Annabel vs the Internet

by Annabel Port

  A few years later I recognised the model again. As being Simon Cowell’s girlfriend, Terri Seymour.

  Charlotte left ages ago, but if I can get in contact with her again, I’m sure I can extract all kinds of information about Simon’s love life. Like maybe he did use that black toilet paper to fashion a quick and easy gimp mask.

  I do some googling. Charlotte has since changed her surname, but with skills that I’m amazed M15 haven’t yet tried to utilise, I manage to find her work email.

  I send her a message. I should mention at this point that while she was a high-flying executive at the company, I was doing little more than work experience.

  Hi Charlotte,

  I used to work with you at Virgin Radio (many years ago). I was a runner but now I’m a presenter with Geoff Lloyd on Absolute Radio.

  Hope you are well. I was wondering if you were still friends with Terri Seymour and if you had an email address for her.

  Many thanks,

  Annabel

  I don’t beat around the bush with any friendly anecdotes about the old days, mainly as I don’t have any. So I’m amazed that less than an hour later I get a response.

  She starts with:

  What a blast from the past.

  I’m pretty sure she’s lying and has no memory of me but this is very polite.

  Then she goes on with:

  I’m afraid I don’t know where she is. I did see her a couple of times when she was with Simon Cowell. I presumed she was in LA, but maybe not.

  I’m a little overwhelmed by all this information but I manage to pull it together into a coherent chapter about Simon and love. Here it is:

  Chapter 2: Love

  Simon Cowell went out with Terri Seymour for a bit. During that time, she was still friends with a girl called Charlotte but they are not friends any more and Charlotte doesn’t know where she is. She might be in LA.

  It’s now time to follow my second lead.

  Geoff and I have a mutual friend named Suzanne, who used to work at the same record company as Simon Cowell. I get in contact with her, begging for titbits for my biography. She does not let me down.

  She tells me that she used to work in the floor below Simon. She was often carrying big piles of CDs and merchandise around and Simon was the only man who would hold the door open for her. He was a complete gentleman and this was at the height of Pop Idol.

  Also, she said that when Will Young won Pop Idol he was brought to spend the day at the offices to learn about what everybody did. I love it that he had to do this. He’d just won a £1 million recording contract but he still had to do what essentially sounds like a day of work experience in the office.

  Anyway, on that day, Will spent ages in Suzanne’s department, which specialised in back catalogue and reissues, as that’s where his musical heart lay. Plus, it was the only place that didn’t have pop and R’n’B pumping from the stereos. Later on, there was a presentation in their company bar. Simon introduced Will and congratulated him on his recent success, then handed the mic to him. Will waxed lyrical about how wonderful Suzanne’s division was and how Zen her offices were. Simon’s face was a picture. She said she often sees him pull the same face when Louis puts a novelty act through on The X Factor.

  This all gives me two new chapters:

  Chapter 3: Manners

  Simon Cowell has been a very polite man in his life and always holds doors open for ladies. He is a gentleman.

  Chapter 4: Will Young

  Simon Cowell wishes Gareth Gates had won Pop Idol.

  I’m a little worried now that this is stuff from ten years ago. I need something much more recent, so I think back to Britain’s Got Talent. The live shows start in around ten days. This gives me an idea. I find out where they are filmed and I ring the studios.

  “Hi, this is Annabel. I’m calling from Simon Cowell’s office.”

  The woman says, “Oh, hello. How is Simon?”

  “Oh, you know, his usual self,” I say jovially.

  The lady asks how she can help me and I say I have a few things I need to check facilities-wise regarding the upcoming live shows.

  “Oh, I’ll put you through to the client liaison manager,” she says.

  There’s now another woman on the line saying cheerfully, “Hello, Annabel.”

  “Hi,” I say. “I’ve just got a few very quick questions for you. Simon’s dressing room, what colour are the walls in there?”

  “I think they’re cream. Hold on.”

