With that, the lights dimmed and ‘A Tale as Old as Time’ came on. The waiter took Ava over to the Beast where she got to dance with him. It was just magical and a moment she will cherish forever.
Then, just when we thought the week couldn’t get any better, I got a text from Warwick Davis (by the way, a little sidenote: he and his family are the nicest and kindest people you will ever meet).
It said: ‘We watched the show. Are you still out here?’
‘Yes, I’m with the family xx’
‘Great, I’m here too at the Star Wars convention. Would you like to come along?’
‘OMG!! Really?? That would be amazing xx’
So we met up with Warwick and his family, Sam, Annabelle and Harrison. Sometimes I just pinch myself and say, ‘I can’t believe this.’ It doesn’t even feel real. Honestly, the majority of times when things happen, I guess especially this last year, it feels like I’m watching it on the sofa with my parents. And then I get home and lie in bed and it’ll hit us.
Sometimes things don’t sink in for a long time. It’s like it’s not really happening. Then all of a sudden some time later, I’ll just be sat watching the telly or on the bus going home and then I’m like, ‘Oh my God, that really happened!’ It is very overwhelming.
At the Star Wars convention we watched a show with Warwick and Anthony Daniels, who plays C-3PO. He was amazing, so funny. He actually wore a gold suit, and he had a cannon that he just randomly let off. It fired little golden sparkles. He’s got his act very well honed.
Obviously, we were the only people there who weren’t dressed up. So we stood out out like a sore thumb. Everyone really went for it. People had literally stuck fur to their skin to look like Chewbacca. How painful is that?
People had made their own costumes, and it must have taken them months. It was just unbelievable. People were embracing the characters and walking around as if they were them.
If someone from the Dark Side passed by, everyone else would move out of the way, as if it was real. There were lots of Darth Vaders and people in the actual Storm Trooper outfits. They must have cost a fortune – at least £3,000 each. And so hot as well in the Florida sun. Ava, me and my dad were saying, ‘This is amazing!’
But I’m afraid my mam did not enjoy the convention so much. In fact, it was the worst day of her life. She hates Star Wars. She just says she doesn’t get it. But she didn’t just go off to the theme park. Oh no. She stayed with us all day and just moaned the whole way through.
She kept looking around at the people in costume and going, ‘Oh my God, what a set of tits!’
And I was like, ‘Be quiet! This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. There are loads of people who would have loved to have come here.’
‘I don’t care. I think it’s shite. There’s something missing in all these people’s lives. There’s no need to dress up like that as if you’re not yourself.’
‘It’s the same as us loving Disney, Mam. It’s exactly the same.’
‘It’s not. It’s not the same.’
‘It’s just escapism. If I could walk around like Belle or Tinker Bell, I would – if they did a costume big enough.’
Then the announcer said, ‘And now a special preview.’ It was a little advert for the new Star Wars Rebels cartoon. They showed that, and then he asked, ‘Does anyone want to see more?’
And everyone was whooping and cheering, ‘Yeah!’
‘OK, you’re going to watch an exclusive episode.’
It was a half-hour episode. And my Mam started crying. We were there about eight hours. She was sobbing, ‘I can’t take it any more, I need to get out.’ But she couldn’t just sneak out then because there was high security in the theatre. So she had to watch it through tear-filled eyes.
The minute we got out, she asked, ‘Can we go now?’
We got an Uber, and the driver was saying, ‘Oh my God, you’re so lucky. I love Star Wars.’ He actually had a Star Wars air freshener hanging from his rear-view mirror.
I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, of all the Uber drivers we could have had!’
Warwick had given us these gold weekend passes that allowed you to get into everything but we were leaving the following day.
‘Do you want the passes?’ I asked the driver.
‘What?’
‘Do you want the passes?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you can have them. We’re not going to use them again, we leave tomorrow.’
‘Are you joking? I’m going to take the whole day off tomorrow. I’m going to ring my wife now and tell her the good news. Thank you so much!’ He loved it.
