The gaffes that say the most, says CAMILLA TOMINEY

Producers rush you into position as if you’re about to go on air the very next second, only for there to be a five minute segment on haemorrhoids and a horoscopes phone-in before you.

That can feel like a long time when you’re on location or in some tiny studio room somewhere, watching a monitor of your own face staring back at you.

So I’ve got a tiny bit of sympathy for the Sainsbury’s boss who got caught on camera singing “we’re in the money” as he waited to be interviewed about the supermarket’s merger with Asda.

It’s really not the sort of song you want to be filmed belting out when thousands of jobs are at risk.

Mike Coupe said he was recorded by ITV in an “unguarded moment” and has since apologised.

“It was an unfortunate choice of song, from the musical 42nd Street, which I saw last year,” he said.

I suppose we should all thank our lucky stars he hadn’t recently seen The Book of Mormon.

A spokesman for Sainsbury’s added: “We all know these songs stay in your head. To attach any wider meaning to this innocent, personal moment is preposterous.”

Preposterous? Hardly. We’re all at the mercy of our own subconscious. I’ve been guilty of bursting into hysterics at the most inopportune moments – once during a reading at St Albans Cathedral, on another occasion when I was taking part on a mock trial at university.

When we were planning my mother’s funeral, I remember the priest asking what music we wanted and, for some reason, I blurted out: “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead?”

It was one of those “if you don’t laugh, you cry” moments but unfortunately the Catholic Church doesn’t really do humour, even though my late mother would have undoubtedly found it hilarious.

We settled instead for Brothers In Arms by Dire Straits which, of course, is really cheery with its “fields of destruction” and “baptisms of fire”.

Have I ever been caught on camera saying something I shouldn’t? Probably.

Only last week I was filming an interview in the back of a horse-drawn carriage through Windsor and openly questioned my own sanity and that of the American news crew around me (the world appears to have gone a bit wedding bonkers).

But actual insults? Probably not. I largely leave that to the politicians.

like the time Gordon Brown was famously overheard insulting Gillian Duffy after she dared to mention immigration during the 2010 election campaign.

Blaming his staff for introducing him to the grandmother of two in Rochdale, he forgot he was wearing his BBC microphone when he later described her in the car as “just a sort of bigoted woman”, before being forced into a grovelling apology, live on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show.

Barack Obama’s halo lost some of its sparkle when he was inadvertently caught on camera slagging off Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a bitch-fest with Nicolas Sarkozy.

“I can’t stand him. He’s a liar,” said the French president, to which his US counterpart reportedly replied: “You’re tired of him; what about me? I have to deal with him every day.”

And who can forget George W Bush’s “Yo, Blair!” or David Cameron’s boast that he made the Queen “purr”?

John Major landed in trouble in 1993 when he said he didn’t understand why people voted for him.

Describing Eurosceptic MPs as “bastards” and threatening to “crucify” them, he thought the microphone had been switched off and said he could not see “how such a complete wimp like me keeps winning everything”.

Isn’t it rather undemocratic that we only find out what our elected leaders really think when we eavesdrop?

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LABOUR’S first mistake was hyping up the local elections as if they were going to be some kind of landslide.

The party also completely underestimated the impact of the anti-Semitism problem that still haunts Jeremy Corbyn in areas like Barnet, which has a large Jewish community.

And they forget that, on the whole, the silent majority of British people do not relish the idea of a pro-Russia anti-Nato overgrown Marxist being prime minister.

The biggest threat to the Tories is not Mr Corbyn but whichever moderate is being lined up to replace him.

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EVERY so often I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I have forgotten to immunise one of the children.

On several occasions I have found myself frantically thumbing through their little red health books to make sure I’ve remembered all their jabs.

We rely on the NHS to remind us about these vital health checks. So I have nothing but sympathy for the hundreds of women who have been so terribly let down by the NHS’s breast screening service.

When things like this happen, it is easy to start thinking about the story in numbers – 450,000 women aged 68-71 missed their mammogram reminders and as many as 270 may have died prematurely as a result.

But each and every woman affected by this isn’t a statistic – she is a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter.

Why on earth is the NHS relying on a single computer algorithm when it comes to cancer screening that could be a matter of life and death?

Surely there has to be a human back-up for when computers go wrong, as has so tragically happened in this devastating case.

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IT SEEMS cats do have a sense of humour after all.

The doctor whom I referred to in last week’s column has got in touch to say he was misquoted in the original article about the difference between cats and dogs.

Marc Bekoff says: “There is no reason cats can’t or don’t have a sense of humour,” after he was reported to have said: “I have seen no evidence of a sense of humour in cats.”

He has written a rebuttal of the previous article, pointing out that cats can be funny – which anyone who has ever owned one knows.

Incidentally, Dr Bekoff told me he’d love to own a cat but his allergies prevent him from doing so.

Clearly what he needs is a hairless cat, if only to prove that cats can indeed be comedic.

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SCIENTIFIC study has confirmed that stress can make you go grey, backing up years of anecdotal evidence on the subject.

I find the idea of people’s hair going grey overnight fascinating and frightening.

When Marie Antoinette was led to the guillotine at the age of 37, her hair is said to have turned white the night before her execution.

But historians point out the doomed French queen had probably just appeared without her wig for the first time.

The English lawyer Sir Thomas More, who was later canonised, was executed in the Tower of London in 1535, and again his hair was reported to have turned white before his death.

But there is a more recent example. I was surprised to read in the obituaries of Barbara Bush, who died last month, that the former First Lady went from reddish-brown to white when her daughter Robin died of leukaemia at the age of three in 1953.

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NOTE to Kate Winslet: if you’re going to urge women to cover up on the red carpet, it’s probably wise not to wear dresses that are practically slashed to the navel