#4

Simon Pegg. I worked at the Natural History Museum. That day I was on the ticket desk for a dinosaur exhibition that was very popular (it was an extra hall of dinosaurs for one summer in combo with the usual exhibit). On busy days we were often at capacity, and would offer people the option to either queue up for 15 mins or so, or book themselves in for an hour or two’s time. Pretty much everyone was happy with this arrangement.

Simon Pegg showed up with his family when it was full, and there was a queue of expectant children, and when told he wouldn’t be able to go in immediately, threw a strop with my co-worker and pulled the whole “don’t you know who I am” thing and just made an idiot of himself and pissed me and the other ticket person off a lot. So he basically wanted to barge in front of a load of children to see some animatronic dinosaurs and was a dick about it. His kid was a baby in a pram, so not really even old enough to be excited.

Majorly put me off him after that incident.

1 Like
#5

Jamie Cullum. My mum told him to fuck off though, so it made it all OK.

No one else springs to mind, many lovely lovely people.

#6

What did Cullum do

#7

Never made a good film Pegg

1 Like
#8

This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.

#9

Paddy from Max and Paddy.

Went off the wall because I told him we’d charge a lot (like £85 I think) for a bottle of vodka. Went on a big diatribe about how he could get it for £25 in Tesco across the road. Made me add up his tab so far and tell him how much he’d spent that night, went on about how shit it was that I had the gall to charge him that much for a bottle of vodka when he’d spent X amount already, and everybody at this shitty charity do had only turned up and spent their money at our bar because he was the speaker. Demanded I fetch my manager, eventually got given the bottle for free, gave me the stinkeye the rest of the night.

#10

We were at a party in Mayfair and Lil’ JC was throwing some shapes on a pretty cool light-up dancefloor - big fan of coca-cola it appears - and we walked past him heading to the bar and he turned round and kinda went to push my mum away out of his “area” but missed then almost squared-up to her. All quite odd. He had a few bimbos dancing round him who all walked off and left him to it and he got whisked away pretty sharply before someone lamped him one. Good egg.

#11

Nothing like throwing a strop as a grown man when you can’t get into something aimed at the 7-12 age group, and you don’t even have a child of that age with you.

4 Likes
#12

I used to work on the switchboard at the BBC in the 90s. “met” is stretching it, but I spoke to lots of celebs on the phone. Most of them were nice, but Jim Davidson was an obnoxious twat to everyone (no surprises there, this was when he was hosting big break and the generation game).
I had a bit of a run in with Esther Rantzen. It was generally understood that you couldn’t just put members of the public through to celebs/ or the offices of TV shows. Esther got wind of the fact that we wearnt putting people straight through to the That’s Life office and called the switchboard to moan about it. It was me she spoke to, and she was really condescending and holier than though about it. We put a note on the whiteboard telling all the switchboard operators they could put people through to That’s Life from now on. I think it was 24 hours before Esther realised what she had let herself in for and told us to stop putting calls through.

8 Likes
#13

Nasser Hussain told a 9 year old me and a mate to fuck off when we asked him for autographs as he was making his way back to the pavilion after a very short stint.

2 Likes
#14

Also, obviously, Chris Evans a few times but I think I’ve posted about him before.

#15

Oh, Denise Richards.

#16

Denise Roberts? Her from Bond film The World Is Not Enough.

#17

Also kind of a dick but u turned at the end-billy Bragg. At an internship I was given a list of celeb’s phone numbers to cold call about a feature I was writing. One of those was billy bragg. Was majorly pissed off about being called and demanded to know where I’d got his number from. I kind of fluffed my way past that and apologised, explaining what had happened and that I was a hapless intern. He was really nice after that, wished me well with the article and with my career.

#20

Answering ‘Grumpy?’ is only going to make them worse I guess.

#21

tiny*

4 Likes
#22

I should also add that there would be frequent punchups in the queue for the regular dinosaur hall, and everyone dreaded bank holidays with rainy weather, as every family in SE England would get the same idea. We actually had a radio code for “these people are being arseholes and I don’t want to deal with them any more”.

4 Likes
#24

Code Pegg?

6 Likes
#25

All the radio codes were Mr or Mrs whatever. Probably should have changed that one to Pegg, but alas on the scale of how big a dick the general public can be, he was low on it.

#26

Jamie fucking Theakston