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Then came the reviews. My face, my teeth, my voice were all up for discussion. I particularly enjoyed a piece in Vice calling me ‘the poshest man alive; a kind of smart-shirted, scruffy-haired real doll operated by Richard Curtis’. I began to wonder how actual celebrities ever get anything done — googling yourself is completely addictive. Help, I’ve become an overnight narcissist!
The weirdness got a bit much when the documentary featured on Goggle-box, the show in which you watch other people watching TV. Strangers sprawled on sofas gurned in horror as I enthused about being issued with a copy of Debrett’s Guide to Modern Manners. Watching them watching me was more than ‘holding the mirror up to nature’. It was surreal.
We had been prepared for the worst. Fearing for our mental health, the HR folk at Condé Nast, Tatler’s publisher, suggested we keep away from Twitter for a few weeks. As purveyors of ‘Britain’s poshest magazine’, we were ripe for trolling.
Funnily enough, the narkiest comments have come from former Tatler journalists, who obviously feel left out. Giles Coren wrote a piece about how much better the documentary would have been 15 years ago, when he worked there. This was padded out with imaginative anecdotes about how he received blow jobs from his colleagues, made less credible by a picture of a nerdy young Coren in spectacles. Camilla Long claimed they partied in the office with their knickers off till 1 a.m., while A.A. Gill’s insight was that it was funnier in his day. Rachel Johnson, who has never worked at Tatler, tried to yank the spotlight back to her, saying how much better the documentary about her editorship of The Lady had been.
Actually, they’re all right in a way: it’s because there aren’t too many fruitcakes at Tatler any more that they let the cameras in. Then again, the little bit of fame could be just the thing to send us crazy. On the tube, I look up to see people whispering.
Matthew Bell, Sophia Money-Coutts, Kate Reardon, Gavanndra Hodge, Tibbs Jenkins Photo: Dan Burn-Forti
By Christmas, I will have slipped back into obscurity, joining thousands of half-remembered faces who were once on TV. For now, I’m enjoying it. On Tuesday morning, I was introduced to a captain of industry at Pewsey station, hub of Wiltshire society. We had met years before, when I was a junior reporter. Uh oh, I thought, as he peered at me with recognition — had I written something disobliging? No, he too had seen me on TV. He mentioned David Frost, who said that strangers often thought they knew him because he spent so much time in their sitting rooms. I basked in the comparison as we boarded the train, he into first class, me into second. There were no seats, and I wondered if David Frost ever had to sit for an hour on the floor by the loo.
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