One of the things you always believe about London is that you’ll see stars on every street corner. It must be true: on one of my first trips here, I saw Ian Hislop, the Private Eye editor, crossing the street.

Possibly egged on by Virgin Radio’s excellent evening presenter Geoff Lloyd, I’ve always kept my eye open for the odd star during my normal working day: but today I appear to have managed a really quite significant amount of showbiznage.

First, eating at the same restaurant I was eating at for lunch was the rather splendid character actor Anthony Head. Depending how old you are, you may remember him as either someone on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or the Prime Minister in Little Britain, or the bloke in the Nescafe coffee ads. Anyway, there he was, behind me, enjoying probably some fish dish at a smart restaurant in EC1. Clearly a regular, he knew the staff: and had shaved his head, which was a little odd. (Lest you think I go out for lunch in these places, I feel it important to let you know that actually, no, I didn’t pay - someone from The Guardian did instead.)

Anyway: that, I thought, was my showbiz quotient for the day: but no. Walking up Argyll Street, I bumped in to former colleague and now presenter for BBC Radio 2, Pete Mitchell. He seemed happy and well, and it was good to see him again. (Amazing what happens to the body if you don’t need to get up at 4am.)

While reporting both of these exciting famous-people sightings in minute detail to Geoff, tapping away on this slightly impossible keyboard while walking up Great Portland Street to see a friend for a christmas do, I nearly bumped into Simon Mayo, who was in conversation with at least three other people. Given he’d come off-air at 4, odd that he was walking home at 7, but I wasn’t going to quibble.

At the party there was a moderately famous XFM presenter. He was wearing a ludicrous velvet jacket, had badly dyed hair, and a silly shirt. I don’t really count him as a celebrity, though he clearly thought he was: someone else had brought him a few vinyl discs as a present, and he clearly thought that by talking twice as loudly in the room as anyone else, he would convey the very essence of celebrity. I thought (sorry Steve Safran) that he looked like a cock. But then, he might have been a nice man, had I said hello and pushed the four simpering women away. But I didn’t. So I don’t have any evidence to that fact.

Anyway, that makes three celebrities and a man from XFM, and I thought this was pretty good. Until I left from the party, had a nice thai meal, and then went to the pub next to work where, among the usual crowd of IT people, was the star voiceover Mitch Johnson, and his dog. Voiceovers, even ones as good and well-known as Mitch, don’t count as celebrities, though. Even with his dog.

But there was also a tall man who had spiky hair there, who I thought looked vagueley familiar. I couldn’t think why. Turns out that he was Eugene Sully, the radio engineer from Big Brother last year. And, sadly, turns out that he and I spent at least an hour swapping humorous stories (to us) about audio processing, Klotz desks, how to pronounce ‘Skype’ (I claim, only for humorous effect, that it is pronounced Sky-pee: he claims, only for humorous effect, that Logitech starts with the word ‘Log’), how to calculate your radio name (clue: his is Eugene Marks), and other such embarrassing boringness that only two men outside of earshot of female company would find amusing. Whether he’s a nice man or just a little bonkers is hard to tell, but anyone who jumps up and down in delight when telling me that his new Sony Ericsson phone is so bad at multitasking that it has to pause MP3 playback to resize a jpeg is okay in my book. The most non-showbiz showbiz person I’ve ever met.

All in all, then, I’ve had a pretty showbiz day. And there’s a man in this carriage of the tube that looks a little like Richard Madeley. But let’s not claim him as a fifth.

Tags: eugene_sully, geoff_lloyd, pete_mitchell, showbiz, simon_mayo, spotting | Permalink | Comments RSS | Leave a response, or trackback.