Living it Arg

by James Argent

  When the big event arrived I was still quite nervous, because it was to be the first time I had performed a musical theatre number since my amateur days. It was a bit of a rush to get to the venue on the day itself, because I was making a personal appearance in Spain the night before. My flight back allowed me just enough time. When I arrived at the Royal Albert Hall, I stood outside and spent a moment looking at the fantastic architecture of the building. I still couldn’t quite believe that in a few hours I’d be inside and singing on stage. I went inside and made my way to my dressing room. As I walked through the corridors I noticed that there were framed photographs on the walls of all the great artists who had performed there over the years, such as Frank Sinatra, Elton John and the Rolling Stones.

  I felt privileged to be there.

  After that I took part in a dress rehearsal, but it felt slightly strange because when I sang there was a bit of an echo around the hall because it’s such a huge auditorium, and it was of course empty. It took a bit of getting used to, but the rehearsal went well and I was able to relax and get ready for the show. My mum and dad were coming along to support me, along with Nanny Colette, Nanny Brighton, Uncle Gerry and my two cousins Saffron and Shea. They would be sharing a queen-sized box together and I felt very honoured that they were all able to come along and root for me.

  When the show started there were lots of fantastic acts performed by children from all over Britain. One of them involved a dance routine in which a young girl was projected into the air in order to do a flip before being caught by her fellow performers on the way down. It was a brave move, but, as I watched from the wings, disaster struck.

  The little girl took a tumble on the way down and landed on her head!

  There were gasps of horror from the audience as she hit the deck with a thud. Luckily, she wasn’t injured, but I could see that she was badly shaken up and my heart went out to her. The girl then showed incredible bravery by getting up and carrying on with the act.

  When it was my turn to take the stage I couldn’t believe the reception that I got. The venue was packed and all the youngsters in the audience were cheering and screaming. As I took the microphone, I was still feeling very touched by the bravery of the little girl who had taken a tumble. I know how hard it is to carry on when you make a mistake, because it can make you very scared to go back on stage again.

  ‘I just want to say congratulations and well done to that girl, who carried on even though she fell. She should be proud of herself,’ I told the audience.

  The crowd cheered and my big moment to sing had finally arrived. I threw everything into my performance of ‘Stars’. Thankfully, all my preshow fears and nerves seemed to fade away and I thoroughly enjoyed it. At the end I was greeted with huge applause. As live performances go, it was definitely one of the highlights of my career, because I’d fulfilled a childhood dream. It made me realise that, if you put your mind to something, you can achieve anything regardless of your background.

  Another highlight for me was being asked to support Olly Murs from The X Factor at a warm-up show in the West Country. I hadn’t been in TOWIE for very long at the time and Olly didn’t really know me (I was asked to perform by the show’s promoter, rather than Olly’s management). Nonetheless, it was still a huge honour to meet him. Olly is an Essex boy himself, although at this point he hadn’t seen much of TOWIE because he’d been touring so heavily. The next time I met him was at a Channel 4 event and he greeted me like an old friend. He’s a lovely guy and a very good singer.

  I’m also very lucky to have been invited onto several TV shows to sing as a result of people seeing me crooning on The Only Way Is Essex. One of my favourite times was when This Morning asked me to dress up as Santa and sing lots of Christmas songs during their last show before they broke up for the festive season.

  In addition to TV work, I get asked to do my stuff at lots of corporate events, which are generally a pleasure to attend. In addition, I have my own touring show called A Night with James Argent, which I performed with a good friend of mine called Tony Roberts. You may have seen Tony previously on The X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent (he’s been on both). He’s a winner of Heart FM’s Next Big Thing competition and he is very accomplished as a singer. Tony does my support act (even though he’s technically a better singer than I am, I get to headline the show thanks to being known from TOWIE!). We also perform duets.

  Of course, not every gig that I’ve done has gone according to plan. There was one occasion when I had a booking at a holiday resort in Skegness that went horribly wrong. It’s funny when I look back on it now, but at the time it made me cringe.

