A summer of solicitation

You never know what people really think of you until one day a complete stranger yells at you from their intercom: “You’re the anal slime on the public conscience!”

I understood for a brief second the pain and anguish that telemarketers and parking wardens must endure on a daily basis. 

This choice phrase was aimed at me from a disgruntled neighbour of actress Liz Hurley after I buzzed their London apartment trying to find out if Liz was currently residing at her Chelsea home. 

I deserved it. After all, I was possibly the 100th person to have rung the bell to their apartment that day asking exactly the same question. It was a hot summer's day in 1995 - 24 hours after actor Hugh Grant had been caught by police with prostitute Divine Brown. It was alleged he had been involved in a lewd act in an LA public toilet. 

I was a papparazzo in the English capital but I felt just as disillusioned as Hugh looked in his now infamous mug shot. 

No doubt about it, this was the strangest way to explore my new home of London.

I was working for the London News Agency - I wasn’t even working for a newspaper - just a sort of girl friday for all the daily rags when they didn’t have their person on the ground. This generally meant I was working in the evenings when the real reporters were sick of waiting for something to happen and found a better story to write or were just going home.

Your copy could run anywhere your news editor could sell it, The Sun, The Mail, The Horse & Pony or as was often the case, lead story in the daily trash can. 

Sex and scintillation sells I was told,  so go out and find it for a few measly quid a day. This was pre the hacking scandal of the late 90s FYI. Cellphones were a relatively new thing back then.

Sometimes, like hanging outside Liz Hurley’s residence - it was several long days of just waiting around with a growing crowd of other hacks.  A much nicer neighbour of Liz, who worked for beverages company Schweppes, came out in the hot searing sun and offered us free drinks if we tidied up after ourselves. 

The lunch rubbish was cleared to be promptly replaced by hundreds of Schweppes cans. 

Most of us scribes had the added problem of not only finding a story but trying to keep in contact with our news desk. 

I didn't have a mobile phone so I had to either go old school and find a public telephone box or borrow the photographer’s to update my boss or get instructions on where I’d go next.

Sometimes I’d be alone on a dark street outside some C list celebrity’s house and told to call in to the desk every hour. I figured out that if no one else was there then I could safely go back home. I would use my landline and stick my head out the window every hour to call in and that sufficed enough to make the news desk think I was still there, patient as a saint, waiting for the celebrity to sleepwalk out of their house. 

It was like reporting the news, just without the news bit. Mostly the job involved sitting around chatting with other reporters, discussing devious ways into the celebrity’s apartment block or analysing possible lunch options. The summer of 1995 in Old Blighty was one of the hottest on record since 1884 so I was instructed by friends to enjoy every minute of it as it was likely to be another 100 plus years before this occurred again. Boy were they wrong, this was pre alarming global warming predictions and hot summers have subsequently become the norm. But it was warm, sunny and I got a killer tan that year and ate a lot of fast food.

Hot summer scoops during my time on the streets included:

Get busy living or get busy dying

I spent a scary day wandering alone and aimlessly around the neighbourhood directly beside notorious prison Wormwood Scrubs after two killers had just escaped. There's nothing better than knocking on some poor single mum’s door to inform her that not one but two murderers could be lurking in the garden. Oh and also would she kindly say how shit-scared she was for the papers. Weirdly I hoped I would turn a corner and run into the escaped prisoners sort of larking about trying to blend into the neighbourhood. But, let’s face it, if the dozens of cops going door to door are struggling to find them, what chance did I have?

The resulting story that ran in one of the dailies written by yours truely was a piece from the scared and weary residents and their fear of being infiltrated by escaping prisoners. Many were ‘not named for fear of retribution’ - most did not actually exist!  

I Khan Drive!

Chasing Jemima Khan through the streets of London by car was like a time trial on Top Gear. Say what you like about Jemima but never mess with a celebrity who could outpace The Stig if a pack of hungry hacks starting chasing her down.

Boys Of Summer 

My only actual face to face encounter with a celebrity was in Paddington outside the home of entertainer Michael Barrymore. Speculation had been rife that the man who had many mature women throwing their panties at the telly was actually gay. Back in 1995 this seemed like a big thing god forbid.

Nothing much was happening outside his Paddington home...but one day I did embrace my anal sliminess and noticed that building work had begun on Michael’s impressive house. 

Owing to this particularly hot summer in London, the builders and labourers were fit young men walking around topless - you can guess how the story was spun  

My news editor was ecstatic! Boys Bare All at Barrymores or some similar headline appeared somewhere in a trashy English rag that day!

Then, as luck would have it, myself and photographer found ourselves alone outside his house when most of the press had run off in search of food. Seconds later, Michael just happened to pop out his gate. I was tucking into a burger at the time, myself and photographer dropped our food and ran after a now sprinting Barrymore heading for his car. As I ran, it occurred to me that I did not actually know what I wanted to ask him. In the end I had one second in between panting for breath as he hurled himself into the safety of his car. 

All I could come up with was: 

“Michael, are you gay?” However, at the same time, in my head I said to myself: “What the fuck are you doing?”. The deep abyss of gutter journalism was getting lower and murkier. 

Not surprisingly, Michael didn’t answer me, but the photographer got the money shot so we were done in Paddington. 

The long hot summer drew to a rapid close a few weeks after it started and I’d drunk too many Schweppes, annoyed countless celebrity neighbours and put my last 20p in the phone box of tabloid trash. This anal slime slipped quietly away from papparazzi life in search of quality news - or at the very least a news organisation that gave me a desk.