Bolt From The Blue. If you look it up on the fan wiki they had a section dedicated to the cake I got made for his birthday that said “still bitter” on it.
If it makes him feel any better, my mate used to work at a shop where Craig Charles would buy his paper and a pack of fags a couple of time a week - when they got CCTV installed, he played the video back of him walking through the door one day while shouting 'HEY LOOK, ITS CRAIGS RIDICULOUS REPLAY' - Craig Charles got really offended and stormed out of the shop in a huff 🤣
I always remembe been one really OP robot that dominated each session.
I recall a tiny little one that was super fast and just flipped everyone
And one with a spinning disk on the front they just annihilated the toeht robots 😂
I also disagree with their decision, but I reckon they chose the fan favourites Firestorm 2 because their bot was faster and more capable of putting on a show, which is what I think they were really looking for.
I'm a former catholic altar boy and went through the entire cub scout system in the 80s and 90s... I'm amazed I was completely left alone. I tell people I must've been one ugly child.
It turns out that everyone I know that was an altar boy or in Boy Scouts was never touched inappropriately by anyone in authority.
To be clear! I _know_ that it has happened, and the trauma to those is very real, I’ve just never known one of those people.
I banged my chair into Andy Peters leg while he was in my year 2 classroom live presenting, causing him to jump and scream. It's been on blooper shows a couple times
An old work colleague (and all round great bloke) hated Andy Peters with a passion I’ve never seen in anyone else. He’d never tell us why but they used to work together at the BBC.
Andy Peters was by chance doing a roving presenting spot at the end of a pleasure pier my friend just happened to be getting married on. He literally hijacked the time they had for photos together on the pier before the wedding breakfast by dragging her, her new husband and the bridesmaids over to be part of the audience he has around him for his presenting spot. There was no asking, just an assumption they would do it and he was pretty rude when the cameras weren’t rolling. I’ve never liked him since that.
My foot appeared on BBC Look East for half a second.
They were doing a report at the building I work at, they interviewed a few people and recorded some general shots of the building in use. Anyway, last shot of the report is looking over someone hoovering the main hall from the balcony above (interesting choice of shot, I thought), and then in the last half a second of the report you see a foot step in to shot in the top right hand corner.
That was my foot. I remember walking through the hall at the time and seeing the cameraman on the balcony above and thought "Huh, I wonder if I'll be on TV."
Technically I was, in the most minimal way possible. Maybe that should just be the way I appear on TV. Hope they get the other foot next time.
In 2013 I was on an episode of Mastermind. I'd have won if two other contestants had scored less than me.
Still really proud of it.
Specialist subject of the Wallander novels by Henning Mankell.
This is amazing! I wish I could listen to it. It reminds me so much of the time that James Naughtie [uttered these immortal words live on the today programme](https://youtu.be/YS5mVoqJpUk?si=NPviLrJCOjzLkphd). Listening to him trying his hardest not to die for about two minutes afterwards was simultaneously excruciating and Hilarious!
I was on the front page of the local newspaper as I was one of the very few people at school who decided to dress up for Modern Foreign Languages Day at school
In the movie Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone, if you pause the film just right, you can see me, aged 11 doing my best reaction to something that’s not really there (as a ghost flies by in front of me). Pretty much blink and you miss it. And a couple of other times, you see the back of my head. I was out of school for about 3 months (with a couple of days in school in between) for that. I had a great time though - got to meet a bunch of famous people, and see what happened during film making, and walk through all the sets (and they paid me to do it - now you have to pay if you want to go there)
And around 15 years ago, I was interviewed for a documentary about the Natural History Museum and dinosaurs. I was really awkward, and in the final version they didn’t use most of it - only that my favourite dinosaur is the T-Rex (it’s not, but my mind went blank and we were stood next to the skeleton)
it's not because of jurassic park is it? because velociraptor was the size of a small dog. They basically switched utahraptor with the more appealing velociraptor name.
T-rex is pretty awesome though. wasn't my fave as a kid but I saw a skeleton of one once and all I could think of was could you imagine seeing one in real life? thing is massive with teeth like daggers!
Iguanadon was my fave. I always liked how when they first found it they didn't know what to do with the thumb spikes, so chucked one away and plonked the other on it's snout before declaring 'yeah, job done!'
Oh yeah, i knew a guy that tried to get the role for draco malfoy. He was a big rugby playing lad so i'm not surprised he didn't get it.
Slytherin! It wasn’t based on anything other than your place in the queue when getting fitted for the costume
Although I did get moved around a couple of tables (they had my back to the camera if they did, so the tie/badge wouldn’t be seen). There were different start times, and limits on how long you could do in a day - so there were times when they moved kids around to fill out shots when fewer were around.
Officially, you were supposed to be in education for a minimum of something like 4 hours a day. No one actually told us we were supposed to get work from our teachers for that time, so it descended into either pissing about in a portacabin, or watching films in a marquee
I work at a pub. We have a comedy club. I was restocking a fridge during a comedy performance. Tom Hollands dad was performing on stage and said something like “can you make a bit more noise back there mate”
I was in the crowd at an England match singing "three lions".
They used the sound from that match in the 98 version.
It got to number 3 in the pop parade.
So yeah, I had a hit record.
