But taking that away, what people think of me is I don’t try to be anything else other than what I am.’ I’m sat here with my PR, and we can talk about branding, what you want people to think of you. I turned over to ITV and I was on an advert, then I went to Channel 4 and I was on a panel show, and I was like, what the f-k…? The joke about me was “you’re everywhere” – and I was.’Īsk Rylan to explain his popularity and he replies that he was ‘the normal boy who did all right. ‘I remember one night,’ he says, ‘I turned on the television, BBC One and I was on a show. He has even received the imprimatur of true fame, like Princess Margaret, Queen Camilla and Dame Judi Dench: making a guest appearance on The Archers, in an improbable storyline about being stranded in Ambridge on his way to Liverpool to host Eurovision. Belatedly I realised how interesting, how funny, and how clever he is – and how he has become part of the national conversation. But then I noticed he seemed to be everywhere: on the sofa of ITV’s This Morning with Holly Willoughby and the subsequently disgraced Philip Schofield, presenting The One Show, on gameshows and in advertisements (he even popped up in my Twitter feed promoting a mobile game, along with a number of presenters and Simon Cowell) – and then there’s his Radio 2 show, Rylan on Saturday, where he spends three hours playing records and phoning his mother. I didn’t see him on Celebrity Big Brother, either. I missed his first major appearance on British television in 2012 on The X Factor. I was a late adopter of the world of Rylan. Rylan Clark presenting ITV's This Morning alongside Holly Willoughby and Philip Schofield in 2017 He never understood the fuss about watches, but after his divorce and subsequent breakdown two years ago – more of which later – he treated himself. He’s dressed in black trousers, a black shirt and a gold Audemars Piguet watch (at a price you could probably put down for a mortgage). He is 34, an affable man, very polite, thoughtful, almost earnest at times, looking like – well, Rylan. But just on a personal level I’d like to be able to have a walk around a B&M once in a while.’
There’s a lot more worse than that going on. ‘Unless I’m in, like, a burqa and a wheelchair I’m going to be spotted, but listen, this is not “poor me”. Then I got a message from someone saying you’re all over this Facebook group “Spotted in Corby Town” with loads of pictures of me in B&M. Every step I took, it was photo, photo, photo, to the point where I had to go. ‘I went in there and within three seconds it was, “What are you doing in here? Surely you don’t need to shop here.” I’m like, I don’t need to, but I want to. He was recently in Corby, doing promotional work, and happened to pass a branch of B&M, the household goods supermarket. He is fastidious about cleanliness in his home, and as he writes in his memoir, Ten, there is nothing he loves more ‘than a browse in the cleaning products aisle of the supermarket’. Then there is his fondness for domestic cleaning products. He has compensated for this by building a replica of a Tube station (actual size) in the drive of his Essex home, which he designed himself. And it is one of his regrets that he can no longer travel on the London Underground untroubled.
Walking the 50 yards from the restaurant where we had been having lunch to his publicist’s office, where we continue talking, he has been approached half a dozen times for photographs. Nowadays Rylan, who describes himself as being ‘seven feet tall with the biggest teeth in show business’ (he is actually 6ft 4in, but a degree of exaggeration goes with the territory), is recognised wherever he goes. Like Boris and Beyoncé, Ant and Dec, the television presenter Rylan has ascended to that rung on the celebrity ladder where his first name alone rings the bell of instant recognition.Īnd it is not simply the name.
0 kommentar(er)
