I was pleased to see that Ant and Dec had won the best entertainment presenter award at the National Television Awards for the 12^th year running.

The cheeky Geordie chappies – who surely must have paintings in their attics which age instead of them in a Dorian Gray-style – are fully deserving of this accolade.

As well as being complete professionals, they are actually very nice people too.  I know this because my brother met them and interviewed them many years ago, before they performed at Kettering Leisure Village (anyone remember that?  I was there!)

He was a ‘cub’ reporter at the time and straight out of Journalism College – he’d got this job through his old schoolmate and friend who’d booked them for the gig.

He found them to be completely decent, genuine blokes, who were friendly and open.  They even bought him a cup of tea at the expensive hotel in London at which he interviewed them, which was greatly appreciated by him as he had huge student debts at the time!

I’m pretty sure they haven’t changed either which is why they continue to be very popular in what is sometimes a fickle industry.

I haven’t really met many famous people, but I did once bump into Richard Harris in Covent Garden.  He was wearing a sky-blue baby-gro type outfit, what’s called a ‘onesy’ these days, but as this was 1993 he was way ahead of his time fashion-wise.

I plucked up courage and approached him and asked for his autograph.  He was lovely, seeming genuinely pleased that somebody had recognized him, and that’s when I blurted out:

“I thought you were really good in ‘The Field’.”

He looked at me, raised an eyebrow and smiled, as I then blushed realizing that unless you knew he’d starred in an Irish film about a field that revelation could sound a little ‘unfortunate’ to anyone else listening!  He continued to smile as he signed the only piece of paper I had to hand – the back of a friend’s florist business card.

Just recently, my daughter asked me if I’d ever met anyone famous, and I recounted this tale (editing the bit about ‘The Field’).

“Who’s Richard Harris?” she asked.  To which I replied that he was a very famous Irish actor, who’d been in various war films, oh, and he was the original Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films.

“Wow, you met Dumbledore?!  That’s soooo cool!  Wait until I tell everyone at school!”  she replied happily.