I invented the Jaffa Cakes yoghurt.
Remember the mid 90s when suddenly everything was getting a yoghurt type desert? Rolos, milky bar, after eights etc. Well I was about 6 or 7, and I loved Jaffa Cakes, so I said to my mom that there should be a Jaffa Cakes yoghurt. She agreed so she helped me write a letter to mcvities and they said that was a fantastic idea and sent me a load of vouchers.
Not 6 months later, Jaffa Cakes yoghurts hit the shelves and they weren't that great and didn't last very long. But around 6 months is the usual amount of time to get a food item from a concept, through design and product testing and into the supermarkets.
Was it acknowledged? No. Would they probably have done it anyway since everyone else was doing it? Probably. Do I believe they bought me off with a fivers worth of vouchers because they didn't want me claiming sweet sweet royalty money for that banger of an idea? Yes.
Everything is a lot more staged and heavily edited than I would’ve ever anticipated! I have good memories of the experience but they’re intertwined with a lot of things that made me uncomfortable or at the time being a naive 24 year old not realising I was being manipulated by the producers.
For example, the menu I submitted as part of my application was scrapped two days before filming started because the producers straight up came back and said “we really think you’ll win if you make these traditional dishes from your native country” and then booked “my” entertainment for me (which they ended up cutting out of the episode). But at least I then figured out why you see so many people say in a CDWM episode “I’ve never made this before…”
They also had a friend of mine on standby with us in my kitchen to pretend that she was “just popping by with this emergency ingredient I forgot” (didn’t use that), and had me call my mother to speak in our native language about “her recipe” that I’m making (that didn’t end up in the episode as well).
Probably some of the most interesting bits are:
- the black cab in which you give your points at the end of the night is just doing circles around the neighbourhood, then drops you off and the next person gets in and you return home in a different (regular) cab;
- in the contract there’s a clause against tactical voting and if you’re suspected in doing that, you’re disqualified (just end up last);
- nowhere in the contract does it state that you have to be the one to do the cooking; it’s a “hosting show”, so you can totally hire a professional chef or buy ready made stuff and just lie through your teeth - there’s nothing in the rules against it!
- you’re paid £125 to cover the groceries for your evening, which also makes me realise why some people in other episodes did dirt cheap stuff for their meals - they get to keep the £125 regardless of how much they actually spent!
- everyone arrives at the address at the same time, the producers decide the arriving order based on the narrative they want;
- the producers also seemed to write the narration script for the episode during filming and Dave Lamb apparently reads it and acts it out like “spontaneous” commentary.
Oh, and they edited the footage in such a way to make it look like two of the other guests absolutely hate each other. And because they film “noddies” (aka, the camera is on your face and the producer gives instructions like “smile, now frown, now roll your eyes) they made it look like they were making all of these negative reactions to each other. So when on my night I was asked if I’m concerned about the tension, I’m on TV saying “😁 what tension? oh I hope they’re having fun 😌” and I look like a ditz at best, and at worse… there were the Twitter comments.
Tbh, that could very well be a genuine reaction! You’re filming from 4pm to 2am, the runners keep re-filling your alcohol glasses, and the producers keep putting ideas and words in your head during the interview, I can easily imagine the frustration by this point. I managed to hold it all in and just have a little cry in the hired cab (not the black cab) after the last night!
I worked with someone whose wife had been on and he said they edited it to make her seem air-headed and ditzy, and also got the contestants to change their scores (or straight up told them what to score) so the "right" person won.
I mean, I knew it was heavily edited, but didn't realise they just outright fixed it
My friend was on an episode and she said the same about how staged it is! Said they were barely allowed to drink etc, food was freezing by the time they ate cause they kept having them stop and retake scenes and made them all bicker etc for the drama. Saw her and the other contestants all having a drink in her bar a couple of months later and all had a right laugh about it
Okay, everything else I can understand from a production point of view but that last one... really feels like a genuine let down. Let's be honest, we all watch it for Dave Lamb.
my cousin was on it ages ago, he was young and passionate about cooking but they made him out to be an idiot and gave him this inappropriate relationship with an older woman contestant. he came last and told the family all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes. gutted for him that they made him look like a twat, lovely guy.
There is a picture of 4/5 year old me hugging Diana, Princess of Wales way back in 1981/82 during one of the Royal Visits to my hometown.....the Queen visited the Town Hall, she chose to visit the hospital where I was.
20+ years later I met Princes William and Harry at an event linked with the Homeless Charity Centrepoint.
It somehow got brought up in conversation with William....at a following more private visit William came up to me handed me an envelope with the photo inside....
That photo is the only 1 I have of my childhood....
There’s a picture of 5 year old me (somewhere, god knows where) giving Princess Diana a bunch of flowers when she came to our hometown! My mum passed the flowers to me and kinda just scooped me up and flung her arms out like she was presenting me and the flowers haha
I met her when my dad was still serving; she was so lovely 😿❤️
What a wonderful thing for William to do, it seems like both boys inherited a lot of their mother's ways ❤️
I put mosaics on a concrete crocodile with Jimmy Savile in Primary school. One of the 7/7 London bombers was my Teaching Assistant, also Primary school. Another of the 7/7 London bombers often served me chips at my local chippy.