  Before attending the booking I’d been partying with Elliott and Diags in Spain, and I’d arranged for my manager Neil to pick me up from the airport and take me straight to the gig. On the day I was due to fly I awoke to discover with horror that I’d lost my voice. I don’t know if it was because the air conditioning in my hotel had dried out my throat, but all I could manage to do was croak the odd word. When I called Neil to explain, he could barely hear my voice rasping down the phone.

  ‘That’s terrible news, Arg,’ he replied. ‘It’s a great big gig. Two thousand people have paid to hear you sing.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I whispered.

  ‘Well, we can’t cancel it at this short notice. You’ll just have to hope that your voice recovers in time.’

  I tried sipping lots of water on the plane home but by the time I arrived back in the UK my voice was worse. Flying seemed to have dehydrated me even more. When Neil greeted me at the airport I knew there was only one thing I could do.

  ‘I’ll have to mime,’ I croaked.

  It was a crazy plan because people don’t expect you to fake it when they’ve paid to see a live performance, but I had no choice. I hated the thought, but it was either that or let down two thousand people. I could manage to say the odd sentence on stage but that was about it.

  I had some backing tracks that I always take to a gig and I knew that among them were some recordings of me singing ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and one or two other numbers.

  ‘I’ll just have to pretend to sing along to those and hope that nobody notices,’ I told Neil.

  When I went on stage at first everything went well. Neil oversaw my sound arrangements and he made sure that the recording kicked in at the right moment.

  I glided around on stage and did my best to lip-synch to all the words. To my amazement it seemed to work and I got the impression everybody thought that I really was singing. When the song ended I got a great round of applause.

  I then tried to manage a few brief words of welcome to the audience before going into the next number.

  And then disaster struck.

  I’d just started talking to the audience when the recording of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ suddenly kicked in again and began to play for the second time. My mouth dropped open in shock as everybody heard my singing repeated through the speakers. It was obvious to the audience that I’d been miming. Backstage, Neil was in a panic as he frantically tried to pull the plug.

  There was worse to come.

  The track got stuck on my opening few lines of the song, which kept repeating over and over again. I was so embarrassed that I wanted the ground to open and swallow me. I stood there cringing. After a few moments of agony, I did the only thing that I could in the circumstances: I apologised with all my heart.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t normally mime, but I’ve lost my voice. I didn’t want to disappoint everyone by not turning up,’ I croaked, after Neil finally managed to kill the recording.

  Luckily the audience warmed to me for being honest and I’ll be for ever grateful to those people for being so understanding. I made sure that I stayed behind to greet everyone who wanted to meet me in person, so that I could say sorry to their face.

  Thankfully, the holiday camp’s management were impressed by the way I handled it – and I was very honoured when they later invited me
back.

  I’d had a lucky escape!

  I’m still just an ordinary bloke at heart, despite being frequently on TV, so it’s always exciting when I get to meet celebrities through my work. One of the nicest people I’ve ever had the pleasure to bump into was David Beckham, whom I met at the Sun’s Military Awards. I was in the loos when he walked in with two of his sons. David had a big smile on his face and he nodded a greeting to me. I don’t mind admitting that I was starstruck, but later on during the night I plucked up the courage to go and properly say hello to him.

  ‘Hello, Arg,’ he replied (I was chuffed that he knew my name).

  ‘Have you heard of The Only Way Is Essex?’ I asked him. ‘You were bought up in Essex, weren’t you? Aren’t you originally from Chingford?’

  ‘Yeah, of course, I’ve heard about the show, mate. I know what you are all doing,’ he replied.

  The pair of us then got chatting about a great pie-and-mash shop that I know in Waltham Abbey, where we’d recently done some filming for TOWIE. David was living abroad at the time, but he said the same pie-and-mash shop was the first place he always took his kids whenever they got off the plane! He was very down to earth. I was impressed by how he made time to talk everybody, fans included. He was always happy to look them in the eye and pose for photos.

