I was a news intern at a TV station for approximately 225 hours (not in a row) and did several on-camera reports.
When I worked for the American Red Cross back in the 90s, I was interviewed by the local TV news about disaster relief operations once or twice.
When I was studying at Cambridge University for a year during college (junior year abroad from my US college), a classmate and I entered some kind of contest for college students where you had to come up with a business or marketing idea having to do with the EU. God, it’s been so long ago I barely remember it now. Also, I spent a lot of that year blind drunk, which doesn’t help my recollection. Anyway, the local BBC Radio (I think) station interviewed us about our entry. I used to have a tape of it, but it’s long gone now.
Is there anyplace you can find BBC Radio transcripts from the early 90’s online? I wonder if there is some record of that lingering somewhere.
I was on the local evening news when a girl who was a regular at the bar I tended at was murdered by another regular after rough sex.
In what I can only surmise was a moment of lunacy the owner decided the news crew could shoot inside the bar and I was tending that night.
I made it very clear I would not say a word on camera but as soon as they started shooting the phone was ringing off the hook with people calling to tell me I was on TV.
Every day for over ten years.
Mid 60’s. On Wednesday nights my high schools friends and I used to drive to downtown Los Angeles to the Olympic Auditorium to watch wrestling.
Towards the end of the evening we would leave the cheap seats and make our way down toward the ring. One night right after the final bout, we figured "what the hell?’, let’s get into the ring. No one stopped us nor did anyone tell us to get out of the ring.
We knew all the wrestling moves. My friend threw me against the ropes, I bounced off and he kneed me in the stomach. My other friends were giving each other “pile drivers”. And still none of the security people asked us to leave. We just left on our own accord.
When I got home, I excitedly told my parents that we had actually got into the ring and did wresting moves. My mom said that she already knew because she had watched us on TV. Apparently, while they were rolling the program credits, the TV cameras were on us.
We were the hit of the school the next day.
I was on ESPN - Dick Vitale made fun of my college’s basketball schedule - said we played a cupcake schedule. (We’re an ACC school, so it’s not like we don’t play anyone…) So I baked a dozen cupcakes and wrote the names of our opponents on them.
Management let me in early, and when he was getting ready, I yelled down to get his attention, and showed him my creation. He said something very much like “Oh shit…” Came up and chatted with me, and asked me to wait around until the cameras were ready. Then we did a little shot with him taking a cupcake from me and eating it.
I was in a Communications Arts Magnet program through middle and high school and at the HS level our in-school studio produced at least 7 different weekly programs, entirely student produced, that aired on the County schools’ cable channel. Nobody watched them of course, but getting viewers wasn’t the point. I did appear in a few segments, and the occasional voiceover, but all of my real work was backstage.
I’ve been on several PBS shows as a home brewing guru, demonstrating techniques and shit like that.
I forgot one. When I was in High School I took a debating clinic at Hunter College, and we road the subway with a guy who was producing a debate show for NYC Board of Education TV. The topic was one I had studied, so I was on it. Must of been watched by upwards of two dozen people …
Dad? Is that you?
Summer after seventh grade, I was one of a trio of students interviewed by a Raleigh/Durham news station while attending a program at Duke University. The following year, I was on public TV several times as part of a quiz bowl competition. Similarly, I appeared on a couple of local commercial TV stations in quiz bowl competitions in high school. (Different teams, but our teams took first place in all three TV competitions.) Our high school marching band appeared on television a couple of times.
As an adult, I’ve appeared on local news a handful of times - twice because cameras were rolling when I asked questions at school board meetings, one interview after I uncovered a major discrepancy with the local sex offender registry*, once because I was deejaying at a major venue during a major local festival.
*A convicted child rapist was listed with the address of the hotel where I worked at the time - which I discovered in the middle of the night, by Googling our address, because it apparently wasn’t displaying correctly on Google maps. I worked night audit, so I had plenty of free time in the wee hours. I checked the entire county’s offender registry, and cross-matched about 20 offenders to addresses at local hotels/motels. I then got on the phone with a bunch of other night auditors, and discovered that only about five of these offenders were actually at the place where they claimed they lived. I contacted the sergeant in charge of this registry, and she ignored me. I discussed it with someone who handled the registry in a different county, hoping that he could chat with the sergeant - one professional to another, maybe the sergeant would listen. Nope. So I got in touch with a friend who happens to be a reporter with a local news station. That got results!
