The Daily Tonic: The Royal E

A lot of people have a story about seeing a celeb IRL, mistaking them for someone they know personally and trying to engage them in conversation before the penny drops. Few are like Katie Razzall’s though.

The Newsnight correspondent once saw someone she thought she knew in a bar. Shouting “Hey, hey, hey!” she ran up to them, only to find herself quickly being tackled out of nowhere, having her arms twisted behind her back and then given a good frisking by security.

The ‘friend’ she thought she recognised?

Prince William.

Thanks for all your stories of Royal run-ins. There’s been loads of great ones and we’ll likely do a few more later this week. Today though – somewhat inspired by all your stories of meeting Prince Andrew – we want to know about any other celebrity stories you once shared proudly but now tend to keep quiet on account of the celeb in question having turned out to be a wrong ‘un.

Today’s Question: What’s your best run-in with a celebrity who is now a criminal/cancelled?

Tell us the tales you’d much rather forget at hello@popbitch.com and we’ll try to ease your suffering with a PB digital goody bundle.

RM writes:
“I went to a school in Windsor Great Park that often had royal visits on very special occasions – 100th anniversary of the school, that kind of thing. There was also a special day at Ascot racecourse where, just before Christmas, the Queen would stand in a sleigh and hand out chocolates for the children from a big sack.

“My sister got to the front and asked Her Majesty for a specific chocolate, but every time the Queen found one she’d exclaim that it was broken, put it back and look for another. This continued for ages while my sister stood, paralysed with nerves, too scared to explain to the Queen of England that a Bounty is actually two small bars in one wrapper.”

anon writes:
“I used to run a media/arts centre in Huddersfield in the late 90s. As Andrew was the Duke of York, we were included in a mini-tour he did of community arts projects in Yorkshire. At the time, we had a big art installation in the lobby, made up of loads of refurbished monitors from old PCs arranged in a grid. The artist had programmed them so large letters scrolled across the screens with what looked like random text. It looked interesting enough for Andrew’s people to suggest using it as a backdrop for press pics, so I posed with Andrew shaking hands in front of the art work.

“Later that month, the artist came to take the installation down, so I mentioned we’d had Andrew in for a photo shoot in front of it. He burst out laughing and explained that the machines had been donated by a medical dept from a local university, and he’d found a text explaining the chemical composition of MDMA.

“So there are pictures out there of me shaking Andrew’s hand in front of a giant screen showing the chemical composition of E. Nice one.”

R writes:
“The only Royal I ever met was Prince Philip when he came to our local RAF base (stepping in after Diana died as the Royal ambassador). My class got to meet him on the runway and lined up to shake his hand, but all any of us could focus on was that he had a drippy snot right at the tip of his nose.

“It was like a snotty game of Duck Duck Goose, waiting to see if your hand was the one it was going to drip on when he got to you in the line up.”

In keeping with the theme, each of the ten songs in today’s audio mix feature the name of a Royal in it somewhere. Some are major figures, some are minor. Some are living, some are dead. You’re bound to get furious with at least one of our choices, so let’s not waste any more time explaining it, eh?

A point for each song title; a point for each artist.

[Ten songs, twenty points]

A young Keanu Reeves reporting from a Canadian teddy bear convention
[A 1984 news clip]

Unsoliticed dik-dik pics
[Cuteness on Twitter]

Gollum x Scatman John
[An AI lipsync]