  One of my childhood heroes, whom I got to meet through my work, was Will Young. I’d followed Will’s progress on Pop Idol while I was a teenager and as a special treat my mum took me up to Oxford Street to go to one of his book signings. When we arrived the store was swamped with people and I was so far back in the queue that I never got to meet him. I was really upset at missing him. I finally go to meet Will years later when I appeared in Daybreak and Will was next door about to go on This Morning. One of the staff at ITV was kind enough to show me to Will’s dressing room and I said hello. The funny thing was that I felt like a starstruck teenager all over again and went bright red! I told Will all about the story of when I tried to see him at Oxford Street and we had a good laugh.

  I also met Alan Carr when I appeared on Chatty Man with some of the other TOWIE cast members. The actor Tom Hardy was also on the show, and so was Ellie Goulding, who performed a song.

  Another celebrity who was a delight to meet was Kelly Brook, whom I am happy to say I got drunk with. I’ve always thought that Kelly is gorgeous and I can confirm that she’s every bit as nice in the flesh as she is in her photographs. I was introduced to her in a guest box at the 02 Arena when Mark and I were invited to watch a Rihanna concert by a corporate sponsor. Kelly was charming and we chatted together while we tucked into a giant buffet of fabulous food. Kelly said she was a fan of TOWIE and she also told us how excited she was to be appearing in a new film with Keith Lemon.

  As the drink began to flow I found myself getting slightly tipsy. I was eyeing up a delicious-looking piece of carrot cake on the buffet when Kelly suddenly grabbed a spoon and began to feed it to me! It was a right laugh and I can remember thinking that not many blokes can say they’ve had Kelly Brook spoon-feed them cake!

  By the time Rihanna was in full flow on stage, the booze had well and truly gone to my head. I sidled up behind Kelly and began to do some dirty dancing. When I think about it now it makes me blush, because I was bumping and grinding like there was no tomorrow. I must have made a bit of a spectacle of myself, because Mark had to thump me on the arm a couple of times to remind me to behave myself.

  ‘You can’t do that – it’s Kelly Brook!’ he exclaimed.

  Thankfully, Kelly didn’t seem to mind. I suppose it just goes to prove the old saying: ‘You can take the boy out of Essex, but you can’t take Essex out of the boy!’

  18

  SURPRISE SURPRISE AND WORKING IN A CELEBRITY SPA

  One of my fondest memories is from when I was invited to sing on the new version of Surprise Surprise, the popular ITV programme that makes people’s dreams come true. I’d grown up watching the show when it was presented by Cilla Black, so I was intrigued when I received a phone call about it from ITV.

  ‘It’s a bit of a secret, Arg, but Surprise Surprise is coming back and it’s going to be hosted by Holly Willoughby,’ one of the producers told me.

  ITV said the new series was launching in the autumn and that they were secretly planning to surprise a woman who was a fan of The Only Way Is Essex. The woman’s family had a very moving story. It concerned two sisters, one of whom had been planning to get married when their mother had tragically died of cancer. Due to her bereavement, the bride felt too distraught to go ahead with the wedding, but her sister had been a real pillar and helped the family to pull together. Thanks to her support, the wedding eventually went ahead. The Surprise Surprise team were planning to make the sister’s dreams come true by giving her the full TOWIE treatment. They wanted me to perform ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ before springing the surprise on the bride’s sister at the end of the song. The plan was that she would be sitting in the audience unaware that anything was about to happen. I would then walk over and present her with a red rose and invite her up on stage. Sam and Billie Faiers would then join us and the lady would be given a well-deserved Essex makeover at Minnies (the boutique that Sam and Billie run in Brentwood). It sounded like a lovely show to be involved with.

  ‘You can count me in,’ I told ITV.

  I loved the idea of being able to make a TOWIE fan happy and I was also impressed by ITV’s grand plans for the show.

  ‘The sister always watches The Only Way Is Essex and you’re her favourite,’ they told me. ‘We know that you love singing so we want to give you the opportunity to give the best performance of your life.’

