Anneka Rice: I fooled people for years with fictitious agent
CLEMMIE HART was the show business agent who managed the career of Anneka Rice, cheerfully fielding job offers that came her way.
A popular figure in the industry for nearly a decade, she was friendly to celebrity bookers over email, but politely refused invitations to social functions. Finally, the reason can be revealed: Clemmie did not exist. Rice invented her after parting from her real agent.
The star of Treasure Hunt and Challenge Anneka had stepped back from work to raise her three young boys, but the requests still rolled in from I’m A Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! and myriad other shows. She needed someone to deal with them.
“It was a two-edged sword, because part of me did want to hang out in a safari lodge with Christopher Biggins, learning to track lions. It kind of killed me to say no, but I had small children. Sending emails from Clemmie made me feel part of it still,” Rice admitted.
Once when Rice accepted a job, she even took “Clemmie” along with her. “I’ve never confessed this. To this day I feel awful about it. My friend Lisa came with me and pretended to be Clemmie. We didn’t dare catch each other’s eye because we’d have lost it,” she told Radio Times.
Rice said “the last straw” with her previous agent was being asked to consider a show called Curry and Rice –a cookery format co-hosted by Blue Peter’s Mark Curry.
Having invented her alter ego, Rice could not resist having fun. When she was asked to take part in The Games, a televised athletics competition, Clemmie wrote back: “We’d love to but, between you and me, Anneka’s a bit out of shape.”
She eventually decided to stop, lest she be found out, and sent a final email from Clemmie claiming that she was pregnant and giving up work.
Rice now has a real agent and has turned the experience into a Radio 4 show, The Clemmie Hart Years, to be broadcast on June 12.
“You couldn’t do any of this now,” she said. “It’s very much an escapade of its time.”