Personally, I Blame my Fairy Godmother. Claudia Carroll
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the dress isn’t a bit stunning; it’s more like a big, flowery shower curtain from a Bed, Bath and Beyond sale bin. Lesson: if you are eejit enough to listen to stylists, then you deserve everything that’s coming to you. As long as these people garner column inches, believe me, they’re not bothered if you end up beaten into a skinny size zero pant suit, looking like a boiler that’s too big for its lagging jacket.
However, I go with the interview answer instead. ‘Why thanks, Katie. That photo was taken at the National TV awards, where Jessie Would was nominated for best TV show, can you believe it, for the second year running?!’ I omit to mention that we lost out to a home video programme where people send in clips of their dogs playing musical instruments, that kind of thing. It sticks in my mind because next day there was a pap shot of me rubbing my eyelid to try and get a bit of fluff out, with a headline, Who Let The Dogs Out? Jessie’s Tears At Being Upstaged By Mutt.
‘Oooh, look at this one, you brave girl, you!’ says Katie, picking up a still shot from the show of me skydiving. ‘Tell me, is that the hardest dare you ever had to do on Jessie Would?’
Real answer: Funnily no. Sure any eejit can skydive; you just hold your breath and jump. What was weird about that one though, was that some pervert actually texted in a suggestion that I do it in a bikini.
Interview answer: ‘Ha, ha, HA. Not at all, Katie. As a matter of fact, I’m often asked that question…’
‘Oooh, or what about the time you had to spend the night alone in a haunted house?’
Real answer: Are you off your head? Best night’s sleep I ever had.
Interview answer: ‘Ha, ha, HA. Yes, that one did put years on me, but by far the most challenging dare I’ve ever had to do on the show was the time I had to work as head chef in a restaurant. Sixty covers in a single night. Nearly killed me.’ I might add that fifty-eight out of the sixty customers demanded their money back after they were kept waiting for almost two hours with nothing but the bread sticks in front of them to nibble at. And that was after I had to announce to the whole, starving dining room that if anyone happened to find my earring inside the fish pie, would they please mind letting me know? Oh and for the record, the two people in the restaurant who didn’t complain were Sam’s parents; God love them, they desperately wanted to be on the show and were just being kind. What people don’t realise though, when they’re texting in all their wacky dare ideas, is that the extreme stuff doesn’t knock a feather out of me. It’s normal everyday, bread-and-butter things that make me want to lie down in a darkened room listening to dolphin music and taking tablets. Like bank statements. Or Visa bills. Or anything with ‘Final Notice’ stamped in red across it.
‘Oooh, and look at this fabulous shot of you and the sexy Sam Hughes! Tell us, Jessie, how did you two first meet?’
I glow a bit, the way I always do whenever I get a chance to talk about Sam. OK, the real answer to this question is:
we met at Channel Six when I first started working there, God, almost nine years ago now. I was just twenty-one years old, straight off a media training course and working as a runner on News Time, which Sam seemed to appear on every other week, talking about GNPs and PPIs and whatever you’re having yourself. ‘Runner’, though, as everyone knows, is a glorified word for ‘dogsbody’, so my job basically involved getting the tea, emptying bins in dressing rooms and on more than one occasion, having to blow-dry under one newsreader’s armpits with a hair dryer, so her couture dress wouldn’t get deodorant stains on it. I’ll never forget it; her name was Diane Daly so all the floor staff, myself included, used to call her Diva Di. A nasty nickname I know, but she’d really earned it; this was a woman who’d regularly ring me at 6 a.m. before work, to order me to the fruit and veg market so I could buy supplies of sprouted beans for her, the time she was doing her whole wheat-free, gluten-free, lactose-intolerant thing. And who would think absolutely nothing of getting me to drop her kids to school, while she skipped off to get her Restylane injections. All of which I did happily, gratefully and without whinging because I was just so overjoyed to be working in TV. This, as far as I was concerned, was It, the Big Break, which could only lead on to bigger and better things.
Two things came out of that whole experience for me. One is that to this day, I always treat the runners on Jessie Would like royalty: iPods for their birthdays, posh spa treatments at Christmas; toxic debt or no toxic debt, the way I look on it is, they’ve earned it, the hard way. The other thing is…that’s where I first met Sam. Vivid memory; it was just before a live broadcast and there he was, patiently waiting behind the scenes to take part in a panel discussion piece about debt to profit ratios or something equally boring. Radiating confidence, not a nerve in his body. He ordered a coffee from me and I was so petrified, my shaking hands accidentally spilled some of it onto the lap of his good suit, but instead of ranting and raving about it, he couldn’t have been sweeter. Just laughed it off, said it was an accident, that he’d be sitting down behind a desk anyway so he could be naked from the waist down and sure no one would even know the difference. Then he smiled that smile; so dazzling it should nearly come with a ping! sound effect, and I was a complete goner.
Course it turned out every female on News Time fancied him, but he was dating some famous, leggy, modelly one back then, so it went without saying that we all knew none of us had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting near him. But just for a bit of devilment, myself and the make-up girls used to invent all kinds of imaginary sex scenarios about him, like he was the ultimate Prince Charming; utterly unattainable, but great craic to fantasise about.
‘Me and Sam Hughes, on a sun lounger, at sunset, looking out over the Caribbean…’
‘No, I’ve a better one, me and Sam Hughes in a dressing room, just before the show…’
‘No, NO. My go: me and Sam in a log cabin during a power cut with only a king-sized double bed for our entertainment centre…’
…was all you could hear along the corridors of Channel Six on the days we knew he’d be in. We even had a ‘hottie alert’ system, whereby the minute one of us saw his car in the car park, we were duty bound to text the others IMMEDIATELY, so everyone had a fair and equal chance to get their make-up on.
Anyway, whenever I did see Sam after the whole, mortifying coffee-on-the-crotch episode, which was maybe about once a month or so, he always made a point of asking me how I was getting on in the new job. Always friendly, always playfully nicknaming me Woodsie, always encouraging, always respectful and never, ever someone who looked down on me as just a humble gofer with Pot Noodle for brains.
Then, one day about three months later, he found me in the staff canteen, hysterically trying to babysit Diva Di’s bratty eight- and ten-year-old boys, who were running riot around the place and ambushing me with lumpy cartons of strawberry-flavoured yoghurt. The pair of them had completely doused me in it; clothes, hair, jeans, everything, soaked right through to my knickers. And, of course, life being what it is, at that very moment, in sauntered Sam, as Darcy-licious as ever. He let out a yell at the kids, which did actually manage to shut them up, then sat me down and helped dry me off with a load of paper napkins. I’ll never forget it; he x-rayed me with jet-black eyes, laughed and said, ‘To think they say working in TV is glamorous.’ I gamely managed a grin, suddenly aware that he dated famous models and here I was, stinking of sticky, strawberry yoghurt-y crap.
‘So, tell me. Is this really what you signed up for, Woodsie?’
Now the thing about Sam is that he can be a bit like those motivational speakers you’d normally see on Oprah; you know, the ones who convince you that you can turn your life around in seven days, that kind of thing. It’s like he comes with a double dose of drive and it can be infectious.
So I told him everything. Out it all came; about how I wanted to work for Channel Six so desperately that I really was prepared to do anything without question. Including letting Diva Di take complete and utter advantage of me. I was so terrified of losing my job, I explained, that I just hadn’t the guts to point out that babysitting her horrible children and blow-drying under her armpits with a hair dryer, was well above and beyond my job description.