A theme of wrong 'uns...
More my little brother who was a toddler. We saw Gary Linekar on an aeroplane (1997). My little brother crawled up to him, not knowing who he was and joked about with him for several minutes!
I found a hairdressers practice head in a skip after the hairdressers went on fire. She’s called Cindy and lives in my living room with other weird shit I have.
My brother had a video on that, it was a meerkat falling asleep. In the background you can hear my daughter complain because I threw her melting ice cream in a bin
When I was at uni my mate and I got on a night bus home after a night out and ended up being featured on a fly-on-the-wall channel 4 series about said bus. They essentially made us the main characters for the first episode, probably because we were in our boxers and wearing sombrero hats. 4 million views on the night it aired and we trended on Twitter.
I can't picture a Channel 4 fly-on-the-wall documentary about a fucking bus and Twitter existing at the same time. Feels like there should be at least an 8-year gap between these things.
I had the highest score on the Chucklevision game on the CBBC website. You had to control them climbing up vines while all sorts of cack blocked your path. I had dial up internet long into broadband times, and I once sat for about 10 hours playing that game nonstop, unable to lose because it moved too slow to be of any danger. Probably cost my parents 12p that day.
I sang for a cadburys marketing campaign for the Olympics where Rebecca adlington swam underwater and people “called in” to support her singing Simply The Best by Tina Turner. They paid me £100, and eventually went on to just use my voice alone for all their tv advertising. I was sat in my living room with my flatmates watching something on sky and an advert came on and it was just me… singing as a beef eater underwater. I was like damn that’s cool, now I’m like.. damn I wish they paid me more than £100 haha!
Mr Blobby, the apparent mascot for this sub, is my cousin.
Also, weirdly, my sister in law is getting married this week to someone I just found out is his third cousin.
I rounded a corner near St. James' Square and literally bumped into the mayor - clocked who it was, said "Awright, Sadiq?" in my best Essex accent and was promptly slammed up against a wall by his security detail lol.
i think I started a chant that became the go to chant for fans of a fairly prominent indie wrestler from England that ended up getting signed by WWE, his mustache made him look a bit like Nigel Thornberry so I shouted out smashing after he did a move and it just caught on from there, like every match he had at Progress would have people chanting Smashing or This Is Smashing when he did anything
You know the meme of Neil deGrasse Tyson with his hands up saying "watch out we've got a badass over here"? Well I made the edit saying "this guy's actually pretty badass" with him pointing instead.
Award-Winning West End impressionist*
* won a t-shirt for best Tommy Wiseau impression at the Prince Charles Cinema
International Radio Voice Actor**
**read out a letter on a podcast as a favour for a mate
I was with my young daughter at the park and we saw an itv news team in the distance. I phoned my wife to turn on itv news and myself and my daughter did a silly little dance in the background of the news report...
...about a dangerous dog attacking a child, my wife informs me.
Someone I used to work with knew him as a teenager, he (Tom) gave himself a hard sounding nickname like “dagger” or something which my former colleague reminded him of a few years ago when he saw him in the street after a few hours in the pub, Tom wasn’t impressed apparently.
Was stabbed at school and had my picture in the paper. I didn't know they paid for this shit until years later. Fuck my uncle for cashing in on my fuckin misery! I never wanted to be in the news I wanted people to leave me alone.
I was 13 btw and heavily bullied with absolutely no friends. So yeah uncle cashed in on my misery but I got a picture in the papers..
I nearly ran David Beckham over on my way to work through Alderley edge as he hobbled across the road to the newsagents wearing a medical boot.
This was just before some football tournament where people were rubbing pictures of his injured foot on the red top newspapers to help him heal.
If I'd have taken him out I'd probably have had to go into hiding
In 1995 some geezer came up to my mate and me in a jeans shop in Bournemouth, and said he was a talent scout looking for edgy, non-conformist looking models for photography work for MTV. We took his card, he took my mates home number — no mobiles back then. I thought it was bollocks and super shifty, and we’d end up chained to a radiator somewhere and that would be that. He phoned my mate the next day asking for us both to attend a photoshoot in London near Tottenham Court Road, £250 each for the day. We chucked some sickys at our workplaces and drove up in his fucked up old escort, parked up and got the tube the rest of the way.
It was an insanely hot day in those mid-90s heatwaves. When we got there it was down a backroad round the corner from TCR, up Charlotte St somewhere if memory serves, up some stairs up to an echoey old photography studio with big roof windows, which massively amplified the sun beating down. It was hotter than the fucking sun in there. We were told to dance and jump around holding a blank clapper board, the idea being they would impose writing on it in post. I was sweating like a bastard, but must have done a tiny thing right, as when we checked out photos in adverts in national magazines weeks later, my shoe was clearly in one of them. We beat them up to £300 for the day because of expenses and went and spent it all on shitty tartan trousers from the tourist trap shit punk shops near TCR, and had a field day in Tower Records and wandering around soho before heading back to the provinces.
TLDR: my shoe (with me occupying it) was in an MTV national press advert for The Real World in 1995.
I was once on the front page of a local newspaper receiving a trophy from a famous footballer for winning "Clubman of the year" despite never setting foot on the field during an actual game. I was proper shit at football and I still stood out there in the rain every single minute of every game.
