My Life With The Stars

A life spent in radio you'd think I'd met a fair number of famous people and you'd be right. If only I could remember who they were. Too many were politicians, who being all things to all men draw you in even as they draw away. You cannot get close. The stars do things differently, they simply adore everybody. Away from the limelight the stars have work to do, among others with work to do, which is to make them sparkle.

I once met Madonna. She was in the fish queue at Waitrose. I didn’t recognise the ill tempered squirt until she whirled round to blank the grinning counter hands. She was so surprised to see someone standing behind her she stepped back. I looked down and shrugged my shoulders, like what do you expect when you live in the public eye? Whereupon she whirled round again. She marched out with a bag of mussels under her arm. Whenever her name is mentioned you'll hear me say, 'I've seen her muscles.'

Being something of a boulevardier I pass a dozen or more famous faces in any one year, actors, writers, musicians, politicians out for a constitutional, all sorts. I see them but they don't see me. A recent find was David Attenborough, I autumn watched him in Foyle’s looking at one of his own books. He didn't buy it and neither did I. Later in Westminster station I stood ten feet from Ken Clarke and his minder. And surely that's Rich Hall in his western shirt sitting opposite me on the DLR?

Yes, I see celebrities everywhere. Why just the other day who should come down the avenue but Fulton Mackay, you know him, the disciplinarian warder from Porridge. We exchanged a few words. He was older than I remembered but his looks were plain to see, and who could forget the voice? I looked him up when I got home. Maybe I was mistaken. He died twenty years ago.