  I hear her say, “Harry, what colour are the walls in Simon’s dressing room?” I hear his reply of “whitish”. Then she comes back on the line and splits the difference with, “Yes, they’re a whitish cream.”

  “Right,” I say, “Sorry about this, but is there any chance of them being painted baby blue?”

  She laughs. I don’t.

  “Oh well, I’ll ask our maintenance guys. Hang on, I’ll just check.”

  I’m put on hold. After a while she comes back. “When would you need it done by?”

  I tell her next week.

  “Right, well, the room’s being set by Monday, but do you think Tuesday will be okay?”

  “Tuesday will be great,” I tell her.

  I move on to the catering now and tell her that Simon has especially requested the herbal Purdey drink in the silver bottle.

  That seems to be fine.

  “One more thing,” I say. “The toilets, I’m just checking they’re all really clean and definitely have a toilet brush by the bowl.”

  “Well, obviously Simon’s got his own toilet that we don’t go into. We’re not allowed. It’s as he left it.”

  “Right, yes of course. Well that’s all great. Speak to you soon.”

  That’s my fifth chapter sorted:

  Chapter 5: Britain’s Got Talent

  Simon has his own dressing room at the Fountain Studios. The walls are a whitish cream but were changed to baby blue on Tuesday 1 May. He drank that Purdey drink. Simon has his own toilet at the studios and nobody else is allowed to go in at any point at all. I think we all know why.

  All I need to do now is get it all serialised in the Sun. I send all the chapters to their news desk and wait for the big headlines, while having a lovely daydream about Simon liking it all so much that he wants it for his own autobiography. Then I remember the toilet bit and the daydream ends. Still, I hope he likes his new baby-blue walls.

  14

  The Challenge:

  To get revenge

  I’m very sure that there are a lot of people who I need to exact my revenge on. I start making a list:

  1. My upstairs neighbour, who complained that I turned my taps on too loudly.

  2. My upstairs neighbours in my last place, who regularly flooded my flat.

  3. Mr Tsang, my second-year senior form teacher, who wrote in my school report that I was “moody” and “rude”. I was a teenager. Of course I was moody and rude.

  4. Tim, for dumping me aged twelve after we’d been on a date to a tropical-fish shop.

  5. Mark, who broke up with me at thirteen for a girl he went on to marry, so actually I’ll forgive him.

  6. Dave, who dumped me at fourteen after arranging to meet me outside WHSmith’s on Southend High Street at 1 p.m. and just never turned up. I waited for an hour. This was way before mobile phones.

  7. Tristan, who broke up with me at fifteen. I rang up his house and he answered in a normal voice and then when he heard it was me, he pretended to be his mum in a high-pitched voice and said he was out.

  8. Ian, who broke up with me in my twenties by just never calling or texting me again.

  9. Jon, who did exactly the same as Ian.

  10. Another Jon, who ended things on my birthday, at my birthday party and didn’t buy me a present.

  11. The former actress and presenter Daisy Donovan, who I did work experience with at the BBC before she got a bit famous. She got all the best jobs and everyone really sucked up to her because of her famou
s family. Admittedly, that wasn’t really her fault.

  12. The girl who kept changing her mind about buying my last flat.

  13. The Labour Party canvasser who came to my door, was sick on the doorstep and then knocked and tried to get me to vote Labour. I had to clear it up with a hangover.

  14. Lord Sugar for never replying to any of my many tweets to him.

  15. Anyone who puts their bag on a seat in a crowded London Underground carriage.

  16. The boy in 1986 who said I couldn’t sing.

  17. The manager of the Music and Video Exchange, who sacked me after a few days and I’m still not even really sure why. There were complaints about the angle that I stapled some paper though.

  18. The man selling single red roses in Sicily, who, after I declined to purchase one, hissed at me every time he saw me.

  19. Warwick University for not letting me on a course even though I had more A-level points than they’d asked for. They said the letters were in the wrong order or something.

