@JamieCollabro on The Wright Stuff - Jan 29th

So Jamie joined UK panel show The Wright Stuff Friday 29th January where they discuss current affairs.  Jamie's quite well known for not holding back on sharing his opinions on Twitter so I was really looking forward to watching the show!  I knew he would be a great panellist and would have some great points to make!!

When the host Matthew Wright introduced him he asked Jamie to recap how Collabro was formed! A clip of the guys performing Music of The Night was also shown!

Music of the Night

Matthew asked him about his dog Peggy who has her own Twitter account with lots of followers! Jamie replied that when he got her they were touring so it was really difficult to toilet train her, they would have to pull the van over really quickly sometimes!  He ended up having to give her to his mum who'd just retired, 'it worked out well' he laughed.

Jamie with Peggy

Matthew asked Jamie if any of the group had any previous voice training.  He explained that he'd had some opera training, that Tom was in a choir for a long time and the other have also had some lessons.  When asked if he would swap what he was doing now for a main role on stage in an opera Jamie stated that he wouldn't as he loves what he is doing, taking a song and making it a little more classical.

He also talked to Jamie about his love of taking selfies and some appeared on the TV screen!  In one of them Jamie has a face mask on!  Jamie explained that the mast got stuck in his beard and took over half an hour to remove!!

Some of Jamie's selfies

During the show they look through the days newspapers and pick out stories.  The first one was about British students being the most illiterate compared to other countries.  Yet pensioners are the highest ranking...he thinks that we used to read a lot more and explained that his favourite shop was Waterstones!  He would read a book a week.  The other day he saw an eight year old on a bus with a smartphone adding they read comments of Facebook that are often incorrectly spelt and grammatically wrong!

There was an article on one of the papers about Barbie introducing some dolls which are different shapes and sizes to reflect real women of today.  Matthew asked Jamie about this and mentioned that Jamie had spoken out in the past about body image.  Jamie nodded and agreed that dolls do influence children and that as a child when he played with dolls it was escapism for his imagination.  That sadly it's almost brainwashed from an early age and that young children want to play with beautiful princesses!  He thought that the new Barbie was a great move but a publicity stunt and looking at the one that's supposedly the curvy one is a bit of a slap in the face for curvy women as it looks like a size 8!  But he thought that it is perhaps a step in the right direction!  He added that children have such a vivid imagination and may think that the Barbie size waist is normal.

With the panel

They discussed a news story about electric shock dog collars, Jamie didn't agree that these collars are a good thing at all.  He said that dogs can be trained using other techniques.  He told the story of when he first got Peggy.  He lives with Michael and Peggy used to keep using him as a toilet so they used reward based training and now she's the best behaved dog ever, its just not necessary, he explained.  He added that a dog that gets repeated electric shocks as punishment is going to react badly and be dangerous.

Another newspaper article was about someone who'd complaned at being charged £4.50 for a lime and water in a pub.  Jamie joked that this person obviously had too much time on their hands as was probably the twitter troll of the pub world!  He explained that if she was using the establishments facilities and space than has to pay something for that.

He also spoke about the 5p plastic bag fee that has recently been introduced in the UK, telling a story of a woman in a shop who'd just brought a joint of beef at £40 but wouldn't pay 5p for a bag!  He felt that she was missing the point, the bigger issue of the environment and that the money goes to charity.  He believes that the whole thing has had terrible press and I have to agree!

At the end of the show Matthew Wright mentioned the Collabro tour and held up the Act Two CD! He thanked Jamie, I think he'll definitely be back on the show!!

Being thanked at the end of the show!

Having fun on the show!

Host Matthew Wright

With another panel member