My Greatest Mistake: Steve Lamacq, Presenter, BBC Radio 1 & 6 Music
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Your support makes all the difference.It happened a couple of years ago. We were broadcasting live from the Oxford Union. It was the NME tour and there was a disparate bunch of bands... Amen, who were a grizzly in-your-face punk experience, and a band called JJ72.
It was my job not just to anchor the programme but to run on stage and do the live link. You're given a microphone, some headphones and a radio in your back pocket so that you can hear the show.
All was going fantastically well. I was just saying "One of Britain's most promising new acts, will you please welcome to Oxford..."
At this point I turned round to try to get off the stage before the band came on. I was standing to one side with my arm out in greeting. So I said the words: "Would you please welcome JJ..."
It was then that I moved just a foot too far and slipped off the stage, live on air, in front of a crowd of 700 people. I fell down a gap, one leg was between the edge of the stage and the monitor desk. If you listen back to the tape of the programme it sounds like ..."JJ Seventy-Two-oooo!" like a comedic moment from a TV cartoon.
The band walked on stage at this point, looking down at me as if to say: "You buffoon. You absolute spanner."
I was hurting quite a lot, I had bruised my groin. But no one seemed to care that there was a man trapped down the side of the stage.
The band then started their set and I was still trying to extricate myself. The only person to help me was the tour manager of Amen, who looked like a Hell's Angel.
I was hoping no one would find out, but someone in my production crew told someone else and the tape was played back a couple of times the following day by Sara Cox on her Radio 1 show.
I walked into work and all day long people were coming up behind me going: "Two-oooo!"
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