  It’s quite a lengthy list. I probably haven’t got time to do them all as I’ve only got three days. It seems that there are a lot of men who have spurned me over the years, though. I could really get my teeth into this and do all the things you’re supposed to do, like sew prawns into their curtain hems.

  Another revenge method is cutting off one sleeve of all their suits but a) I’m not convinced that the type of person I’ve ever gone out with would own more than one suit and b) in the intervening twenty-five years since my first rejection, I’ve found that the passion and fury have faded past the stage where I’d want to track him down, break into his house and hack his clothes to bits.

  I go back to the list and realise I’m still pretty annoyed with Warwick University for not letting me on my course even though I had more A-level points than they’d asked for. I’m going to exact my revenge on them!

  My first thought is a bomb scare. I’m a bit worried about being arrested, though.

  I have another thought. I call up admissions and say to the woman that answers,

  “Hello I’m the personal secretary to His Royal Highness Prince Andrew and he’s expressed a very serious interest in coming to your university as a mature student doing English and history. Where do we go from here?”

  This is a brilliant plan. I’ll get them all excited about him coming, I’ll arrange an interview for him and they’ll be giddy and laying on a big spread but he won’t come because I’ve made it up!

  A bored-sounding voice replies, “And when would he be starting?”

  “This September,” I tell her.

  “I think admissions have closed. Let me check.”

  I’m on hold. She comes back to tell me that they don’t do a joint degree of English and history. She goes on to list all the things you can do with English. I pick out English and creative writing. Andrew could always ask Fergie to help him with his coursework.

  “Okay,” the woman says, “I’ll just check that’s still open.”

  I wait a bit and then she tells me it’s not; admissions to this course are closed. It’s May. The course doesn’t start for five months. It’s not like I’m calling the night before. And this is for the Queen’s son.

  I point this out. “Well, as I said before, this is for Prince Andrew.” I put a lot of emphasis on the words “Prince” and “Andrew”.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” she says.

  I’m very surprised. And I feel less bad about them rejecting me all those years ago. Then I tell her that he’ll come next year, then. She starts saying he’ll have to fill in an UCAS form. Then asks, “What qualifications has he got?”

  “Well, he’s definitely got a helicopter pilot’s licence,” I tell her.

  There’s a long pause. Then she says he’ll need to do an access to further education course.

  “As I said before, this is Prince Andrew we’re talking about,” I reiterate.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” I’m told again.

  I’m now starting to forget why I’m doing this and become very focused on trying to get Prince Andrew a place at Warwick University.

  “What about if there was a significant donation, and I’m talking millions?”

  She tells me that they treat everyone the same and it’s not her place to talk money. She still sounds so bored. Someone is trying bribery to get a major royal a place at university and I can’t help but feel that she’s half-listening while thinking about what she’ll have for her tea later.

  I remember why I’m doing this and give it one more try, “How about he comes down tomorrow and has lunch with you and a look around?”

  “He’ll only be seen if he has an offer, which he doesn’t at the moment, and then he’d have to come down to an Open Day, which actually we have this Saturday.”

  Big mistake mentioning that.

  “Great,” I say, “Perfect! What time should he arrive?”

  She sighs and says she’ll put me through to another department. I’m on hold for so long I get bored and hang up. I’ve got a feeling this was their intention. Still, I definitely wasted their time a bit, so this was a truly great revenge.

  I know who I want to tackle next. Lord Alan Sugar.

  I joined Twitter nine months ago and since then I’ve sent 880 tweets. I’d estimate that around 60% of those have been to Lord Sugar. They are very nice tweets, admiring his work on The Apprentice and telling him how much I love his tiny fork diet and like to think of his big fat sausage fingers clasping a tiny fork. Just this week I warned him that I’d seen Tom’s nail file, which he invested in on The Apprentice, in a bargain bin in a pharmacy in South Woodford. I was doing him a big favour.

