WHY I WENT TO UNIVERSITY AT 54 TO STUDY TV PRODUCTION

After a real knock-back tonight I cannot sleep. Although most people would be thrilled with the 2 grades I received thus far for part (not all) of my TV Studio module, I am extremely disappointed with myself and insufferably low tonight. I have decided to try and remind myself why I went to university at the skeleton-like old age of 54.

I have always thought I have a half-decent brain in my noggin. I tend to be one of these members of the quiz team that can be counted on to find the really obscure & inane fact that only 8 year old's can remember. The rest of the team will be coming up with all sorts of really techy answers and I will suddenly burst into life with some random answer and everyone goes "where exactly did that come from" and I am all "errrrrrr I just knew it." If you are playing teams at Trivial Pursuit then always have me on your team if you need a player with all the blue and green answers (I am amazing at B&G cheeses). Conversely, if you are useless at brown questions, then I guarantee you will want someone else with you. To almost every question, I will always answer Enid Blyton, only once has it every been the right answer, sadly it was about the Famous 5 so I even knew it that time. QUIZZER "Who wrote the first 4 books of the New Testament?" ME "Enid Blyton."

Although I have written 5 books, I am the most dreadfully slow reader. It took me a year to read Taz Thornton's 'Unleash Your Awesome' and likewise with Ian Donaghy's 'A Pocketful of Kindness' - I am a book reading Neanderthal.

My attention was taken by making TV back in 2013 (I think - might have been 2014 or 2015 but it defo wasn't later. I'm sure it was December 2014 now come to think of it - Or was it January 2015?) when Lime Studios were filming a scene for Hollyoaks in Empire Nightclub Liverpool where I was working as a consultant. I asked about the chance of making a treatment about what is going on in the transgender brain. Well, they LOVED the idea and soon after we made a pilot in a beauty parlour on Water Street. It was fabulous and I adored being in front of the camera. The pilot was sent to Channel 4 who gave us solid feedback. Let me tell you that Channel 4 were not averse to the idea and openly welcomed me and Lime working on it. Sadly this was a very dark time and I had no money. Consequently I could not even afford the fuel to drive to Liverpool to continue the venture. The concept ran dry. I still believe that it would make a wonderful TV Series even now and I have not given up on the idea.

Roll forward to 2017 and I decide that I need to be on a TV gameshow. I started looking into it and took to applying. On my very first application I was successful. In fact, I received a phone call from the people within 2 hours of applying. Me and Jo, my friend were in Manchester auditioning 2 weeks later for Letterbox (a new show with Mel Giedroyc) on BBC2. By July we were filming the show. As it happened, I bumped into Bradley Walsh and Shaun Wallace after this photo was taken. They were filming The Chase in the studio directly to the right of Mel as she stands. The Letterbox studio was next up to the left of that red door in the background.

4 weeks earlier, I was actually invited to audition for The Chase and I was successful (though never got on the show). I was on the shortlist for 2 years. BUT... Not 1 week later and I was invited to audition for a 3rd gameshow, The Boss on BBC1. I was successful and by October I was in the studio in Manchester again and we were filming. Sue Calman was fab - if not very short and a mad cat lover (oh and she loves grapes too). One week after filming and I was invited to attend an audition in Manchester for 15 to 1. Again I was successful and on November 6th I walked into BBC Glasgow and we filmed the show for Channel 4. I have to say that Sandy Tostvick was superb and so lovable. She spent ages talking to me while I stood on the finalists podium. I came 2nd but I remain friends with the winner Jo Bartleet to this day. We are planning to go on a gameshow as a team (maybe Pointless). Anywayzzz, Fifteen2One didn't air until the following December and that was the end of my brush with TV.

Whilst in each studio, makeup and green room I was tenacious and asking loads of question. It got me hooked and I felt I wanted much more. I made no secret that I love being in front of the camera.

I joined B&M back in September 2019 and even when I started I was talking about furthering my education. Everywhere I looked at jobs, it seemed that everyone wanted degrees for this and degrees for that. It seemed that if you wanted a good managerial job in retail these days you either had to be at a company for years or have a degree. This frustrated me. I had no higher education and looked at some of the people with degrees and though "wow, I could do that"... and so...

On 1st January 2020 I made the decision that I wanted to die with a degree and I posted this out on Twitter, Linkedin & Facebook. The post went mad. Now this has changed and I want to LIVE with a degree.

At this point I didn't care what degree, I just wanted a degree. I had given no thought to it and there was no plan. I did a post on LinkedIn in the form of a document and it received thousands of hits and likes. BUT the proof of the pudding is (in my opinion) the comments your posts gains. Many of the comments were very much around "Well what do you want to study." Sadly I cannot find this posted document.

But what a good question... What to study... Hmmmmmmmmmmmm

So I did another post that was equally successful but this was about how on earth I would afford to go to university. I could barely afford my bills (in fact I actually couldn't). My outgoings still outstripped my income by some £200 a month. I was badly in debt with no end in sight.

This post received over 20,000 hits and about 200 likes. That was about average for me at the time and the feedback was brilliant. However still the £££numbers didn't add up. That said... I did not give up on the idea. I kept plugging away, posting documents, videos and written posts. Then one day...

Someone offered me a lifeline. I am not saying who it is and not one soul knows but it saved my dream and from that moment I stepped up a gear and started to look at the University of Central Lancashire website. This man has become a wonderful friend and I plan (and have been saving up a little bit each week) to get him to my graduation in 2 years time. Without him, I would not be at university.

Back to what... At first I looked at hospitality because I was very good at that. My logical thinking was that if I was good at it, then I would be brill at a degree. It then occurred to me that even though I was good at it, I probably would not enjoy it. As a result, I dropped this idea like a stone.

