The real shock came a month later, when the BBC's website carried a story announcing that the family who now owned the hare had heard The Grand Masquerade at their home in Egypt. I followed all this with some amusement, happy to see that our little baby was still spreading its ripples in the media pond. The Independent picked up on this next day (“Author calls for owner of jeweled amulet that bewitched the nation to come forward”), and that started it bouncing round the internet again. “ Masquerade author appeals for hare,” it headlined the story. Five days later, a news website called This Is Gloucestershire repeated Barker's words, but mis-attributed them to Williams himself. Our programme, titled The Grand Masquerade, went out on July 11, 2009, closing with an appeal from Mike Barker asking whoever now owned the hare to release it for an exhibition of some kind. “I was always worried it would come to the surface again and disturb what I was doing. “Whenever in the past any mention of it came on, in a quiz game on television or something like that, it would spawn lots of letters and so on,” he explained. But it had seemed churlish to speak to the television crew while turning us down, and now he was glad he'd changed his mind. Speaking on the later BBC Four documentary, Williams explained that he'd decided to do their own programme because it promised to concentrate as much on his recent work as on Masquerade itself.
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