I look shit with celebrities

There are many things your correspondent truly sucks at: sport, maths, dealing with authority figures. But without doubt the shining beacon in the sea of my incompetence is having my photo taken with famous people.

Obviously Arena is far too self-consciously cool to encourage its staff to grab passing celebrities and force them to beam into someone’s camera phone, but on other magazines it is virtually a sackable offence if you see, say, Jamelia, or someone from Hollyoaks, without humiliating yourself and them in this manner.

I have once had my picture taken with someone from Hollyoaks, but he’d already left the programme and gone on to join the band ‘Chairmen Of The Board’. Me neither. Still, a soap-opera actor is a soap-opera actor, so I readily posed for a picture when he stopped by the teen magazine office I was working in. And… flashed my pants. That’s me, on the beanbag. That exclamation mark I’ve photoshopped on is the only thing protecting the Bartley modesty.

That picture represents the high point. Second-best ever is this picture of me and the glamour model Jodie Marsh, taken a few years ago at the launch of her autobiography in some horrific bar in Leicester Square. In person she is almost tangerine; I am almost dead. It is not the ideal photographic pairing under any circumstances, but I would have fared much better by a) St Tropez-ing beforehand, and b) not trying to compete in the ‘frightening teeth exposure’ stakes.

Then there was Lil’ Chris. If you ever saw him on TV show School Of Rock, which you almost certainly didn’t, because the moment I get my photo taken with someone their career dies, you could not possibly have appreciated how lil’ he is. Check us out; I am at least a foot taller than him and he is looking for an exit. But his diminished stature has not made him any less attractive to teenage girls; notably the one on the left who is clearly plotting how to murder me.

And now my personal least favourite, the picture I tried to destroy, it is me and the Cheeky Girls. Now, I like to laugh at the CGs as much as anyone, but no one can say they’re not dedicated to their looks. “Every day is swimming, then gym,” their mother told me (she goes everywhere with them). So did I have the sense to have my picture taken with the Cheeky Mum? Did I bollocks. There I am in the middle of her two perfect size 8 daughters, my hair unwashed, my eyes drunken and a face that has ’special needs’ written all over it. It is this picture that has finally convinced me that I don’t just look shit next to celebrities; I look shit all the time.

Perhaps anticipating my crap-celebrity-magnet status, Arena has kept me in the office wherever possible, and I have nothing at all to add from the last year. But at the end of this week I am moving on to pastures new, pastures newspaper in fact, and a whole world of new, crap ‘serious celebrities’ is opening up. Perhaps I might come across Andy Burnham at a party! Or a Kay Burley or Carol Vorderman in the corridor! Or, more realistically, some unknown MEP… I’ll keep you posted.