I then turned my attention to either media or TV. It never even occurred to me that there would be an actual degree in TV Production itself (seems a bit stupid now not knowing that). Anyway, I applied for Multimedia Journalism and was thrilled to get an interview with a wonderful lady called Caroline Hawtin. I had applied for this as the ordinary layperson in me thought everyone in TV must have a journalism background. Caroline basically said (well actually said) "You'd be bored doing this course, you need to be making the news not reporting on it" - She was right.

She took it upon herself to go find the right course for me and before I knew it I was making a video for a guy called Adam Robson, Senior Lecturer in TV Production at UCLan. I then received an invite to go to university. I was overjoyed. So at this point, I had someone wonderful in the Middle East helping me, I had sorted out the additional finance I needed to balance the books through SFE... after all I would need to drop my hours at work and I had worked very close with B&M so that I paid my employer the due respect they deserve.

The plan had fallen into place and on the 13th September I tweeted this... (and my open "thank you" to everyone on the 14th below it). At this tweets height on 14th September, it reached 305,000 likes and only Chritiano Ronaldo had a bigger tweet. To put that in perspective, when I went to bed on 13th at midnight, it had reached 94 likes (that's 94, not 94,000). PS.. Donald Trump tweets that day did rubbish in comparison to mine and my mate Christiano's (400,000).

This tweet has become my legacy and continues to be picked up by amazing people and used to inspire people across the globe. That happened again last week when someone on LinkedIn posted it again and his post gained tens of thousands of likes. I have been told by an expert in social media that across all SM Platforms it will have now been viewed over 40 million times and possibly up to 50 million. I can't even fathom that number out but I am proud of my little tweet and will now forever be pinned to my account. That day I walked up to the Media Factory has to rank as one of my all time top 5 most precious moments.

What are the other 4 I hear you ask?

1. Marrying my beautiful x wife back in 1995, 2. The birth of Lewis 2004 3. The birth of Lily 2008 4. Blackburn Rovers winning the Premier League in 94/95 season.

I started as a Foundation Student in TV Production and was overjoyed... 4 years of study to look forward to and I will have my BA with Honours. I was loving it and I knew that this year would be my easing back into education. After all it had been 36 years since I had last been a student of anything. Things were good and I felt like I was fully on top of things. One day we were asked a one line question by a lecturer called (of all names) Emma. Well in usual 'me' style I crafted a beautiful 250 worded answer and 2 days following (I was in work when) I received a call "Hi Emma it's Emma Barrass." I was invited to step up a year to Year 1. There was no pressure to do this but it didn't take me long to say yes... Like 1 second. The following day, I walked back into uni into a new Year and new set of uni mates and lecturers.

One part of me was sad as Emma is ace (well let's face it all Emma's are ace - not met a bad'un yet). However fortunately she will be teaching me in Year 3 and for my Masters, so all good. The step up shocked me; there was a lot more to do but I knew I was fully capable. I had been placed on the foundation year as I could not prove my A level grades. Thankfully I had managed to prove to my lecturers that I was relatively clever within 3 weeks, and maybe I really did have a brain.

I did this post at some point in late October which did rather well too

Since then, I have posted loads and loads about the stuff I have been getting up to at university. I have loved the journey and I have shared so much of it with you. I am known for my brutally raw posts. I have met some wonderful people, both students and lecturers. The university has been a groundbreaking flag-bearer in the fight against Covid with the lowest rates anywhere. The efforts of the university have been (in my opinion) astonishing. I continue to be impressed.

As it stands, I have two grades in for semester 2 of 1st for Live TV & Sport and TV Studio Production. I am waiting on another 2 modules, Multimedia and Video Production. I should be proud of this but neither score is good enough for me - they are both below the standard that I set myself and for that reason, I grade myself as average. I DON'T DO AVERAGE and thus I think my performance is poor. I am certain it is all I deserve as I trust my lecturers implicitly. In my mind, if I continue to think this way I will forever be in the pursuit of perfection. I wanted 100, I know this is possible because if it wasn't then why score from 0-100. Why not score 0-95 or 0-90?? SO it has to be possible. But I cannot accept any less than 85 - thus I failed and my quest for 100 must continue.

No-one ever remember who came 2nd

All that said, what have I achieved this year...

This year I have 1) Been a Media School Student Rep 2) Taken over as LGBT Society Chair 3) Run for Arts & Media School President (didn't get it - really pants & disappointed) 4) Had a radio Show called LGBTalks 5) Had the 2nd most successful tweet in the world on just one day of my life 6) Leant how to edit really well on Adobe Premier 7) Learnt how to use Adobe After Effects to a reasonable standard 8) Written a script that scored 74 in semester 1 - which is a 1st 9) Graded 91 for my semester 1 Multimedia which is my proudest moment thus far (1st Outstanding). 10) Helped Year 2 & 3 students with filming for their acting degrees 11) Proficiently used the green screen for my multimedia assignment with the help of Sam my lecturer 12) Made a name for myself all over the uni (probably a bad thing LOL) 13) Started planning TEDx University of Central Lancashire 2022 14) Suffered a terrible outbreak of Hives and still never missed a lecture even though I was off work for the first time in 23 years 15) Met some fabulous friends like Phebey, Luca, Rob, Tom, Ella, Danny, Becca, Alana, Emma-Jane, Charlotte and many more 16) Started a journey that will only be rewarded when I am nominated for a BAFTA.

So why???

Why did I go to university at 54???

If you read this to the end, thank you - Emma Preston

*** This post is dedicated to my hero, you know who you are ***