I just thought, it is pure fate that our Uber driver was such a massive Star Wars fan – it was meant to be. After all, it takes no effort to be kind and if you can’t be kind in Disneyland then it basically means you have no soul. As Cinderella once said:
‘Where there is kindness there is goodness;
where there is goodness there is magic.’
Chapter Twenty-one
THE TIME I WATCHED JEREMY KYLE WITH KEVIN BACON
The nineties UK classic TV show Gladiators had a total of thirty-four gladiators. Eunice ended up being a stunt double for Angelina Jolie and Rhino appeared in films such as Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Batman Begins, and Argo.
In Footloose, the actors who played the parents are barely older than the kids. Dianne Wiest (mother) was only nine years older than Ariel (Lori Singer) at the time and John Lithgow (father) was twelve years older.
The BAFTA Awards’ famous mask was designed by US sculptor Mitzi Cunliffe and it weighs 3.7 kg.
This year has just been proper mental and I know I’m never going to get a year in my life that’s greater and that’s why I’ve loved and cherished every single minute of (what some would call) work. I honestly have been like a pig in shit, I’ve been lapping it up. I’ve been blessed enough to be part of two of my favourite television shows of all time with my heroes: I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and Saturday Night Takeaway. I used to have no luck at all, couldn’t even win a bloody raffle me, but this year I’ve been lucky enough to be able to present backstage and give out an award at the National Television Awards (NTAs), which was actually my first ever invite to an awards ceremony. In fact it was the first time I’d ever set foot on a red carpet (well, apart from a Blackpool B&B that me and my mam once stayed at where the carpets were red and the walls were green).
I took my dad as my date and we were given a blacked-out car to take us (no joke) thirty seconds across the car park. We giggled as we made the long trip from my dressing room to the carpet, but we felt dead posh and that. Once we had taken selfies with people, signed autographs and had our picture taken by the press, I went backstage and sat in my dressing room while the family went up into a box to watch.
I was so nervous. I had actually bought my outfit for the event four hours earlier in Topshop. Not ideal: I had had an outfit made for me but when I got it I looked like I worked for a really shit airline in a blood-red ill-fitted suit complete with shoulder pads an American footballer would be jealous of. So I ended up wearing an £80 suit with a black vest from River Island underneath. But it was fuchsia pink, I had my hair in a high pony and my skin was highlighted to the gods so I didn’t care.
It was funny though when interviewers asked, ‘Who are you wearing, Scarlett?’
‘Well, I’m wearing myself, mate, but my outfit is from Toppers – £80 it is and the vest’s £6 from River Island.’
When I first walked on stage to hand out the first NTA of the night with Dermot O’Leary (the king of live TV), my throat started going that dry it was as if water had never touched my lips in a year. I was so nervous but managed to somehow read the autocue whilst having someone tell me how long I had left to chat for in my ear. My first ever interview of my life was with none other than Danny Dyer. Now I absolutely love Danny Dyer – I have a bit of a crush on him to be honest – so needless to
say I was shitting a brick and my heart was skipping beats. ‘Please don’t swear, Danny, I’m not saying you would but it’s my first interview and I love you.’
‘I won’t, darling. You got nothing to worry about, sweetheart.’
And I knew he wouldn’t, he’s a good egg is Danny. After finding out on Who Do You Think You Are? that he was in fact royalty and was related to William the Conqueror and Edward III, I wanted to know more about how it had changed things around his house.
‘So, have things changed now you’re royalty?’ I asked him.
‘No, and the Queen still hasn’t welcomed me into the Windsor fold. Give me a bell, babes.’
I didn’t even know what to reply so I just said, ‘You are the most Cockniest person I have ever met.’
I soon eased into the interviewing after being able to chat to Ant and Dec, the lovely Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield (who by the way are literally the nicest people in showbusiness). Before I knew it, the night had nearly ended, so I slipped on my tiger slippers and was about to head out when I heard, ‘Mary Berry is coming backstage, Bake Off has just won!’ ‘Ahhh, shit, it’s so dark back here, I don’t know where my shoes are.’ I couldn’t find them in time to chat to Mary Berry and have a photo with her, so I now have a framed picture in my living room of me and the person everyone wants to adopt as their gran, Mary Berry, with huge lovely tiger slippers on my feet.
