My Second 15 Minutes of Fame
You know there is nothing quite like receiving praise from ones peers. It puts you on an emotional high and even the ‘large-boned’ such as I can, in such circumstances, be seen skipping along the road with complete abandon. That is the way I felt the other day on having seen a wonderful and very positive review of Riff-Raffles in the Sunday edition of The Nation newspaper. The review was a half-page article, in this broadsheet newspaper, and included a picture of the front cover of the book. In addition there was also a slightly abridged version of the article on the nation web site from early the same day. The review was written by James Eckardt who not only writes for the newspaper, but is also an author whose eighth book has recently been published.
How I managed to stop myself from running into the street and thrusting a copy of this newspaper article into the hands of every passerby I do not know, especially as any form of self restraint has often proved most elusive to me when it comes to sharing my own good news or good fortune. Whilst I bounded around town that day with a jaunty stride and a fixed broad smile I believe I may have forced a few of my hotel guests to read the article whilst endeavouring to eat their breakfasts, but other than that I was remarkably restrained. I did, however, spend a large part of the day entering my name and then ‘Riff-Raffles’ into the Google search engine and looking in wonderment and the number of times I appeared in both of these categories.
Fame, alas, for ZZ list celebrities such as me is nothing save a fleeting moment in the spotlight. I recalled Andy Warhol’s comment “The day will come when everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” and thought how true that statement has become today with our televisions sets crammed with, mainly dreadful, reality shows. Singers, actors, idiots locked away for weeks together whilst being spied on like laboratory mice and on and on the list goes. It seemed to me as if Warhol and Orwell had combined to create the world we live in today, and I have just joined the party.
The truth is though this is not my first relationship with that brief spell of notoriety. In my time as an estate agent, I appeared on a dire daytime chat show called Vanessa, hosted by the larger than life, archetypal Essex girl grown up, Vanessa Phelps. This was the release day for the movie Notting Hill starring Hugh Grant and the woman of my dreams, Julia Roberts. Vanessa assembled various nobodies, such as I, to discuss the movie from various angles with me there to suggest how it may affect property prices in the area. I was collected at 06:00 by a BBC limousine and driven the short distance to their west London studios. I had, the previous evening, ensured my video recorder was set to record my performance and that the spare television was taken to my office and set up for the staff to tune into.
Up to the time the limousine arrived I was excited. No nerves whatsoever, just a tingling sensation every time the thought of being on live television crossed my mind, which was approximately eight-hundred and twenty times every second from the moment I had agreed to appear. However, having arrived at the studios and been shown to the green room, which by the way was painted blue, I now started to wonder what on Earth I had let myself in for and began to experience one panic attack after another with each paralyzing me more than the last. I tried to eat some of the wide range of free food that was provided for us guests, but succeeded only in gagging on the first mouthful and almost dropping the entire breakfast plate over my own lap.
We were given a brief tour of the studio, followed by a session with Vanessa to explain what would happen and for the sound engineers to undertake voice tests. Vanessa told us where she would be standing and detailed the questions she would be directing at each of us, thus giving us the opportunity to prepare our replies in advance of the live broadcast. It all seemed very straightforward and the questions were rather basic requiring only a simple response. I started to relax again and sat back in the makeup room imaging myself as a seasoned television professional.
The time arrived for the show and with our section only a few minutes away we were ushered towards the stage area. Vanessa then chatted about the upcoming movie and we walked to our designated seats to the orchestrated applause from the assembled studio audience. As the show’s host chatted away, several members of the audience would jump up and ask questions simply in order for them to attract the cameraman’s attention. These would be mainly girls in their early twenties whom I considered overdressed simply to be in the audience of a late-morning television chat show. I later learned that these were girls seeking fame and fortune, hoping to be talent spotted through their regular appearances as participating members of such audiences. Almost without exception, I felt every one of these girls would stand a considerably increased chance of achieving fame if they remained seated with their mouths firmly closed, but then what do I know.
Eventually the time arrived for our individual introductions. There was a young man who was a film critic for a local paper hoping to one day have his own show — as it happens I saw him several years later hosting a Channel Four film review programme. There was a fashion editor from Vogue magazine who looked as though she studiously ignored anything to do with fashion and had appeared to me to have been dragged out of some late night bar. Then there was a very attractive young girl who was the manager of a well established Notting Hill wine bar and local resident. I had tried to hit on her in the Green Room but was rebuffed and told she was engaged to a football player. Finally there was me, a bloody estate agent and Vanessa introducing me as the type of person we all detest as much as the taxman and other supposed pariahs. My nerves returned.
When the first of my questions came I sat with my mouth opened and frozen in horror. This was not one of the questions I had been primed for and was deliberately aimed at making me look stupid — something I believed myself more than capable of without any help from the large Essex girl with the microphone. I did manage to gather my senses sufficiently to respond but I was stuttering through my response and to make matters worse sweating profusely, shaking and red faced. The next question was similarly unscripted, although I responded a little quicker this time, so quick in fact that all of the words merged into one and even I did not understand what I was saying when I played the recording back on returning home.
A several-minute session of the world’s most stupid studio audience questions followed before I could escape back to the green room and gulp down a large tumbler of whiskey. On returning to work, everyone was very polite in saying how good I was but I knew the truth — I stank and never ever wish to appear on television again. Despite my appalling performance over the next year I received several requests from television companies to appear on this show or that, but declined without hesitation.
