Behind the scenes of TV’s Love your Weekend

On Sunday 11 January you’ll have found us at Manor Farm in Alton, Hampshire, being interviewed by Alan Titchmarsh for ITV’s Love your Weekend. In this article, Natalie takes you behind the scenes.

You know the metaphor of a duck gliding over water but paddling furiously beneath the surface? Well it was all a bit like that. What you see on screen may look calm and stress-free, but we faced some big logistical challenges to get to that point.

We chose our ponies with care. Sam (who is genuinely unflappable), together with his carriage, and Big Mac, one of our older horses who loves his job almost as much as he loves people! Lauren volunteered to be our wheelchair-using participant to be shown sharing the carriage driving. A small army of staff and volunteers from Park Lane made sure that everything ran smoothly, from loading people, horses and carriage safely into the lorry, to negotiating the narrow lanes leading to the farm (thanks to the superstar driving skills of Peter!), to manoeuvring Lauren’s wheelchair onto the carriage.

Once there, our first priority was to assess the environment that the horses were about to find themselves in. We were especially nervous about the big light-reflecting screen, and all of the equipment. They’d never have seen anything like this before, and that’s a very big deal for any horse.

Some of the Park Lane team on the set at Manor Farm

On film you see the horses calmly standing, but earlier in the day we’d walked them across to where the filming would happen to show them all these potentially scary new things. And bless them, they took all of it in their stride. When Alan asked me how we chose horses that would be suitable for RDA activities, I was able to say that a calm demeanour was absolutely essential, and there was the evidence of Sam and Mac behind us.

We were excited to be invited to Manor Farm and it was fascinating to be part of the process. Alan Titchmarsh really is as lovely as you’d think, a perfect gentleman who put all of us at ease. The production crew worked so hard! No sitting around for this lot, not a moment was wasted, but they still found the time to be welcoming to us all.

So thank you to everyone we met that day, and to the fabulous Park Lane team I had with me to enable me to stand and talk to Alan without stress.

Watch the feature now on the ITV Love Your Weekend website, it starts 14 minutes in to the episode.

You can also read about it on the RDA website