Was on the local news and radio when I was in primary school. I was interviewed for the telly but I didn’t realised that it was important so I just said “I don’t know” to everything the bloke asked. I was a useless kid
I've posted this before but...
I once hung up the phone on Van Morrisson...
My Aunt and Godmother had just lost her father and I was at her house with several other family members just checking in seeing if she needed anything etc. The phone rang, I answered,
"Can I speak to GodMother please"
"Yes who is calling?"
"Van Morrisson"
"HA how hilarious you are, you realise she just lost her father and we don't need people making jokes like that"
So I hung up, I went into the living room and told her only to be told that was the real Van Morrisson and turned out her father played Guitar with him back in the day.
I was on 50/50. I’m married to a guy who was on Robot Wars. (And lost and is still bitter which is hilarious)
Which robot? I used to love that show!
Bolt From The Blue. If you look it up on the fan wiki they had a section dedicated to the cake I got made for his birthday that said “still bitter” on it.
Was never gonna beat Firestorm II, was it my man (I genuinely remember Firestorm, but not your husband's... sorry!)
We don’t mention it or Craig Charles as he will mutter to himself all night. It’s great fun.
If it makes him feel any better, my mate used to work at a shop where Craig Charles would buy his paper and a pack of fags a couple of time a week - when they got CCTV installed, he played the video back of him walking through the door one day while shouting 'HEY LOOK, ITS CRAIGS RIDICULOUS REPLAY' - Craig Charles got really offended and stormed out of the shop in a huff 🤣
Craig Charles called me a coont on his stand up circuit back in the late 90's. And that's my claim to fame.
This is making me laugh, imagine if you could get a Craig Charles cameo for his birthday
I looked for one for his 40th but couldn’t find one!
I always remembe been one really OP robot that dominated each session. I recall a tiny little one that was super fast and just flipped everyone And one with a spinning disk on the front they just annihilated the toeht robots 😂
Razor was the cool one that had that big scorpion spike
Hypnodisc was my favourite. I think the flipper one was Chaos 2
I also disagree with their decision, but I reckon they chose the fan favourites Firestorm 2 because their bot was faster and more capable of putting on a show, which is what I think they were really looking for.
Are…are you my husband?
Used to look after Nick Knowles' sister's dog
Bonus points for good use of the apostrophe, Nick Knowles’ sister’s dog’s looker-after 🏅
I was on Rolf’s Cartoon Club as a kid. Managed to not get molested.
Are you not a little offended?
I'm a former catholic altar boy and went through the entire cub scout system in the 80s and 90s... I'm amazed I was completely left alone. I tell people I must've been one ugly child.
It turns out that everyone I know that was an altar boy or in Boy Scouts was never touched inappropriately by anyone in authority. To be clear! I _know_ that it has happened, and the trauma to those is very real, I’ve just never known one of those people.
Someone I know sat on Jimmy Savilles knee it was arranged through the Catholic church Sunday school.
Better luck next time?
Were you a particularly ugly child?
I’m sorry you weren’t a sexy enough child
But Jim fixed it?
I was a milky bar kid
I had a crush on the milky bar kid as a kid and used to cry if I couldn’t sit next to the boy who looked like him in nursery lol
Damn, I failed the auditions for that position in the 1980’s
A kid at our school claimed to be one of the milky bar kids. Never worked out if it was true.
I banged my chair into Andy Peters leg while he was in my year 2 classroom live presenting, causing him to jump and scream. It's been on blooper shows a couple times
An old work colleague (and all round great bloke) hated Andy Peters with a passion I’ve never seen in anyone else. He’d never tell us why but they used to work together at the BBC.
Get your mate on here. We need the dirt on Andy
Andy Peters was by chance doing a roving presenting spot at the end of a pleasure pier my friend just happened to be getting married on. He literally hijacked the time they had for photos together on the pier before the wedding breakfast by dragging her, her new husband and the bridesmaids over to be part of the audience he has around him for his presenting spot. There was no asking, just an assumption they would do it and he was pretty rude when the cameras weren’t rolling. I’ve never liked him since that.
My parents own a bouncy castle rental company, and it's one of their bouncy castles in the church fete scene in the film Hot Fuzz.
Was it for The Greater Good?
“Crusty jugglers…”
My uncle is the cab driver who appeared by accident on the bbc.
The guy who was expected to talk about music downloads and then actually just tried to improvise,
That’s uncle guy. What a guy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Guy_Goma_BBC_interview That Guy?
Yes
That face when he realised he was live!
You should see when he opens his Christmas presents.
I stole a can of beer from the female lead singer of Chumbawhumba, at a squat party, in a convent. She was dressed as a nun.
Should have stolen a whisky drink or a vodka drink.
Or a cider drink.
What about a lager drink?
While singing a song to remind everyone of the better times
Chumbawhumba are from Burnley and so am I, which is my crap claim to fame.
