P. D. Clifton

I’m driving Annie to school, through the West Midlands countryside.

My daughter, as is her wont, isn’t paying me the slightest bit of attention.

Instead, she’s focused on her iPhone… updating a playlist on Spotify and playing the tastiest morsels from it on my car stereo.

Annie’s musical tastes are eclectic and multi-era-spanning. She listens to loads of modern stuff (Bruno Mars – bleah. Lana Del Rey – great, but there’s a lot of sweary-song-skipping when we play her in the car. On this subject, why do modern singers swear so much? They’ll regret it when they have kids too and they’re cringing at all the cuss words on the radio or streaming or whatever they’ll be listening to in the future. The mother******s).

Annie also plays a lot of old tracks. She loves Abba. And, right now, she’s playing the Spice Girls’ Wannabe.

‘I really, really, really wanna zig a zig AAAAAAAHHH,’ I sing along. Is Mel B saying something rude there? it suddenly occurs to me after over twenty-five years of listening to this song. I really hope not.

‘I once hung out with one of the Spice Girls…’ I throw over to Annie, in the passenger seat, in what I hope is a nonchalant manner.

‘WHAT?!’ Annie’s head snaps around. She’s paying me attention now. ‘No you didn’t!’

‘Yes I did,’ I say, nodding my head breezily.

‘What are you talking about? Which one?’

‘Well…’ I sigh, trying to give the impression these things used to happen to me with boring regularity when I worked in the world of TV light entertainment (as I did for a few years in the noughties). ‘I was working at this TV company… and Mel B came in and said she wanted to make a TV documentary with us… so I followed her around with a video camera for a few days, so we could do a taster.’

‘What’s a taster?’ asks Annie.

‘You know, like a couple of minutes of the documentary… so then we could take it to the BBC or ITV and ask them for the money to finish making it,’ I explain.

Annie doesn’t say anything. But I can tell she’s impressed.

Annie is obsessed with pop culture – like me – which makes name-dropping to her immensely satisfying.

The Mel B name-drop was a good one. I continue reminiscing, hazily, about my couple of days filming the famous Spice Girl – for the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary which never took flight.   

‘What other famous people have you met?’ Annie now asks, her interest fully piqued.

What a great opportunity to show off to my daughter! I think, then begin to trawl my memory for other potential name-drops which are sure to impress this thirteen-year-old.

Hmmm, there aren’t many. Most of the people who I met, on the few years I worked on ITV’s The British Comedy Awards and similar TV shows, tended to be comedians… or celebrities booked for their quirky appeal, rather than female teenaged following.

Eddie Izzard, Johnny Vegas or Jonathan Ross? They won’t mean a jot to Annie. Leslie Nielsen, star of The Naked Gun? Nah (he was lovely though). Courtney Love? Annie is yet to go through a grunge phase. Elton John? I didn’t actually meet him – he was on the year before I started on the Comedy Awards.

But then I suddenly think of a good one.

‘Annie,’ I say, ramping it up, making my voice slightly tremulous… ‘the most famous person I’ve ever met… is Stephen Hawking!’

‘No!’ says Annie, astounded. Even she’s heard of Stephen Hawking. She looks at me with amazement… dare I say, even admiration.

Bingo!

I explain to Annie how I met Stephen Hawking at the Comedy Awards in 2004. I’d booked him to present an award to Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons. And, on the day of the show, Hawking was trundled into the green room by his second wife (not the one played by Felicity Jones in the later film).

It was hard not to be moved and inspired by the sight of the great scientist – his nimble mind imprisoned in his racked body. Thinking about it now, I can’t help but think of the great war we humans must forever fight against illness… some of us involved in what we hope are short-lived skirmishes (like my partner Lizzie), others unwillingly drawn into the battle for their lives for the whole of their lives.

‘So what happened when you met him?’ asks Annie, brushing the existential mumbo jumbo in my head aside with her question; she just wants the hard facts.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘his wife… who I think was his nurse as well… asked me to hold out my hand. She then picked up his hand… and placed it in mine.’

‘How did his hand feel?’ asks Annie.

‘Limp.’

‘And then what happened?’

‘So,’ I continue, ‘I began to shake Stephen Hawking’s hand. I had to do all of the shaking. He didn’t have any strength at all.’

‘And after about fifteen seconds of shaking, he finally said…’

‘What?’ asks Annie.

‘He said…’ I spin it out… then intone:

‘HE-LLLO!’

I do an impression of Hawking’s famous metallic robot voice when I say the ‘HE-LLLO’. Probably not entirely respectfully.

Annie thinks about this momentous encounter for a moment.

‘Was that it?’ she asks.

‘Er – yes, it was,’ I reply.

I don’t know what my daughter was expecting. For me and Hawking to have sat down together and knocked up his next great thesis on theoretical cosmology – not exactly my strong point – all before the show director called for the great scientist to get up onto stage and do his award presentation to the guy who invented The Simpsons.

‘Oh, OK then,’ says Annie, looking disappointed. She turns back to her iPhone and begins to watch videos.

‘Hey! Do you want to hear some more about Mel B?!’ I nearly shout, desperately trying to claw back my daughter’s attention (and admiration)… then sing in a feeble, pleading voice: ‘ZIG A ZIG AAAAHHH!!!!’

But it’s no use. I’ve lost her. My celebrity story just wasn’t good enough for Annie. Indeed, in a way, it feels like the whole of my past career as a TV producer has failed to pass muster with my daughter.

It occurs to me – as I glance at Annie intently staring at videos on her phone – that maybe the only way for me to really impress her… is for me to become a TikTok influencer. And then I could hang around with a bunch of other famous TikTok influencers, who Annie would know all about.

But… are you allowed to become a TikTok influencer if you’re 50 or over?

Probably not.

May 2023