My top minor celebrity encounters
A life of briefly bumping into people
There is always something quietly odd about being in the same room as a celebrity, as if another world has intruded into your life. The fact of the famous person’s presence feels overwhelming, as does the social imperative of having to be seen not to take a blind bit of notice of them, even while being aware that you will spend the rest of the day saying ‘Guess who I saw!’
Of course, if you really wanted to be cool, you wouldn’t even do that, perhaps only drop a reference years later if the person’s name happened to crop up naturally, but really, it’s hard enough to make conversation these days as it is.
I was in a Brussels cafe recently and was informed by a friend that at the table adjacent was the Belgian singer Stromae. Now I’m a fan of Stromae – I think ‘Alors on Danse’ is an absolute banger, and the video to ‘Fils de joie’ is one of the best things anybody has done in any medium this century. I also know, because my cousin told me, that he had some problems with malaria medicine which he has apparently never quite recovered from.
Clearly, given that I was encountering him on his free Sunday, and he was with his family, it would have been crass to do anything but ignore the man. It’s just hard to do that while also checking someone for symptoms of malaria. I guess this is the problem of celebrity, that we trying to react as we do to everyone else to a person we already know things about, while at the same time trying to keep an eye on whether they confirming our pre-existing notions of them. For his part, Stromae’s concluding ‘On y va’ offered no clue as to whether he was still suffering the after-effects of a tropical disease.
In this spirit, I present to you a potted history of my own minor celebrity encounters.
1) Cast of ‘Outside Edge’, 1993
In 1993, they filmed the television series Outside Edge on the cricket pitch opposite my house in Nottingham, England, where I grew up. (I have never claimed to be anything other than middle class). The series is by all accounts a gentle ensemble comedy revolving around two couples involved in their local amateur cricket club; Timothy Spall and Josie Lawrence featured in the cast. Personally I’ve never seen it and rectifying that is not a priority at present.
In this case there were two aspects of the of the minor celebrity encounters linked to the show. Firstly, the camera crew wanted to film a scene in our bathroom, which I was certainly more excited about than my parents were. As it happens our bathroom was the wrong set-up to film in anyway.
Later, on a day where they were filming, I walked on over to the club. I met a couple of young women who were autograph hunters – to be specific, they were fans of the actor Josie Lawrence. I remember a young woman with dark hair, maybe about 16, speaking with evident love of Lawrence. She thought that I’d come from afar to hang out at the periphery of the set, that I was living the life of a fan, saying that must have been harder for me as a boy. In reality I’d just walked there from over the road.
Anyway, I went with the groupies to the edge of the village green, where I saw Lawrence (I think she was having a cigarette) and Spall sat down on the ground. I didn’t know what to say to him so I said, ‘It’s nice to see the stars out in Nottingham’, to which Spall replied in an if I recall avuncular tone, ‘Not stars, mate, real people.’
I don’t think either of us emerged from that exchange very well.