My foot appeared on BBC Look East for half a second. They were doing a report at the building I work at, they interviewed a few people and recorded some general shots of the building in use. Anyway, last shot of the report is looking over someone hoovering the main hall from the balcony above (interesting choice of shot, I thought), and then in the last half a second of the report you see a foot step in to shot in the top right hand corner. That was my foot. I remember walking through the hall at the time and seeing the cameraman on the balcony above and thought "Huh, I wonder if I'll be on TV." Technically I was, in the most minimal way possible. Maybe that should just be the way I appear on TV. Hope they get the other foot next time.
We need a reboot.
Can I have your autograph
Sure, I'll sign it with my foot
Shut this down, we have the winner 🏆🏆🏆 😂
In 2013 I was on an episode of Mastermind. I'd have won if two other contestants had scored less than me. Still really proud of it. Specialist subject of the Wallander novels by Henning Mankell.
Howling. "I'd have won if I hadn't lost."
"If my grandma had wheels, she would be a bike"
Them scoring more then you, is a total bummer.
It's almost cheating!
I once uttered the words "fucking bastards" on Radio 4. It was broadcast.
This is the best response on here.
Any context or just randomly decided to go for some Caesar dressing for the word salad?
This is amazing! I wish I could listen to it. It reminds me so much of the time that James Naughtie [uttered these immortal words live on the today programme](https://youtu.be/YS5mVoqJpUk?si=NPviLrJCOjzLkphd). Listening to him trying his hardest not to die for about two minutes afterwards was simultaneously excruciating and Hilarious!
I got Scrabble champion in Year 6 Scrabble club and got given a glass trophy. Whenever I play Scrabble now, I warn my opponents of my title
I was on the front page of the local newspaper as I was one of the very few people at school who decided to dress up for Modern Foreign Languages Day at school
In the movie Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone, if you pause the film just right, you can see me, aged 11 doing my best reaction to something that’s not really there (as a ghost flies by in front of me). Pretty much blink and you miss it. And a couple of other times, you see the back of my head. I was out of school for about 3 months (with a couple of days in school in between) for that. I had a great time though - got to meet a bunch of famous people, and see what happened during film making, and walk through all the sets (and they paid me to do it - now you have to pay if you want to go there) And around 15 years ago, I was interviewed for a documentary about the Natural History Museum and dinosaurs. I was really awkward, and in the final version they didn’t use most of it - only that my favourite dinosaur is the T-Rex (it’s not, but my mind went blank and we were stood next to the skeleton)
Don't leave us hanging, what is your favourite dinosaur then if it's not the T-Rex?
Velociraptor
it's not because of jurassic park is it? because velociraptor was the size of a small dog. They basically switched utahraptor with the more appealing velociraptor name. T-rex is pretty awesome though. wasn't my fave as a kid but I saw a skeleton of one once and all I could think of was could you imagine seeing one in real life? thing is massive with teeth like daggers! Iguanadon was my fave. I always liked how when they first found it they didn't know what to do with the thumb spikes, so chucked one away and plonked the other on it's snout before declaring 'yeah, job done!' Oh yeah, i knew a guy that tried to get the role for draco malfoy. He was a big rugby playing lad so i'm not surprised he didn't get it.
Did they assign you into a Hogwart's House?
Slytherin! It wasn’t based on anything other than your place in the queue when getting fitted for the costume Although I did get moved around a couple of tables (they had my back to the camera if they did, so the tie/badge wouldn’t be seen). There were different start times, and limits on how long you could do in a day - so there were times when they moved kids around to fill out shots when fewer were around. Officially, you were supposed to be in education for a minimum of something like 4 hours a day. No one actually told us we were supposed to get work from our teachers for that time, so it descended into either pissing about in a portacabin, or watching films in a marquee
I was on Pointless and got a pointless answer.
They asked for RUBBISH claims to fame! 😂
Incredible 👌
I edited the people's postcode lottery advert where the woman on the market stall says "Derek, we're going to benidorm!"
I work at a pub. We have a comedy club. I was restocking a fridge during a comedy performance. Tom Hollands dad was performing on stage and said something like “can you make a bit more noise back there mate”
Everything I know about Dom Holland implies he might be a bit of a fanny.
Speaking of which, I went to the same school as Dominic Holland. Not at the same time though, so I guess ir definitely counts as a rubbish claim
I was in the crowd at an England match singing "three lions". They used the sound from that match in the 98 version. It got to number 3 in the pop parade. So yeah, I had a hit record.
I fell off a ladder at work and landed on Keith Chegwin. I dogsat for Jimmy Saville for a week when he went on holiday.
Want to ask where he went on holiday but I feel like we already know.
Now then, now then. There must be more to the second story?
I invented the Jaffa Cakes yoghurt. Remember the mid 90s when suddenly everything was getting a yoghurt type desert? Rolos, milky bar, after eights etc. Well I was about 6 or 7, and I loved Jaffa Cakes, so I said to my mom that there should be a Jaffa Cakes yoghurt. She agreed so she helped me write a letter to mcvities and they said that was a fantastic idea and sent me a load of vouchers. Not 6 months later, Jaffa Cakes yoghurts hit the shelves and they weren't that great and didn't last very long. But around 6 months is the usual amount of time to get a food item from a concept, through design and product testing and into the supermarkets. Was it acknowledged? No. Would they probably have done it anyway since everyone else was doing it? Probably. Do I believe they bought me off with a fivers worth of vouchers because they didn't want me claiming sweet sweet royalty money for that banger of an idea? Yes.
