The Graham Norton Show
On NYE 2025, Alison Limerick appeared on The Graham Norton Show (series 33 episode 13). As her musical director, it was my job to prepare and rehearse the band in the run-up to the show and I thought it might be worth talking a little about the process.
The John Lewis Ad
As part of their Xmas 2025 PR campaign, John Lewis/Saatchi & Saatchi decided to use Alison’s club hit Where Love Lives as the music for a nostalgic look back at the 90s. As a result, Sony Music (who own the original recordings) climbed on board and got their own PR team into action. This resulted in Alison being booked for this episode of The Graham Norton Show and would also soon entail her performance of three songs on BBC Radio 2’s up-coming episode of The Piano Room in Feb 2026.
Preparation
Alison and I often meet up once a week for our ongoing projects, so one of these days was used to re-arrange the 6+ minute classic mix into a 3:30 version suitable for prime time TV. Once we’d done this, we sent a piano/vocal version out to the band, as well as the production company, who already wanted the edited version for storyboarding. We rehearsed the band under a shroud of secrecy (we weren’t allowed to tell anyone we were pre-recording the NYE show), then sent the full band version on to production.
The Show
The rest of the story was as might be predicted, with arrival on the morning of the recording, band set-up and soundcheck, followed by rehearsals for the show, then once again for the cameras. The audience were let in around 18:00 and we were all set to play at the end of the show. All the production crew were epic on the day, and the technicians were truly at another level compared with what the band has to deal with at venues around the world. God bless The Beeb! 🙂
You can currently watch the show on this link
…although it will soon be taken down from the BBC site. Alison’s segment is at 48:40
