Why, who are you anyway? – Casual encounters with celebrities…

I’m with the good people of Dalkey going that extra mile to keep superstar celebrity Matt Damon in his box. Graham O’Toole and Nathan O’Reilly, hosts of Spin 1038’s morning radio show, should not have been so mawkish and sycophantic after hounding Matt out of his Dalkey lockdown hideaway and he telephoned the show. It is simply not the Irish thing to do. Chasing ratings is one thing but these boys have let down the side and all the stoical efforts of previous generations that have been ingeniously indifferent to celebrity. It is not our way to fawn over the rich and famous.

Learn from the experts such as in an apocryphal story when Liam Neeson was showing his good friend Robert De Niro around the striking natural beauty of our Antrim Coast and they called into Mary McBride’s Bar in Cushendun for a pint of Guinness. In the tiny cramped bar Liam was approached for an autograph by a young female fan which he generously gave but grumpy De Niro, no doubt irked by the approach and expecting the usual celebrity harassment experienced state-side, silenced the twenty or so drinkers to announce that he and his friend were just in for a quiet drink and would appreciate if people would leave them alone to which a regular at the bar replied: “Why, who the hell are you anyway?”. That’s the spirit. The reply was not from a genuine and benign ignorance rather it was the sharpest repost County Antrim could deliver and it defines the decorum we should give those who, through no fault of their own, just happened on celebrity.

I have always felt, indeed it is often said, that in Ireland because of this, the rich and famous can enjoy a high degree of pleasant anonymity. And we should never be concerned that this anonymity could be annoying for celebrities too. I was in a Belfast restaurant many years ago waiting to leave with a friend who was speaking to others at a table when a couple approached and the man, known to my friend, joined their conversation causing his partner to be forced into my personal space and, since I knew her and she was famous, I pretended I didn’t and struct up a fairly banal conversation asking where she had been and what her plans were for the evening. Then I struck her hard by asking if she was a pharmacist. She winced and replied “no a musician” but I remained indifferent even though she was so stunningly beautiful and I felt I was being cruel. Her table ready she left and my friend re-joined me asking how I knew Sharon Corr. And this is how it should be even if we are called out as cold and heartless to the rich and famous in their dire need of a daily ego boost.

I was witness to a master class in celebrity put down a few years back and as this case proves the drunker we are the better we perform. Attending a black-tie business event at the Culloden, I was negotiating in the gent’s toilets with a senior colleague sent to tie my bow-tie so I could join the dinner. The context here was that my wife, aspiring for better, had bought a real bow-tie but we found the instructions impossible and I had huffed and left home not properly dressed. My colleague was terribly drunk insisted I lie on the floor as this was the only way he could do the tie and having only met him for the first time I was suspicious if not slightly nervous. His uncle, he slurred, apprenticed him as an undertaker in the 1940s somewhere around Ballymena and this is the first skill he learned. But the point of my tale (or is it tail?) is that mid-tying we were joined by Gerry Anderson. Gerry, finding us as we were, was noticeably concerned but seemed broad-minded enough to overlook it. While at the urinal my colleague assailed him about; how talented he was, that his sister was his biggest fan and that tomorrow he would ring her and tell her that he “had met the famous Gerry Kelly”.

To be fair to the Spin 1038 hosts they only suggested that it would be nice to find Matt and it was Matt who, when he wasn’t hunted down, gave himself up by ringing into their show. But even this defence does not get away from the fact that this is the thin edge of a very slippery slope to mix a few metaphors. We need to get back to ignoring celebrities something Ireland is truly proud of and when they crave recognition and flaunt themselves we must always ask; ”why who the hell are you anyway?”.

“Bob and Matt” by Siebbi is licensed under CC BY