The day after the NTAs I was on a high, I had so many amazing tweets and Instagram posts about my presenting job, I felt like a professional. That was until I read the papers. Now in some articles I was in the ‘hot’ section with what I was wearing but in one particular newspaper I was in the ‘not’ section. Why, I thought, I liked my outfit, did they think it was too pink, did it clash with my orange tan? No, apparently ‘I didn’t show my figure off and it wasn’t a gown.’ I mean the person who wrote the article was clearly an Einstein for pointing out the obvious that I wasn’t wearing a dress. Also I had short shorts on, my legs were out, but did they have to be? Erm, no! I could have worn a turtleneck jumpsuit if I’d wanted to. It’s so sexist how I was told I basically wasn’t revealing enough. Come on, guys, it’s 2017! Women can wear what the hell we want and we don’t need some journalist to tell us if we are hot or not!
Next came the BAFTAs, which I was super shocked at being asked to present an award at (as in all honesty I wasn’t even expecting an invite to attend in the audience). I know how much of a prestigious event it is and I was completely honoured. Not many people get invited and the people who do are absolute stars. I always love watching the BAFTAs and seeing all the amazing frocks but being there in person was breathtaking.
I took my mam along as my date and when we arrived we were escorted to a lift, a lift that David Haye was casually standing in. I clenched my mam’s hand and whispered, ‘O. M. G. It’s David Haye, Mam, look.’
‘I know,’ she whispered. ‘I can see, it’s only a little lift, he might hear us.’
We giggled and went to our seats. We then spent the next half an hour before the show being fan girls and admiring the room.
‘Joanna Lumley is five rows in front of us, Mam.’
‘Sweetie darling.’
‘Look to your left, Benedict Cumberbatch is there. Look to your right, there’s Jennifer Saunders. And look down there, it’s Dame Joan Collins.’
‘Now seriously, Scarlett, how does she look that good? She looks younger than us.’
The awards ceremony began and me and my mam were just in awe. Halfway through I was taken backstage with Aisling Bea who I was presenting the ‘Reality & Constructed Factual’ award with. I bumped into Charlie Brooker, Charlotte Riley and was sat next to none other than Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick) from Gossip Girl. Louis Theroux was backstage too and we ended up having a conversation about feminism (one to tick off my bucket list). Me and Aisling had created an Anchorman-style sketch to present the award where we would read out full stops, pauses and mistakes on the autocue. Luckily people laughed and I could now relax.
Me and my mam were so hungry after the show. Obviously we didn’t dare eat anything before the BAFTAs as I only have to look at a chip and I bloat to the point where people mistake me for being ‘with child’. The food was divine and my mam told me to ‘stop being a tit’ because everything that came out I would say, ‘Oh so for the main we are having BAFTA glazed carrots, with BAFTA mash, with BAFTA beef with beautiful BAFTA gravy lavished all over it for a bit of BAFTA moistness.’
‘Right, stop saying BAFTA or I will be BAFTAing out of the door, into the BAFTA taxi, all the way to your BAFTA house, got it?’
It is a night me and my mam will both remember forever and I wish I could do it all a-BAFTA-gain.
I have also got to take part in absolute nineties nostalgia by bringing back the cult classic Streetmate (which I will chat loads about in the next chapter) and of course by participating in The Crystal Maze. All I need now is to have Jet from Gladiators’ legs wrapped round me, a cameo on Absolutely Fabulous and to present the weather on Big Breakfast, and my childhood is officially complete.
The set for The Crystal Maze was massive compared to what I thought it was going to be, like I was actually out of breath when I made my way from the futuristic zone to the medieval zone. I felt like I was actually travelling back through time. I knew I would be the first and only person to get locked in on one of the challenges because my mam had already predicted it. I was put on a team with Steve Jones, David Coulthard, Jodie Kidd and Joey Essex. Now I have always loved Joey, this was only the second time I had ever met him but he is a genuinely lovely chap. Yes, he only wears a watch for decorative purposes as he can’t tell the time but that doesn’t make him a bad person, does it? He is someone that, if I ever got the chance, I’d like to have a tour of Essex with; he could show me the sights.
