Screen Break
Pissing with the rich and famous - Kelner at the Grand National
By Martin Kelner on Sep 3, 2006 - 5:46:00 PM
|
|
A well-known television newscaster once told me how he hailed a cab in the suburbs of London, and climbed into the back of the vehicle apparently unrecognised by the driver. On checking the rear view mirror, however, the cabbie registered his passenger’s celebrity, and did a swift double take, before spluttering, “’Ere, ‘ere…do you know who you are?”
I only tell the story because I had a similar moment when I shared a pee at Aintree on Saturday with William Roache, TV’s Ken Barlow. For the benefit of female readers, who may be unfamiliar with the etiquette of such urinal encounters, I should explain that there isn’t any.
There really is no universally recognised code of behaviour to consult on those occasions when you find yourself standing next to a star of stage and screen with your penis in your hand. Unless the encounter has been pre-arranged - as a leisure time activity as it were - possibly with money changing hands, in a style that will be familiar to readers of the more lurid newspapers, a certain awkwardness is inevitable. It is unwise to spark up a conversation lest you lose concentration and wet his shoes, or even worse your own; and a nod or smile of recognition could easily be misinterpreted, especially if your eyes were inadvertently to stray downwards.
Not that I would have had much to contribute to any conversation anyway, as I do not watch Coronation Street, and all I know of Mr Roache is that he once sued somebody for saying he was boring, and at a recent election, he campaigned, I believe, for one of the fringe political parties; UKIP or the Conservatives, or someone.
It seemed therefore that our meeting was destined to fizzle out in silence, possibly with one of us saying, “I’ll ‘phone you,” or “We must have lunch some time,” as we washed hands and parted company, but nothing more significant than that. However, as my new friend removed his hands from the hot air drier with something of a flourish, he flashed me a brilliant smile, delivered a cheery actor’s “Hello,” turned on his heel and left.
This, I expect, is William Roache’s coping strategy. It must be awfully difficult to walk around doing normal things, like shopping and micturating (not simultaneously, obviously) when your face is on TV every night and you are constantly being bearded by gibbering starstruck idiots blathering at you. Mr Roache was clearly demonstrating the famous person’s version of getting your retaliation in first.
Aintree on Grand National day is uncommonly fertile ground for the starstruck. I saw Cliff Richard as well, although not in the toilets - I expect he has some sort of private arrangement like the royal family – and the comedian Johnny Vegas, whose coping strategy is to talk to anyone and everyone; and you try getting rid of him. He was on Aintree’s closed circuit TV, taking the mickey out of the sponsors John Smith’s, grabbing the microphone, and bellowing for some reason: “I am a horse.”
I can never decide whether the wayward Vegas is a comedy genius, or some kind of roly-poly simpleton taking us all for a ride, which I reckon probably makes him a comedy genius. At his best, he always seems on the verge of going completely out of control, and that is why we laugh. It is uncomfortable laughter to begin with, but somehow Vegas draws you into his madness, and eventually it is impossible not to surrender to him.
That is what Sue Barker discovered on Grandstand when she found herself on something of a runaway train, interviewing the eccentric comic, who - unusually for a young man from St Helens - was wearing a sand-coloured hunting jacket and brown trilby hat.
“Sue, I have sometimes given my life over to drink,” Vegas said, somewhat unnecessarily, before commenting on some footage from a previous year of him in jockey’s silks mounting a racehorse. “My gentle man breasts encourage the horse to run faster,” said Vegas, “The horse feels younger, like it was being fed, by a mother sat aloft.”
A lesser woman might have been tempted to curtail the interview at this point, but Sue is a veteran of thousands of editions of Question Of Sport through which she has had to surrender herself to paroxysms of laughter at Ally McCoist and John Parrott’s desperate japery; Sue has carried the mantle of “golden girl of British tennis”; she has done All Bran adverts; she was reported as being romantically involved with Cliff Richard for goodness sake. If there is anybody in Britain whom it is impossible to embarrass, it is Sue Barker.
Vegas ploughed on. Over a shot of the jockeys’ room, he boomed: “In the Isle of Man, they are breeding people only two feet high. Your days are numbered. Table tennis, table tennis, when will you take on a fat professional. You sit there watching Seabiscuit. It’s a bad film.”
The pictures of the jockeys enjoying the badinage emphasised the strength of the BBC’s National coverage. There is an “access all areas” quality to it; a microphone stuck under “Slippers” Madden’s nose at the moment of victory, jockeys wandering round in towels watching the re-run of the race minutes after they have washed off the Aintree mud; the cameras and microphones are everywhere, and everyone is happy to see them.
Well, not absolutely everywhere, as it happens. There has to be somewhere for Ken Barlow and me to share a quiet moment.
