Country Mouse

Giles Wood

Dash it. Had we only left our hotel room five seconds earlier, we could have been sharing a lift with Nick Knowles. Timing is everything in life. ‘Nick Knowles?’ said Mary. I tried to explain his televisual pedigree: ‘ DIY SOS?... I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!?’

But Mary was none the wiser. He was staying at the same edgy Shoreditch hotel as us for the 2019 National Television Awards. Downstairs, he caught my eye briefly in the lobby, but not a flicker of recognition appeared on his vulpine features. Knowles was out of the lobby before I could explain to him that I, too, was a minor celebrity. But perhaps he already knew my work as an opinionated armchair television critic on Gogglebox.

The TV choirmaster Gareth Malone and the ceramicist Grayson (no relation to Larry) Perry both recognised me two years ago at the Grierson Awards but I found Knowles’s blanking me unnerving.

When you have opted to keep only one foot in the so-called real world, and to dip the other into the murky and powerfully distorting shallows of television, then insecurity comes with the territory. Remember Alan Partridge begging for a second series? And yet I resent it when I get too much recognition, as in petrol stations up north, the security queue at Stansted Airport, or in supermarkets – Lidl more so than Waitrose. Or too little, as at the centenary commemoration service for the Battle of the Somme at Marlborough College chapel.

For those slebs who fail to bag that second series, I must remind myself there does exist the showbiz industry equivalent of the welfare state. Any number of irreverent quiz shows, Robinson Crusoe- type survival ordeals, cookery elimination programmes and – most profitably – panto, will provide a former ‘star’ with a medium-term safety net.

The day after the National Television Awards, we were pictured on the red carpet outside the O2 by the Huffington Post, which described us as ‘ Gogglebox royalty’. Very pleasant, but we slebs are now so many. In January 2016, the death of David Bowie was quickly followed by that of Harry Potter actor Alan Rickman within the same week. By the time rock star Keith Emerson of ELP died in March, the compassion was not so much fatigued as a surreal element was beginning to nudge in.

Fortunately, June Whitfield left us three weeks before Windsor Davies, but how will the future cope with the logistical problems when whole penny cascades’ worth of Love Island runnersup expire simultaneously? It won’t be a statistical blip; it will be down to sheer volume and inevitability. These annual cascades will be causing headaches for obituary writers who, like most of the ‘society’ photographers outside showbiz parties, haven’t a clue who most of the new celebrities are and have to be tipped off by their PRS.

In my childhood, the numbers of celebrities were manageable. We could all recognise Brigitte Bardot, George Best, Taylor and Burton, Peter Sellers, the Beatles, the Stones, Cliff and Elvis.

I remember the night it all started going wrong. It was on the 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show with its Nothin’ Like a Dame dance routine by assorted newscasters and presenters whose faces were familiar but whose names had never registered. This was the watershed moment when it became clear that, just as after Duchamp’s urinal anything could be art, suddenly anybody could be a celebrity. Newsreaders, art forgers, weathermen, darts players, football managers, pétomanes, even serial killers...

But back to the National Television Awards. We had left the edgy hotel in Shoreditch and were proceeding slightly faster than a horse and cart towards the O2 arena. Yet our progress was in fact too fast because we arrived before the red carpet was open and had to make another circuit of the O2. Time for me to practise getting my Dermots right. ‘Will it be Dermot Murnaghan or Dermot O’leary presenting the awards?’ I chivvied. ‘If we win, Mary?’

‘Use it or lose it,’ came her terse response (referring to my brain).

Fashionably late is the recipe for a good red-carpet appearance apparently. We hobbits waited for what seemed like hours in the entrails of Mordor before minders ushered us the wrong way up the carpet without the advantage of Frodo’s invisibility cloak. I love cock-ups and was in my element, hissing to Mary very loudly, as we passed ranks of photographers and paparazzi, ‘This is a farce, Mary. Bad timing.’

We needn’t have worried. There was a deafening roar: at the exact time the minders launched us onto the carpet like a dodgy Mars space probe, Westlife the boy band were simultaneously launched by their ‘people’, creating a wave of excitement that totally eclipsed Gogglebox royalty.

I say ‘boy band’ but these were men with fully descended testes. One or two members of Joe Public recognised our faces peeking out of the mêlée as we were both heavily bedecked with car coats and muffled with scarves. No one told us it was against red carpet protocol not to disrobe outer garments. But, for me, getting cold means I get a cold. And oh the joy of coming in the wake of Westlife.

Luckily we didn’t win, ensuring no embarrassing acceptance speeches. What made my evening was sitting behind greater celebrity Antony Head. You know the best-loved long-running advert of all time – the Gold Blend ad? The story of love and coffee.

I wanted a selfie but never plucked up the courage to ask. I know my place in the celebrity pecking order.

The Oldie