Had not one, but TWO letters published in a single issue of CVG back in 1997....
That magazine was ace.
I painted a wall that was shown in a Brad Pitt film 😂
Were you in the credits?
I was not 😒
Mine and my friends' feet/ankles were used to film the walking scene of the bill episodes
We used to record the bill and rewind the feet so they went backwards 💀
Lol I don't believe you. That's too good.
This is not an insignificant achievement!
we have a winner! that is amazing. Genuinely starstruck.
Were they really?!
That’s quite a good claim to fame in my view!
I was an extra in the JobCentre scene of "The Full Monty"
This is a great one! Iconic scene, that. I’ll have Hot Stuff in my head all night now (appropriate for the weather, wayyyy)
Please tell us that you did the dance and they had to refilm it to stop you confusing everyone?! 🙀😹😹❤️
The scene as filmed only had Robert Carlyle watching the other main characters do the dance, but during the set up we all did the dance....
I went out with the actor who played the inside (not the voice) of Marvin the Robot in Hitchhikers Guide.
Original TV show, or more recent film?
Radio show 😉
Warwick Davis cheated?!
I am officially one of the 12 fastest Rubik's Magic practitioners in the UK. Officially.
12th comes great after 11th! 🏆
I walked in on Matt LeTissier having a shit in Leisure World Southampton. Late 90s.
That's what he wants you to think.
Danny from McFly put me in a headlock in his house I might add that I was invited in, I wasn’t robbing him
I was on Come Dine With Me 10 years ago, haven’t watched an episode since now that I know how it’s made 🤷🏻♀️
Spill the beans!
Everything is a lot more staged and heavily edited than I would’ve ever anticipated! I have good memories of the experience but they’re intertwined with a lot of things that made me uncomfortable or at the time being a naive 24 year old not realising I was being manipulated by the producers. For example, the menu I submitted as part of my application was scrapped two days before filming started because the producers straight up came back and said “we really think you’ll win if you make these traditional dishes from your native country” and then booked “my” entertainment for me (which they ended up cutting out of the episode). But at least I then figured out why you see so many people say in a CDWM episode “I’ve never made this before…” They also had a friend of mine on standby with us in my kitchen to pretend that she was “just popping by with this emergency ingredient I forgot” (didn’t use that), and had me call my mother to speak in our native language about “her recipe” that I’m making (that didn’t end up in the episode as well). Probably some of the most interesting bits are: - the black cab in which you give your points at the end of the night is just doing circles around the neighbourhood, then drops you off and the next person gets in and you return home in a different (regular) cab; - in the contract there’s a clause against tactical voting and if you’re suspected in doing that, you’re disqualified (just end up last); - nowhere in the contract does it state that you have to be the one to do the cooking; it’s a “hosting show”, so you can totally hire a professional chef or buy ready made stuff and just lie through your teeth - there’s nothing in the rules against it! - you’re paid £125 to cover the groceries for your evening, which also makes me realise why some people in other episodes did dirt cheap stuff for their meals - they get to keep the £125 regardless of how much they actually spent! - everyone arrives at the address at the same time, the producers decide the arriving order based on the narrative they want; - the producers also seemed to write the narration script for the episode during filming and Dave Lamb apparently reads it and acts it out like “spontaneous” commentary.
I absolutely love reading stuff like this.
Oh, and they edited the footage in such a way to make it look like two of the other guests absolutely hate each other. And because they film “noddies” (aka, the camera is on your face and the producer gives instructions like “smile, now frown, now roll your eyes) they made it look like they were making all of these negative reactions to each other. So when on my night I was asked if I’m concerned about the tension, I’m on TV saying “😁 what tension? oh I hope they’re having fun 😌” and I look like a ditz at best, and at worse… there were the Twitter comments.
So, what about the really upset bloke 'what a sad little life, Jane!'? Don't tell me my life is a lie
Tbh, that could very well be a genuine reaction! You’re filming from 4pm to 2am, the runners keep re-filling your alcohol glasses, and the producers keep putting ideas and words in your head during the interview, I can easily imagine the frustration by this point. I managed to hold it all in and just have a little cry in the hired cab (not the black cab) after the last night!
I worked with someone whose wife had been on and he said they edited it to make her seem air-headed and ditzy, and also got the contestants to change their scores (or straight up told them what to score) so the "right" person won. I mean, I knew it was heavily edited, but didn't realise they just outright fixed it
My friend was on an episode and she said the same about how staged it is! Said they were barely allowed to drink etc, food was freezing by the time they ate cause they kept having them stop and retake scenes and made them all bicker etc for the drama. Saw her and the other contestants all having a drink in her bar a couple of months later and all had a right laugh about it
Okay, everything else I can understand from a production point of view but that last one... really feels like a genuine let down. Let's be honest, we all watch it for Dave Lamb.
Yeah, I want more
my cousin was on it ages ago, he was young and passionate about cooking but they made him out to be an idiot and gave him this inappropriate relationship with an older woman contestant. he came last and told the family all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes. gutted for him that they made him look like a twat, lovely guy.
I once taught the archbishop of Canterbury to use an iPad.
This is quite funny because my dad will likely have taught one of the former Archbishops of Canterbury to use a computer.
