let him on. James said: “I was cast on The Chase, I had a filming day but they phoned me up and said, James, were you on Pointless? And I hadn’t put it on my form.
Source: Mirror
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