We managed to get most of the crystals (they kindly got rid of one of them to get me out of the room I was locked in). We really did all put our hearts and soul into it as we did it for Stand up to Cancer, a charity close to all our hearts. We managed to get 112 gold tickets in total. Now as an avid fan of The Crystal Maze I knew we had to make sure we got rid of all the silver tickets out of the dome as they cancelled the gold tickets out. So me and my nimble fingers picked out every silver I could see. We managed to get 112 gold and only seven silver tickets: £20,000 won for cancer research. We were over the moon. We even got our very own ‘We Cracked the Crystal Maze’ commemorative crystals for keeps.
People on the television are super lucky, I mean getting the chance to do The Crystal Maze, it was so bloody fun, I’d have paid to do it. Another ‘job’ which I can’t believe is a job is Celebrity Juice with Keith Lemon. When I went on there I was on Fern’s team with Jonathan Ross (Wossy). Opposite me was none other than Holly Willoughby, Baby Spice Emma Bunton and Gino D’Acampo. We were carrying furniture whilst getting hit with plywood by a little person. I watched Wossy lick a man’s arsehole (obviously he wasn’t to know), Gino entered a sex party and I nearly died (at least three times) in a mechanical chair while shouting out answers to questions like:
‘Name three things you find in a cage?’
‘A hamster, a rat, a person!’
‘Three places you can’t take your clothes off?’
‘In public, the zoo, a nursery!’
One of the many highlights this year was filming adverts. I did some online adverts for Suzuki where I had to stick as many Post-it notes on a car as possible, play the Generation Game and pop balloons inside a car with my nails. Another one was for Virgin Atlantic which I absolutely loved; I had to be interviewed by three children on my knowledge of Disney and Virgin (obviously I aced it).
And then there was my advert with Kevin Bacon for EE. Now my advert was straight after the one he did with Britney Spears (no pressure) so I was honoured to be chosen. In my head, as the other adverts were filmed in studios I had assumed we’d be doing the same, but little did I know it would be filmed on a cold beach in
the middle of nowhere in Hastings. Beautiful place but I have never felt cold like it. I was wearing a sack, a little pair of shorts and some thermals. I had to pretend to eat a witchetty grub, which brought back all sorts of traumatic flashbacks from the jungle. I did joke with Kevin Bacon, ‘Do you want me to save you a bit in case you’re hungry later?’ but I don’t think he heard me. I would love to experience that day again – it was just bizarre, but also I never knew you could have that much fun whilst not being able to feel your whole body from freezation (I understand this isn’t a real word but you can keep it, same as the word me and my mam use for someone who is really nasty, we say they are full of evility).
At one point me and Kevin Bacon (I had to restrain myself from singing Footloose every two seconds) were sat having a cup of tea watching Jeremy Kyle on set. I mean there’s something I never thought I would be able to write down. I think the tagline was: ‘Who stole my grandad’s dole money?’
Now I was trying to act cool around Bacon (that’s my nickname for him as I’ve met him for ten hours so obviously that means we are now soul sisters) but at one point I was strutting up the hill when a gust of wind came and I heard Jadeen (my agent) and Nicola (who sorts my hair and make-up out) shout, ‘Scarlett, your pants!’ To my horror I was standing there with my shorts wrapped round my ankles; luckily I had big granny-pant thermals on underneath otherwise Kevin would have got a shock. ‘I’m not intentionally mooning you, Kevin,’ I apologised. I was so mortified I could feel my face turn beetroot. Luckily he just giggled and saw the funny side of it, but I will never live it down and I can never watch Footloose in the same way again.
To my horror I was standing there with my shorts wrapped round my ankles.
Life is very surreal at the moment. Sometimes I just sit and think, oh my actual God. It is so overwhelming how my whole life has changed in such a short space of time. To be honest I never want it to end. I mean if it did, I’d be happy to go back to my life being a disability advisor but I just feel so lucky to be having these experiences.
Me Life Story Page 21