  ITV said I would be supported on stage by an eleven-piece band, which would include a brass section, drums and keys. Normally when I perform it’s to a backing track, so this would be the first time I’d sung alongside a proper big band. There seemed to be no expense spared and the producers arranged for a top musical director called Mike Dixon to oversee everything. I was very honoured because Mike is a huge name in the West End, having been musical supervisor for We Will Rock You alongside Brian May. Mike is also musical supervisor on the West End show The Bodyguard. Not only was I going to have my own band, but I was going to be working with one of the best directors in the country – so the show was a bit of a dream come true for me as well as for the lady we were surprising.

  I got on really well with Mike during rehearsals and he gave me some great help and advice. I told him that I’d love to sing on a West End stage one day and he was kind enough to introduce me to some of his contacts.

  The episode of Surprise Surprise was great fun. I’ve met Holly Willoughby many times on This Morning and it was good to be working with her again. We share a connection, because her husband Dan Baldwin is an Essex boy who went to the same secondary school as I did, although we were a few years apart and didn’t know each other. Dan is an executive on Keith Lemon’s Celebrity Juice, which I’ve also appeared on. Keith Lemon always makes me laugh and he’s just as funny in real life as he is when you seen him on the telly.

  The band Surprise Surprise laid on were amazing and with Mike’s help I managed to pull off a performance that I was very happy with. More importantly, the woman we surprised had a fantastic time. When I ducked into the audience as my song came to end she had no idea we were about to single her out. I moved from person to person with the rose that I was holding before finally pausing to stop alongside her.

  ‘I luuurve . . . you!’ I crooned, as I handed the rose to her.

  I then led her on stage to meet Holly along with Sam and Billie. It was a very emotional show and I felt privileged to be able to play a part in making someone feel so happy. I know it also made my mum feel very proud to see me involved in something so nice. As for my singing, it must have gone well, because Holly Willoughby gave me a little smile afterwards and said, ‘Well done!’

  One fun show that I have appeared on a couple of times is Family Fortunes with Vernon Kay.
The first occasion was when TOWIE took on the cast of Benidorm in a celebrity episode. Later, I got invited back with my own family. I was joined by my dad, my sister, Nanny Brighton and my cousin, Aaron. We did well, because we ended up winning a family cruise! Vernon Kay is a real joker and he’s always one for springing things on you. Midway through the show it was mentioned that I’m a bit of a singer, so he put me on the spot and we ended up singing a little duet of ‘That’s Life’ together.

  Vernon also gave me a shock when I went on his Saturday show on Radio 1. I’d been doing a bit of hospital radio on TOWIE at the time, so he invited me up to the BBC studios in London to join in with the big boys. I enjoy doing radio because it gives you a chance to have a bit of banter on air, which is something I feel natural doing. When I arrived at Radio 1, Vernon greeted me with a smile and when the show began we had a quick chat about TOWIE and played a few songs together. I was in the studio live on air and surrounded by hundreds of switches and buttons, when Vernon suddenly decided to get up and leave me on my own.

  ‘Right, this is your big chance to prove yourself on the radio. I’m just popping out,’ he said.

  I was terrified!

  I think it was Vernon’s way of playing a little joke on me. All I had to do was play a number by Lady Gaga, but there were millions of buttons and I felt like I didn’t have a clue.

  ‘Erm . . . this is “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga,’ I stuttered on air.

  I pressed the button to bring up the music but to my horror nothing happened.

  Oh hell! I thought. The whole nation’s listening and I’ve messed it up.

  Luckily, the next button I hit was the right one and there was only a brief pause before the music kicked in, but it gave Vernon a good laugh!

  They have a funny nickname for me at Lime Pictures and ITV. They call me the Ian Beale of TOWIE because I’ve been there since the beginning, just as the character Ian Beale has in EastEnders. I’ve always made it clear that I don’t want to go anywhere else and I’ve pretty much been in every episode (in fact, at the time of writing there is only one show that I’ve missed, which, in case you are wondering, was Episode 3 of Series 1). People joke that if TOWIE lasts twenty years I’ll probably still be there sweeping up at Sugar Hut.