The “Kyle Files” pigeon.

It’s been a stressful, hectic week here, so I think it’s time for a bit of levity. A few years ago I was asked to appear on an episode of “The Kyle Files”. I live in South Wales, and the show is filmed in Manchester, so it was a long drive there and back for what was essentially a few minutes of airtime. Luckily I had a friend join me for the journey, and he took great delight in telling everyone where he worked that he was having the day off to go with me as I was going to be on “The Jeremy Kyle Show”. This is the same guy who told everyone I was going to be on Crimewatch too, never mentioning it was as an expert, not a suspect.

A few weeks later I had a call from them again asking if I could come back and do more filming. This time they offered to pay for a train ticket and a hotel for me. They’d reimbursed me for my petrol the time before, but this time I could chill out on the journey, plus wouldn’t have to do about 10 hours of traveling in one day, so figured why not.

I met the film crew, and we started filming some introductory footage of me. Basically, I was to walk down the busy street, sit on a bench and “people watch”. They seemed to want to make me out to be someone who could spot a scammer just by looking at them. This is where the problems start. I’m sitting on a bench, very obviously being filmed by a TV crew and looking at the people going by. Suddenly everyone is looking at me like I’m some kind of weirdo! At one point I get completely distracted by a pigeon wandering around on the street, to the point they had to stop filming. I explain what was happening, we make a small joke about it and move on. The rest of the day was pretty good. More filming outdoors, meeting Jeremy Kyle again and then off for the night in a hotel. Back home the next day, then off again the day after to fly to Vegas to speak at a conference. Now all I had to do was wait for the program to be shown.

A few weeks later it’s finally on. I’m annoyed that they’re saying my name and not the site’s, then it happens! They only went and filmed the damn pigeon and spliced him into the footage!!!! There were 4 people in the world that watched the program and got the joke. Now you all know how a pigeon appeared on prime time TV purely to make 4 people laugh.

Why am I bringing all this up now? As you know, YouTube suspended our account last week. We’ve been trying to replace as much lost footage as we can, and while searching I actually found the episode online. I don’t know how long it’ll be there, but you can check it out at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6th3eu if that’s the kind of thing you like. As for the pigeon, here he is in all his glory!