Brilliant fun week staying at a lovely Sandals resort in Jamaica. 5 Star resort and we all had 2 bath tubs and a swimming pool in our rooms. Pretty amazing. Obviously ITV doesn’t pay for this lol. Sandals sponsors it and gets it resort in the background on TV so everyone is happy:) Sandals staff are great.

Rusty Lee has an amazing amount of energy and was fantastic fun. We landed after our long flights and went straight into filming and even by 8pm in the evening Rusty was up singing to everyone in the hotel and dancing about with the hotel band as we filmed her singing ‘No Worries’. Great :)

This was a cooking show so we cooked many Caribbean dishes in different areas round resort then had a day out filming a coffee plantation and a farm. Both of which were brilliant and learned a lot. We even had a police escort to get though Kingstown in the morning rush hour lol.

We had a great team with Will directing, Rich on sound, Sara as Home Ecc, and Natalie as our Sandals fixer. We also had several folk from the resort helping especially Ian one of the managers.

We then had a last day of filming to do with a trip down a river and a trip to a local market. This got cancelled as a category 5 hurricane was heading our way and everyone on the island needed to batten down the hatches in preparation. So then started our briefings etc. I was quite excited until I heard actually what a category 5 hurricane is. It means an average wind speed of 180 mph gusting 260mph and it would destroy almost everything in its path!

So we then turned into a bit of a news crew as it came our way. But fortunately 2 hrs before hitting land (so unpredictable) it veered south and dropped to a Category 4. We were on the north of the island and maybe had 100mph winds so like a very bad UK storm. A few spots on the south of the island got a Category 3 hurricane. One town had 70% of its homes destroyed. So extremely glad the Cat 5 never hit the island as when we woke the next day it would have been to a destroyed island and probably many deaths. We probably would have been fine in our 5 star hotel as Sandals looked after everyone very well including their staff and we had big buildings that had survived a few hurricanes already. Anyway will be a trip to remember.

Heres just a wee clip I filmed on my TV of the last in 5 video clips from This Morning on ITV which I filmed, did sound, drone and lighting, Anthony Brown Directed and did second camera. Natalie Bloxham produced and generally sorted all the cooking stuff ready for John Torode to do his magic with actually cooking. My first cook show and I thought it would be sort of pretend cooking. But no it was incredibly great tasting food every time:)

We filmed at the beautiful Alladale Estate which was awesome and covered in snow. I did my first live broadcast through the Inspire 2 with X7 camera. The Cendance controller with its SDI output worked perfectly for it. Got an Adrenline rush there:) Next stop Sardinia with ITV and Gino D'Acampo for my second cooking show:)

JUNE 2024 - Jamaica filming with Rusty Lee and a Hurricane!

JANUARY 2019 - ITV 'This Morning' Torode on the Road