  All these nice tweets and I’ve never once got a reply. Yet he’s happy to tweet back and forth with the likes of Piers Morgan and Tulisa, and also retweet compliments he gets about his books or his YouView service, for example.

  I take it very personally that he consistently ignores me. Now is the time to right that terrible wrong.

  I need to get hold of him or someone who regularly speaks to him. I ring up his company Amscreen. I’m afraid that my American accent, once again, has to be used. A woman answers.

  “Hi, I’m calling from the United States. I’m from Time magazine. You’ve heard of that, right?”

  She has. Time magazine, of course, is famous for its Person of the Year, previously won by Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, Pope John Paul II and Gorbachev. But they’ve not yet announced this year’s winner.

  I go on with, “I’m calling on behalf of the editor Richard Stengel with some pretty good news for Lord Sugar, so I was hoping to get hold of him.”

  The woman says that it’s best if I contact his PR company as, “We don’t see too much of him around here.”

  Scandalous! He’s the chairman!

  I call his PR company. I go through the same introduction, the pretty good news and then dive straight in with, “And I’m pleased to tell you we’d love him to be Time magazine’s Person of the Year.”

  “That’s fantastic,” the lady says.

  “Yes. As you’ll know we choose the person who’s done the most to influence events of the year. Obviously, Lord Sugar has done a lot for fledgling businesses with The Apprentice and there’s the launch of YouView. . .”

  She’s making encouraging noises.

  “And there’s that nail file he brought out with Tom.”

  She goes quiet now.

  I fill the silence with a query on how you say the surname of nail-file Tom. I feel like I’ve got her back again as she asks if it’s an interview that we’re after.

  I tell her, “No just the go-ahead. Obviously, we’d only name someone Person of the Year if we had their permission first.”

  She asks for my email address. I give her the entirely made up angela.cartwright@timemagazine.com.

  She tells me she’ll check it’s okay with Lord Sugar and then email me back. Of course I won’t get this email, but I do get the satisfac
tion of Lord Sugar thinking for some of today that he is going to be Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

  I’m really enjoying revenge now and I want to seek retribution one more time. It’s the boy who said I couldn’t sing in 1986.

  From the age of ten until sixteen I went to a drama group, Focus Theatre Workshop in Southend-on-Sea. We had an annual production and I memorably starred in Oliver! as a workhouse boy, and in Bugsy Malone as a boxer, a down and out and Joe the Barman. Three whole parts! I was practically like Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor. Also, in Annie, I was one of the orphans, Pepper. I had one line of singing in “It’s a Hard Knock Life”, but it was taken away from me, due to the fact that I can’t sing.

  However, in my first play, when I was about eleven, I actually had a good part. It was Sleeping Beauty and I played Morpheus the Sprite of Sleep. I know it doesn’t sound like a great part. I’m not sure it made it into the original story or film, but I did have to do a whole song and dance on my own. It was Paul McCartney’s “Frog Chorus”. Looking back, I have no idea why Morpheus the Sprite of Sleep sang the “Frog Chorus” and what it has to do with Sleeping Beauty. It does feel a little shoehorned in.

  Anyway, it was my first role and it was a big one. I felt like there were a few mutterings among my peers about me getting a singing part, but I ignored it and threw myself into the role. I performed my heart out and I thought it went well. Until I saw the VHS recording of one of the performances. During my rendition of the “Frog Chorus”, you can very clearly hear a young boy in the audience say in a loud stage whisper, “She can’t sing.”

  The humiliation. I think this was a turning point in my life. I lost my confidence with my singing. I might’ve become a rich pop star, maybe then an X Factor judge. I’d probably be living in that house in Dubai that Nicole Scherzinger once stayed in during judges’ houses week.

  This young boy wronged me and I will have my revenge.

  I know that it’s not going to be easy. My first thought is to give the VHS to M15 to use some kind of voice-recognition software on the boy. But I quickly realise this is ridiculous. I’ve no idea where the VHS is.