The perils of being a posh boy on the telly

The first time it happened was at the cinema. I was queuing for my ticket-for-one when the woman behind me exploded. ‘Omigod I saw you on television!’ ‘Oh, er, yes,’ I mumbled. The next time was in the cinema, as I squeezed down the row: ‘Sorry, but I have to say, I saw you on that show,’ grinned the young man. I suppose we were on the King’s Road, so it wasn’t surprising everyone had been watching Posh People: Inside Tatler. It was only when I was stopped by a blonde in Shoreditch the next day that I began to worry for my ego.

I joined Tatler last year — ten years after I started my career as a receptionist at The Spectator. On my first day, filming began for the BBC’s fly-on-the-wall documentary. It’s been a funny time, what with interviewing pigeons for a jewellery shoot and writing confessionals about threesomes. Strangest of all has been the past week, since the show aired. Perhaps it was inevitable that, of the 450 hours filming for three one-hour episodes, they would make something of the new boy. But I never expected it would lead to a proposition (from an older man) on Twitter. As a print journalist, your readership is maybe a few thousand. Show your face on telly, and 1.5 million people have clocked it. Many more on iPlayer. It goes to your head. You start to think there’s something special about you. When all I did was turn up for work.

The reaction hasn’t all been favourable. In the first episode, there’s a bit in which I say that the correct way to eat a pear is with a spoon. To which someone countered — on Twitter, naturellement — that the way to eat a pineapple is to ‘shove it up your overprivileged arse’.