You win.
I did a segment on local (very local) public television in the late 90’s talking about menopause, or rather the process of getting there. After making an earthy comment about vaginal dryness the cameraman assured me the entire audience would not leave during the commercial break
I played violin on TV a few times, when I was a kid.
Also when I was a kid, my mother and I were in a mother/son spelling bee.
And in the past 15 years, I’ve sung on TV numerous times with my Men’s Chorus.
Oh, this too. I was banging my girlfriend in an alley on Valentines Day in '86 when News Chopper “what-ever” was hovering overhead covering a bank robbery. As I recall, we kinda dug it …
In the fall of 1976, I joined the Men’s Chorus and the mixed chorus at Loyola Marymount University (even though I was still going to El Camino College at the time). One Monday afternoon, we were instructed to get into our comncert tuxes and proceed to the Sacred Heart Chapel, where we sang a few of the selections we had prepared for our Christmas concert, while a videographer taped us.
I don’t really recall that we were told when to expect this footage to air. But on Christmas day, there it was, on KCET, right there at the beginning of a program of various choirs singing Christmas music. I always thought it was a little suspicious that the TV was turned to that channel on Christmas day while we were getting ready for dinner. But the really weird part is that 40 miles away in Sylmar, my grandmother who was spending the day with my cousins caught the very same show. She had had a stroke a few years earlier and couldn’t actually speak much, but she did point at the screen and say my name when she saw me.
I had another television appearance in 2008, I appeared on The Singing Office on TLC. Our show, along with several others, was taped on Mother’s Day on a sound stage in Manhattan Beach. My wife and daughter, along with her guide dog and another blind a couple, arrived by Access paratransit about an hour before they were really supposed to. Still, the crew very graciously allowed them to join me in the green room until it was time for them to go out into the audience. Some footage of all of us there appeared in the program.
About a year after the show aired, we joined this couple again at a karaoke venue that we all like to sing at. At 8 p.m., the kitchen closed at this place (turning it into a bar), and we had to clear out (because our daughter is a minor). As we were leaving, one of the patrons of the bar stopped me and said “I remember you; you were on that TV show about a year ago, right?” Then he noticed the rest of the party, and said, “And you were there too! And you! And you! And you!” pointing to each of us in turn.
Not me, but mizPullin had a very small, non-speaking appearance in the pilot for the series “Walker, Texas Ranger”. She was just a background person while Chuck was doing something manly, but for some reason the camera focused on her for a moment.
1990, the (free) Gig on the Green in Glasgow -that’s me on the left, up on my brother’s shoulders in a bright pink coat 
Nah, that was an undercover Rose Tyler, you can get away with that 
I was interviewed on local TV when my first article appeared (in Scientific American).
I didn’t get to do it again for many years, until the History Channel decided to base most of one of their episodes of Clash of the Gods on my book Medusa. I got to be one of the dressed-in-black “experts” that gets air time throughout the show. They flew me down to a surprisingly tiny studio in midtown Manhattan, set up a dark background in a small room, and the camera guy, sound guy, light guy, and other hangers-on were in the next room in order to get proper focus, with the microphone boom projecting in through the doorway and everybody trying desperately to stay out of the shot. It was fun.
Maybe in another 25 year I’ll get another shot at TV.
Various local news stories throughout my life. When I was a kid I was a tiny redheaded moppet who played violin at Chapel Hill street festivals, and apparently made good footage for stories about the festival. Straight out of college, I was in a New Orleans cafe when a Fox News crew came in to get “man on the street” reactions to a sleazy Internet story (a couple was claiming they were gonna lose their virginity online, charging pay-per-view to watch). My “man on the street” reaction was to talk about Foucault and the Panopticon, using some half-remembered college bullshit, and apparently got used for their “snooty egghead on the street” section, which, fair enough. More recently, a couple of times I’ve done something cool with my students and gotten local news to cover it; usually I’m there in the background organizing things.