Following the extremes of the meeting’ Famous people’ and meeting ‘Infamous people’ threads lets dwell on the comfortable middle ground of meetings with people who are hardly famous at all.
I’ve got a little note pinned to the wall in my house in my Gran’s shaky parkinsons disease handwriting.
“Yes the Godfather is my butcher. He remembered you – thought you were looking at him funny”
The note accompanied a signed photo of George Vella – TV-am’s Codfather. He used to do the fishing forecast. That was a thing apparently – can fishing be forecast?
Anyway the benefit of working on breakfast telly is you don’t have to give you your day job so after a hard morning fishing-forecasting to the nation he still had time to get the tube back to Woodford and serve behind the counter in my Gran’s local butchers. Visiting her as a kid I’d accompanied her as around the local shops to discovered the streets of the far north east corner of London really are paved with celebrity gold. I tried to explain to her who the Codfather was – she had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
Obviously at a later date she had taken him to task on it and I think only half understood what he was talking about. Its possibly the only time he’d ever signed and given away one of his TVam-branded headshot photos.
