Songs That Get Stuck in Your Head

There are certain songs that no matter how hard we try, they refuse to leave our brains until all our friends have disowned us due to our constant [and in my case terrible] renditions of said songs. At the moment there are three songs in particular that my brain has been playing on repeat and they all happen to have a Cbeebies connection.

Children's programmes, by their very nature, need to have a very strong appeal to their audiences so that they will love them to death, grow up into self respecting members of society and have many drunken nostalgic conversations about the programmes they watched as a child. Those particular conversations will go something along the lines of:

Person A: Wasn't Barney that annoying purple dinosuar?
Person B: Well yes but there was also a cartoon Old English Sheepdog called Barney who had a mouse that lived on top of his head
Person A: I think I vaguely remember it...nowhere near as good as The Poddington Peas though
Person B: OH MY GOD YES, The Poddington Peas was the best kid's programme ever!
Person A and B start singing in unison: Down at the bottom of the garden among the birds and the bees...etc etc.

Music is an integral part of what makes a television programme immortal. Even when the programme has been dead and buried for decades and nobody can remember the character's names or any of the plot lines it doesn't really matter as long as people can still sing the theme tune.

Bearing all of this in mind it's not surprising that if you watch as much of the Cbeebies channel as I do, it shouldn't really come as a surprise when some of the songs get stuck in your head for quite some time. Personally I find that when this happens the best way to rectify the situation is by sharing the offending songs with everyone around, after all a problem shared is an extra problem that somebody else has to deal with on top of all their problems.

So on this bright and sunny day, the gift I give to you is a list of these three songs complete with links and videos because I'm nice like that...enjoy!

Cbeebies Lunchtime Song
Sung by the delightful Andy Day, he asks "WHAT'S ON YOUR PLATE?" This song is guaranteed to get me excited about food every time I hear it.
Listen to it here 

Small Potatoes Theme
Once I have become suitably excited for food and decide to chow down on a spud for lunch  I inevitably get this song stuck in my head...


Time for an Adventure
By far the most annoying song to ever get stuck in my head, I'm not particularly fond of Baby Jake as a programme yet for some reason, every now and then this song decides to imbed itself into my mind for days on end. 
Listen to it if you think you're hard enough

The Children's Media Conference

Last week I trundled over to Sheffield for the 8th annual Children's Media Conference. I'd heard about the conference just after it had finished last year and I still don't know how I hadn't heard about it before seeing as it's almost on my doorstep. Judging by the website it looked like quite an impressive event full of networking opportunities with big shots in the Children's Media industry but the tickets were beyond my budget and I would have to sell an arm, a leg, possibly a few of my teeth and all of my hair to afford a full price ticket with all the trimmings included. Instead I decided to offer my services as a volunteer for the duration of the conference.  I think it was probably the best decision I've made all year. Not only did I get to attend this amazing event for free and have my accommodation, travel and most of my meals paid for me but I also made a lot of fantastic new friends. I also discovered that I have some pretty nifty leadership skills  that had been lying dormant waiting for such an opportunity to arise.

I received an email a few months ago saying I had been designated the role of  Technical Director which sounded quite impressive but I didn't really understand what that would actually involve until I got there for my training the day before the conference started. I soon discovered that I would be put into one of four showrooms to oversee and explain the running order of the individual sessions that took place in my allocated showroom. This meant that I was to blame if everything went horribly wrong or even if something went a little bit wrong....no pressure at all then!

I had two technicians, two runners and up to six speakers in any one session  and half an hour between each session to get everyone out and get a new wave of people in. This meant that I had to ensure all the speakers were miked up asap, that they knew about how tight we had to keep it and that they stopped talking when they should (aided by our wonderful traffic light piece of tech that was placed on their table) and that they read out the house keeping notes at the start and end of their session. I also had to make sure we had the right number of chairs and water bottles on stage, the techies had connected everything they needed to connect and knew the running order of the slides and videos, decide when we were good to start the session, let everybody know that we were starting the session, make sure the opening music was playing and then get the runners to open the doors to let the hoards of people dash in. For the busy sessions (there were a few) I had to make sure that people didn't leave empty chairs in between one another which meant that either myself or one of the braver runners would go down to the stage and ask everybody to shuffle up to the end of the rows. This happened beautifully some of the time and less beautifully at other times. Then there was the Q&A sections where I had to make sure my runners got the mics to the people who wanted to ask questions and then when it all finished I had to make sure everybody got the hell out as soon as possible, do a quick whip round to make sure there was no rubbish left in the isles and then get the next lot in to do it all over again. It was a bit mad but after the second session my smile was less forced and I actually relaxed into the role and by the time we had wrapped at the end of the two days I had been told that I had done a very good job by more than one person.

When I wasn't screaming on the inside and I had clocked off for the day there were the networking parties to attend in the evenings. This mainly involved taking full advantage of the free alcohol that was being forced into my hand at regular intervals, fighting my way into the path of the staff who were making the rounds with the canapé trays, chatting drunkenly to people who had interviewed me the week before for a job that I didn't get and dancing around like a loon to Thriller. It was all good fun...well it was before one of the straps on my dress broke and I had to keep tucking my dress around my bra strap every five seconds so as not to expose myself to the world. Apart from that it was all amazing.

To wrap it up here are a few personal highlights from the event:

• Meeting Ben Faulks aka Mr Bloom but not realising who he was until half way through my conversation (he does a much better job at disguising himself than Clark Kent ever did)
• Picking up a business card at the end of one of my sessions that had been dropped on the floor only to find out that it was Ian Prince's business card (he used to be the editor of Newsround back when I was still in the target age range to watch the show without people telling me I should possibly grow up and he is somewhat of a hero of mine. I always thought it was cool that he had a very similar surname to Matthew Price who was one of the presenters at the time). I'm thinking of framing this wondrous piece of cardboard and putting it on the mantelpiece!
• Having the Head of Cbeebies as one of the speakers in one of my sessions and chatting to her at the end. She is a lovely person and she told me to get in contact with her when she comes back from her holiday in a fortnight.
• Getting some good hints and tips from people about breaking into regular work as a freelancer at the BBC.
• Sitting in front of Anna Home at the key note speech thinking that it was such a surreal moment in my life.
• Realising that a girl who I previously worked with for a big event with CBBC and Cbeebies at the start of the year actually used to live with my ex house mate for three years before she moved in with me...it's a very small world!
• Meeting some amazing fellow volunteers and making lots of new friends. 

The whole four days I was in Sheffield was such an amazing experience and the city itself is truly beautiful and nothing like how it's portrayed in The Full Monty. I had very little sleep whilst I was there and despite having a rather sticky bathroom floor in my Travelodge room and missing nearly all the tennis matches that Andy Murray won I cannot wait to do it all again next year!