We'll get these clerics educated yet.
There is a picture of 4/5 year old me hugging Diana, Princess of Wales way back in 1981/82 during one of the Royal Visits to my hometown.....the Queen visited the Town Hall, she chose to visit the hospital where I was. 20+ years later I met Princes William and Harry at an event linked with the Homeless Charity Centrepoint. It somehow got brought up in conversation with William....at a following more private visit William came up to me handed me an envelope with the photo inside.... That photo is the only 1 I have of my childhood....
That's not a rubbish claim to fame at all, that's absolutely incredible! What a lovely thing for him to do
There’s a picture of 5 year old me (somewhere, god knows where) giving Princess Diana a bunch of flowers when she came to our hometown! My mum passed the flowers to me and kinda just scooped me up and flung her arms out like she was presenting me and the flowers haha
That made me smile. Then I read your last line. I only have one of my childhood too but nowhere near as cool as yours!!!
I met her when my dad was still serving; she was so lovely 😿❤️ What a wonderful thing for William to do, it seems like both boys inherited a lot of their mother's ways ❤️
That’s incredibly nice of him!
I put mosaics on a concrete crocodile with Jimmy Savile in Primary school. One of the 7/7 London bombers was my Teaching Assistant, also Primary school. Another of the 7/7 London bombers often served me chips at my local chippy. A theme of wrong 'uns...
And one person linking them...
What's the number for MI5?
More my little brother who was a toddler. We saw Gary Linekar on an aeroplane (1997). My little brother crawled up to him, not knowing who he was and joked about with him for several minutes!
Weird, he usually prefers walkers.
Get out.
I thought this was going to be a post about finding cool stuff in bins
I found a hairdressers practice head in a skip after the hairdressers went on fire. She’s called Cindy and lives in my living room with other weird shit I have.
For a second I thought you meant the hairdresser was called Cindy and she lived in your living room 😂
I was on You've Been Framed as a child. I was in a go cart race with another child and he crashed into a wall, so he was the star really.
My brother had a video on that, it was a meerkat falling asleep. In the background you can hear my daughter complain because I threw her melting ice cream in a bin
My third cousin is Gary Oldman
He's actually every member of your family, you've just not noticed yet - his acting is that good 😅
When I was at uni my mate and I got on a night bus home after a night out and ended up being featured on a fly-on-the-wall channel 4 series about said bus. They essentially made us the main characters for the first episode, probably because we were in our boxers and wearing sombrero hats. 4 million views on the night it aired and we trended on Twitter.
I can't picture a Channel 4 fly-on-the-wall documentary about a fucking bus and Twitter existing at the same time. Feels like there should be at least an 8-year gap between these things.
I got a hug and a kiss from Barbara Windsor on the set of Eastenders
Had a letter published in Smash Hits letter page. Still got the badge.
I am jealous of this because I sent letters into Smash Hits but they didn't get published. 😁
I had the highest score on the Chucklevision game on the CBBC website. You had to control them climbing up vines while all sorts of cack blocked your path. I had dial up internet long into broadband times, and I once sat for about 10 hours playing that game nonstop, unable to lose because it moved too slow to be of any danger. Probably cost my parents 12p that day.
My one and only, and it's pretty lame - twos on Howard Marks' spliff.
That's pretty dope.
I made all the warning cards that appear on official channel 4 clips on YouTube.
I was once filmed by the BBC for a segment on returning to the office after Covid for the evening news. I was cut.
I sang for a cadburys marketing campaign for the Olympics where Rebecca adlington swam underwater and people “called in” to support her singing Simply The Best by Tina Turner. They paid me £100, and eventually went on to just use my voice alone for all their tv advertising. I was sat in my living room with my flatmates watching something on sky and an advert came on and it was just me… singing as a beef eater underwater. I was like damn that’s cool, now I’m like.. damn I wish they paid me more than £100 haha!
I auditioned to be the Milky Bar Kid when I was little. I got thrown out of the audition for fighting. With my brother. Who was also auditioning.
Mr Blobby, the apparent mascot for this sub, is my cousin. Also, weirdly, my sister in law is getting married this week to someone I just found out is his third cousin.
Pat Sharp from fun house told me to "fuck off" , I think it a pretty random claim to fame
Yeah well, Morrisey told me to fuck off when I called him a cunt when I saw him in the street.
Oh I love You, id love to tell Morrisey to fuck off
Ha ha I was in utter shock, All I did was song the fun house theme tune to him 🤣
I rounded a corner near St. James' Square and literally bumped into the mayor - clocked who it was, said "Awright, Sadiq?" in my best Essex accent and was promptly slammed up against a wall by his security detail lol.
I was one of the first 100 people to register a Minecraft account. Indev day 1, yeah baby
That's lowkey pretty cool, considering how big MC is now
I high fived the guy that drives the royal train.
i think I started a chant that became the go to chant for fans of a fairly prominent indie wrestler from England that ended up getting signed by WWE, his mustache made him look a bit like Nigel Thornberry so I shouted out smashing after he did a move and it just caught on from there, like every match he had at Progress would have people chanting Smashing or This Is Smashing when he did anything
[удалено]
You know the meme of Neil deGrasse Tyson with his hands up saying "watch out we've got a badass over here"? Well I made the edit saying "this guy's actually pretty badass" with him pointing instead.
