We love you gadget fans!

Monday 20 April

Dancers on the Super Theatre stage at the live show

Two years ago, a bunch of blokes in suits from a company called Upper Street Events took me and my boss, Richard Pearson, out for fish and chips and said they’d like to help us organise a live exhibition based around The Gadget Show. It seemed like a good idea, the fish and chips were very tasty and so it all began.

After a whole load of planning and a lot of worries about whether any exhibitors or visitors would turn up as the recession really started to bite, the show finally opened at 10am on Friday 17th April. Amazingly, tickets had completely sold out two weeks earlier and there’d been a big rush right at the end with new exhibitors realising they just had to be involved. As I arrived at the NEC, I was gobsmacked to see the size of the queues waiting for the doors to open; NEC stewards told me we had set a new record for the longest pre-show queue ever in the history of the place. I love tech fans. And so it seems do NEC stewards – they later told me that they’d never come across a happier and friendlier group of visitors to a show.

Hall 1 looked incredible as the visitors poured in and over the 153 stands. The aim was always to produce a truly interactive exhibition and brilliantly almost every stand had stuff to do – Gadget Show Live was a truly hands on experience and every time I managed to make it down to the exhibition across the three days the buzz was fantastic. There was everything to see from latest cutting edge tech to power tool drag racing. There was every conceivable type of gaming to try your hand at. There was a personal transport test track, F1 cars and a fighter jet you could sit in, endless brilliant fitness gadgets to test, awesome electronic drum kits, massage chairs, OLED TVs, hi-tech watches, simulators, tech advice from the geek squad, photography classes, free chips, even Jason Bradbury in a corner signing copies of his book ‘Dot.Robot’… I could go on forever, it was gadget fan heaven.

Of course, my main role alongside Richard Pearson was to produce the whole Super Theatre Show. With possibly the best presenting team on TV at our disposable we were pretty sure we were onto a winner but we wanted to keep up the interactive theme of the rest of the show and get Suzi, Jason, Ortis and Jon in amongst the audiences. There were times on the rehearsal day when we were trying to perfect stuff as the set was still being built around us. I wasn’t sure we’d ever be ready for the first performance at 11am the next morning … but we were ready. Suzi and the boys put on an utterly amazing performance every day, in every show. In fact, many people enjoyed it so much they asked if we will be producing a DVD of the show that they could buy to watch again. Not sure what the answer to that is yet, but watch this space.

I do just have to mention here what an extraordinary job Suzi did. As you know, she was very seriously ill a few weeks back and the road back to fitness has been a painfully slow one for her. But she insisted all along that she had to be at Gadget Show Live to meet the thousands of people who have supported our show over the last five years. Her doctor had told her that ideally she needed another few weeks before she would be fully fit, but Suzi being Suzi didn’t want to disappoint anyone. She put her heart and soul into the Super Theatre Show and proved just why she’s so popular with Gadget Show fans; she’s a real tough lady.

It was a truly extraordinary three days. Those blokes in suits from Upper Street Events had done an inspired job of creating a very good show, but what made it great were the thirty one thousand Gadget Show fans who came to visit. Each day as I walked back to my hotel across the NEC campus, every single person I passed was wearing a beaming smile and raving about what a great time they’d had.I had to agree, I’d had a blast.

Last night when I finally got home, my wife had fish and chips waiting for me… it somehow felt like a neat bit of book ending.

Thanks so much to everyone who came along and we really hope to see even more of you when we do it all again next year. I promise it will be bigger, better and even more gadgety!

Ewan Keil, Executive Producer, The Gadget Show & Gadget Show Live