Sunday, 7 August 2016

Five Minutes of Fame.

Here’s a picture of me posing with the rest of the contestants in a TV quiz show which I didn’t win. And there’s a little story attached to this one, too (isn’t there always?)


A few nights after the show was transmitted (on Channel 4, which was a bit cultural back then) I was sitting at the reception desk in the theatre where I worked, when I spotted a group of teenage girls regarding me with some intensity through the glass doors. (I think I returned their stares with my laid back, quizzical look - you know, one eyebrow raised - but I don’t quite remember.)

Eventually one of them came in and approached me.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, with just the slightest hint of what I would like to think was wide-eyed wonder but probably wasn’t, ‘were you on Fifteen-to-One on Tuesday?’

‘I was, yes,’ I replied brightly, expecting to be given an invitation to a knicker-throwing party somewhere on the sleazy side of the local gasworks.

‘Oh, right,’ she said, and then went back to her companions. They giggled a bit and walked away.

Later that evening one of the actors came hurrying down the stairs and said ‘Hey, I saw you on the telly on Tuesday.’

The aggregated time span of both incidents amounts to my five minutes of celebrity, and I think that’s probably it for this life.

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