Being a brief list of the celebrities that I’ve come into fleeting contact with over the last month or so. The gentle reader is expected to bear in mind that said celebrities are unlikely to be of the stature of your major Hollywood Oscar winner, since most were spotted milling around Covent Garden, Soho or Piccadilly Circus…
- The guy with the hair from the Salon TV show.
For the Americans among us, The Salon is a reality TV show set in a hair and beauty establishment (allegedly just off London’s shimmeringly glamourless Shaftesbury Avenue). The gentleman I spotted from the show was strolling down towards Piccadilly Circus one late-winter’s evening, with a few passers-by taking pictures of him. He looked slightly dumb-founded and as if he was rather enjoying it. - Matt Lucas, TV’s entertaining man-in-a-baby-suit.
Matt Lucas (alias “What are the final scores?” George Dawes) went to the same university as me. In fact he not only went to the same university as me, but he went at the same time and was friends with a couple of friends of mine. But I barely new him, and so didn’t feel an urge to reintroduce myself to him when we both found ourselves stuffing our faces on nearby tables in the Leicester Square Kentucky Fried Chicken. Some poor, rather dumb-looking chap tried to get an autograph, but clearly it wasn’t an appropriate time. - The quite-cute-one-off-The-Office.
Celebrities are clearly intrinsically grumpy people. I go to this hair place in Soho, and have done since I worked at Time Out. I always knew that it used to be cool, but I’d never seen an actual living celebrity in there before. Today was different, however. Because Martin Freeman (who plays the nice one from the Office) stomped in eager for hair-rescue. The only unfortunate thing about this encounter is probably that he’s not really known (primarily at least) for the quality of his haircuts. In fact maybe a bit anti-known. So in a sense him coming into my hair place probably isn’t the best sign of my continued style. - Stephen Gately.
The anaemic butterfly in bizarrely successful prefab pop-group Boyzone somehow managed to defy nature by becoming a weird fat caterpillar-like non-solo-star. But that was then – as the other day my work colleagues and I spotted the bad-skinned and newly-skinny, tiny pop-singing, proto-West-End-starring Joseph-in-his-designer-stressed-denim while on our way to a nice little restaurant in Covent Garden. He kind of had that look on his face that Chandler got in Friends when he came into the room with his new Tom Selleck-alike moustache. Only scarier and much less good-natured. We avoided him. And maybe pointed a little.
So there you go. My last month’s celebrity encounters. Anyone spotted anyone more interesting?