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We’ve been very fortunate over the last few months to appear on James Martin’s Saturday Morning a couple of times. Whoever it was, at ITV or James’ production company, that came up with this idea (of featuring artisan producers generally, rather than getting us on specifically), chapeau to them. It’s a fantastic way to connect a massive audience of foodies with our country’s artisan makers. I’ve said a few times since, if this was a government growth strategy, it couldn’t have been better designed. Indeed, it’s actually far more effective than one of those.
While lots of our subscribers, customers and followers found us via the show, and our pre-existing customers got to feel all zeitgeist for knowing about us first, we often get asked about the process of actually making the TV bit. I thought I’d write a bit to tell you how it all happened.
How did James Martin find out about us? That started in a field. James works with a brilliant team of producers and food experts. One of those was on the lookout for British charcuterie, and working through their little black book, spoke to the organiser of a food festival we love attending. Their recommendation was enough to get us a conversation, and it went from there. I’d first met that food festival organiser at a different event (not one of theirs), which itself had been a total washout. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that if we hadn’t gone to the diabolically bad food festival, we would never have been on James Martin. Funny that.
When James’ team confirmed that we’d be on the show, the next step was to send in products for them to make choices about what to make and feature. We packed up a bumper box of British charcuterie and fired it off to the secret location. When it got there, everything was tested and we found out a few weeks later what they’d chosen to do with our products.
We were really excited when we heard James was going to make a muffuletta. Someone at that programme knows what they’re doing, because making muffulettas had been a social media trend for a while, and it’s a great way to use charcuterie differently. That’s what we were most excited about, because we love communicating different ways to use our charcuterie, and James Martin was tapping straight into that opportunity. We were delighted.
We got a filming date, and that’s when things got a bit panicky around here. Fortunately, James and the team film collaborations with artisan producers remotely, so you get to see the inside of these operations. I think that’s better than bringing us into the studio, not that that wouldn’t be cool. Scarily though, we’d only started our factory fit-out a few weeks before the filming date, having moved out of our tiny garden workshop. Quickly, it became clear that the question needed to be “what can we make presentable?” rather than “how can we get finished?” and so we prepared what’s now our tasting room for filming. The camera zoomed in on me at a table, with our awards behind me. If you’d panned out, you’d have seen that only half the awards were on the wall, only half of the wall was painted and the floor hadn’t been installed. That’s the magic of TV for you.
On the day itself, we were prepped up to chat with James. An unexpected pleasure was the presence of Paul Ainsworth, who chatted through the charcuterie too. It was great fun, and we were so grateful for their feedback. Having said that, we nearly didn’t hear any of it. First, we had to contend with our very patchy rural wifi, and once we had that set, our builders decided to crack on with a bit of drilling. Having hastily established serenity via a polite cease and desist (we couldn’t shut the tasting room door, because it wasn’t hung yet) we spent about 15 minutes chatting with the chefs. It feels pretty ‘live’, because there isn’t much scope for re-shooting or anything, so we crossed our fingers that it would all come out OK.
Behind the scenes, we waited for the airing date, which was a few weeks after we filmed. In that time, we’d spoken to other producers who had witnessed website crashes galore from James Martin fans visiting during the show. Hatches were battened down, stock levels adjusted, hosting capacity expanded. We were ready to go.
On the day, we waited with baited breath. I was actually running a charcuterie course in the factory, so I didn’t see the programme, which I was quite glad about really. What I did see was a great many kind words on social media, whatsapp and email from friends, suppliers and customers. We also welcomed many new website customers, and thankfully the site didn’t crash.
Fast forward a few months, to Bray Cured’s third birthday in June 2024, which coincides now with the King’s official birthday too. The season of James Martin’s Saturday Morning had just finished, and I was in the factory running another charcuterie course when my phone started pinging alarmingly. It took a few minutes to work out what was going on, but then it dawned on me that our appearance on the show was being repeated. It was a fantastic surprise birthday present, as we met a whole new set of new friends through the reappearance.
And that’s how it happened. The exposure we were given was fantastic for us, as a small producer. We’ll always be grateful to James and the team, as well as everyone who tuned in.
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