fan), Ian Coburn (long-time promoter, harsh voice, as if sourced from a Beverly Hills Cop laugh) and Gareth. Ian’s measured drone draws me from my preparatory musing. “Russell, Jack Black is outside. He wants to pop in and say hello. What shall I tell him?”
Obviously Ian is being polite. If Jack Black is at the door, there is but one response: to welcome Jack and douse him in glucosey adulation. Duly Ian fetches him. Jack enters, unassuming and garrulous. I stand and greet him. One of the peculiarities of meeting famous people is the tendency to bend established protocols to accommodate them. For example under usual circumstances I’d introduce a newcomer to the group to all present with a cursory namecheck and nod. With a famous person you tend to eschew this ritual. Presuming they spend their lives encountering new people they’ll never see again, you spare them the rigmarole of all that ceremony and just say, “Jack Black – these are my mates.” If there were just one or two you might do names, but more than that it starts to feel tricky. Maybe Gareth felt short-changed by this slight, I don’t know. All I can tell you with certainty is while Jack Black offered up all manner of heart-stopping flattery – about my performance hosting the MTV VMA awards, and my turn as Aldous Snow in the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall – Gareth Roy was providing a metronomic beat beneath the conversation, contrived from the Rainman-ish observation that Jack Black was wearing the same coat.
“Man, I gotta congratulate ya – you did a swell job out there …”
Tick-tocking along under the compliment I can hear Gareth, chewing his way through a thought, like a mouse gnawing electric cable. “He’s wore that jacket on 1 Leicester Square.”
I try to meet Gareth’s eye, but it is trained on the jacket, a jacket upon which he is so fixated that had it been heroically returning from Vietnam, his interest might still’ve been thought excessive.
“Jack Black’s got the same jacket on. Same buttons, same hood. Same jacket.”
Jack, ever the professional, ignores the tinnitus of Gareth’s commentary. A DVD extra that no one had selected. “It’s great to see ya man.”
Gareth draws nearer. “It even smells the same. Crisps. It smells of crisps.”
Eventually the autistic soundtrack becomes so intrusive that I have to say, “Is that a new jacket, Jack?” A question I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking had it not been necessary to subdue Gareth’s Forrest Gump-ish detail fetish. If only, three months later, when editing a pre-recorded radio show I’d made with Jonathan Ross, Gareth had employed the same fastidious obsession with procedure, perhaps the BBC might not have been facing destruction. But these are thoughts for a later chapter, for now America is a long way away. We sit in the dressing-room at 1 Leicester Square devising risible enquiries to blurt at … well, movie stars.
The best question Matt wrote was this one: guesting on the show were a composite boy band constructed for a reality TV show from members of ’N Sync and Boyzone and a boy band called 911 (which is the number for US emergency services but also looks like the numerical date for September 11th, which is pertinent to the bad taste punchline). The question was: “So, Steve, you were in Boyzone?”
“Yeah.”
“Pete, you were in ’N Sync, that must have been fun, was it?”
“Yeah, yeah, it was.”
“And Chris, here it says you were involved in 9/11. What on earth were you thinking?”
He looked baffled. We weren’t allowed to use that.
Tom Cruise has an awareness of how he’s portrayed and constantly wants to be seen as ordinary. It’s one of the things that great big movie stars do, they don’t want to seem antithetical, insulated, overly-privileged and completely abstracted from their audience. They need to be accessible. We were talking about the birth of his first baby. Ours was the only interview he did in the UK, so
Obviously Ian is being polite. If Jack Black is at the door, there is but one response: to welcome Jack and douse him in glucosey adulation. Duly Ian fetches him. Jack enters, unassuming and garrulous. I stand and greet him. One of the peculiarities of meeting famous people is the tendency to bend established protocols to accommodate them. For example under usual circumstances I’d introduce a newcomer to the group to all present with a cursory namecheck and nod. With a famous person you tend to eschew this ritual. Presuming they spend their lives encountering new people they’ll never see again, you spare them the rigmarole of all that ceremony and just say, “Jack Black – these are my mates.” If there were just one or two you might do names, but more than that it starts to feel tricky. Maybe Gareth felt short-changed by this slight, I don’t know. All I can tell you with certainty is while Jack Black offered up all manner of heart-stopping flattery – about my performance hosting the MTV VMA awards, and my turn as Aldous Snow in the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall – Gareth Roy was providing a metronomic beat beneath the conversation, contrived from the Rainman-ish observation that Jack Black was wearing the same coat.
“Man, I gotta congratulate ya – you did a swell job out there …”
Tick-tocking along under the compliment I can hear Gareth, chewing his way through a thought, like a mouse gnawing electric cable. “He’s wore that jacket on 1 Leicester Square.”
I try to meet Gareth’s eye, but it is trained on the jacket, a jacket upon which he is so fixated that had it been heroically returning from Vietnam, his interest might still’ve been thought excessive.
“Jack Black’s got the same jacket on. Same buttons, same hood. Same jacket.”
Jack, ever the professional, ignores the tinnitus of Gareth’s commentary. A DVD extra that no one had selected. “It’s great to see ya man.”
Gareth draws nearer. “It even smells the same. Crisps. It smells of crisps.”
Eventually the autistic soundtrack becomes so intrusive that I have to say, “Is that a new jacket, Jack?” A question I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking had it not been necessary to subdue Gareth’s Forrest Gump-ish detail fetish. If only, three months later, when editing a pre-recorded radio show I’d made with Jonathan Ross, Gareth had employed the same fastidious obsession with procedure, perhaps the BBC might not have been facing destruction. But these are thoughts for a later chapter, for now America is a long way away. We sit in the dressing-room at 1 Leicester Square devising risible enquiries to blurt at … well, movie stars.
The best question Matt wrote was this one: guesting on the show were a composite boy band constructed for a reality TV show from members of ’N Sync and Boyzone and a boy band called 911 (which is the number for US emergency services but also looks like the numerical date for September 11th, which is pertinent to the bad taste punchline). The question was: “So, Steve, you were in Boyzone?”
“Yeah.”
“Pete, you were in ’N Sync, that must have been fun, was it?”
“Yeah, yeah, it was.”
“And Chris, here it says you were involved in 9/11. What on earth were you thinking?”
He looked baffled. We weren’t allowed to use that.
Tom Cruise has an awareness of how he’s portrayed and constantly wants to be seen as ordinary. It’s one of the things that great big movie stars do, they don’t want to seem antithetical, insulated, overly-privileged and completely abstracted from their audience. They need to be accessible. We were talking about the birth of his first baby. Ours was the only interview he did in the UK, so
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