I once worked with the second strongest man in Scunthorpe.
bet he did all the heavy lifting in that job
I used to work with a guy who was friends with Britain's shortest bus driver.
Award-Winning West End impressionist* * won a t-shirt for best Tommy Wiseau impression at the Prince Charles Cinema International Radio Voice Actor** **read out a letter on a podcast as a favour for a mate
Oh hi throwaway9910191423!
I worked with the mother of the guy named Michael who the song ‘Michael’ by Franz Ferdinand was based on.
As a baby I was nearly wiped out by Frank Spencer on roller skates.
I once threw a stag party that ended up on the news. I still wear that as a badge of pride
My relatives once owned the house that was used in the aunt Bessie's adverts
I was on The Dick Emery Show. I was 5 and I played one of his children in a mildly racist sketch.
My flatmate’s mum was a nurse, and syringed Tony Hart’s ears.
My bands EP release got to number 1 on the iTunes metal charts. Sat there for a wonderful 2 days due to our almighty sales number of 30
My dad once punched Billy Pipers dad in the face...
I was with my young daughter at the park and we saw an itv news team in the distance. I phoned my wife to turn on itv news and myself and my daughter did a silly little dance in the background of the news report... ...about a dangerous dog attacking a child, my wife informs me.
I used to dive in the the training group before Tom Daley, before he became very good
I saw Prince William and Prince Harry in a Burger King outside Bicester once
I live in Jane McDonald's brothers old house so we tell people Jane Mcdonald has shat on our toilet.
My upstairs neighbour when I was a baby was Aggie who later became famous on How Clean Is Your House She's a lovely lady
Russell grant followed me unprompted on Twitter 💅
I'm the cousin of Tom Hardy, the actor. Never met him, likely never will.
He's too busy posting quotes on Facebook.
Someone I used to work with knew him as a teenager, he (Tom) gave himself a hard sounding nickname like “dagger” or something which my former colleague reminded him of a few years ago when he saw him in the street after a few hours in the pub, Tom wasn’t impressed apparently.
Was stabbed at school and had my picture in the paper. I didn't know they paid for this shit until years later. Fuck my uncle for cashing in on my fuckin misery! I never wanted to be in the news I wanted people to leave me alone. I was 13 btw and heavily bullied with absolutely no friends. So yeah uncle cashed in on my misery but I got a picture in the papers..
You also got stabbed, let’s not forget that
Every cloud
Good to air out the ol' insides every once in a while.
I nearly ran David Beckham over on my way to work through Alderley edge as he hobbled across the road to the newsagents wearing a medical boot. This was just before some football tournament where people were rubbing pictures of his injured foot on the red top newspapers to help him heal. If I'd have taken him out I'd probably have had to go into hiding
In 1995 some geezer came up to my mate and me in a jeans shop in Bournemouth, and said he was a talent scout looking for edgy, non-conformist looking models for photography work for MTV. We took his card, he took my mates home number — no mobiles back then. I thought it was bollocks and super shifty, and we’d end up chained to a radiator somewhere and that would be that. He phoned my mate the next day asking for us both to attend a photoshoot in London near Tottenham Court Road, £250 each for the day. We chucked some sickys at our workplaces and drove up in his fucked up old escort, parked up and got the tube the rest of the way. It was an insanely hot day in those mid-90s heatwaves. When we got there it was down a backroad round the corner from TCR, up Charlotte St somewhere if memory serves, up some stairs up to an echoey old photography studio with big roof windows, which massively amplified the sun beating down. It was hotter than the fucking sun in there. We were told to dance and jump around holding a blank clapper board, the idea being they would impose writing on it in post. I was sweating like a bastard, but must have done a tiny thing right, as when we checked out photos in adverts in national magazines weeks later, my shoe was clearly in one of them. We beat them up to £300 for the day because of expenses and went and spent it all on shitty tartan trousers from the tourist trap shit punk shops near TCR, and had a field day in Tower Records and wandering around soho before heading back to the provinces. TLDR: my shoe (with me occupying it) was in an MTV national press advert for The Real World in 1995.
Bradley from S Club lived down my road, and I told my entire primary school his address.
I worked with a guy who was an extra in the Jokers parade scene in the 1989 Batman movie
I was once on the front page of a local newspaper receiving a trophy from a famous footballer for winning "Clubman of the year" despite never setting foot on the field during an actual game. I was proper shit at football and I still stood out there in the rain every single minute of every game.
Was on the local news and radio when I was in primary school. I was interviewed for the telly but I didn’t realised that it was important so I just said “I don’t know” to everything the bloke asked. I was a useless kid
I've posted this before but... I once hung up the phone on Van Morrisson... My Aunt and Godmother had just lost her father and I was at her house with several other family members just checking in seeing if she needed anything etc. The phone rang, I answered, "Can I speak to GodMother please" "Yes who is calling?" "Van Morrisson" "HA how hilarious you are, you realise she just lost her father and we don't need people making jokes like that" So I hung up, I went into the living room and told her only to be told that was the real Van Morrisson and turned out her father played Guitar with him back in the day.