Nineteen Seconds

The clip is nineteen seconds long and I said every word of it.

Week one, the Thursday, the sit-down they do with everyone before a series starts, in a portakabin, with a wall of black fabric behind me and a woman I had never met asking questions off an iPad.

So why are you doing this?

And I said: “Honestly? The penalty for walking was larger than my pride. And if six weeks of television puts six hundred covers a week through a thirty-four-seat restaurant in Camberwell, I’m not going to stand here and pretend that isn’t part of it.”

That is the whole of it. There is no edit in it; you can see the cut points at either end and there are none in the middle. It is nineteen seconds of a woman answering a question accurately six weeks before she had any reason to answer it any…