Hi @rambo and @missy, hope I've tagged this right!
I have a writer friend I've known for years who writes shows for Derren Brown and years ago I was down in London and my friend set up a meeting with him. Now I ought to mention that before my friend started writing for Derren I was already a huge fan of his work so when he said he'd arranged a dinner date with him my anxiety levels shot through the roof. I'm a pretty shy guy and I've always tried to resist hero-worshipping the people I admire but the thought of actually sitting down for lunch with someone as talented and incredible as Derren filled me with a weird combination of utter horror and blissful excitement.
Me and Iain had been out the night before I was due to go for lunch and we'd got hammered on cheap whiskey so the journey on the tube to a posh restaurant in central London with a killer hangover was not the best preparation for meeting one of my idols. I was trying to think of all the questions I could ask and the deep conversations I could have but my brain just wasn't functioning. We arrived and Derren met us in the foyer, hugging Iain then doing this awkward pause thing where he looked to be going in to hug me but then pulled back and offered his hand to shake instead. This totally threw me and I was even more of a gibbering wreck. I was totally out of my comfort zone and struggling to hold down the coffee I'd had on the tube which was doing cartwheels around my churning stomach.
From that point on the day just went from bad to worse. I ordered plaice which i'd never had before and it came with this weird little blunt knife thing. Not realising you're supposed to use this to scrape the flesh off the bones I spent the next 10 minutes trying to cut through this boney fish while trying to be as demure as possible while crunching it's many bones. I must have looked a right twat. Derren was courteous and polite and asked me things about my life but you know how it is when you're nervous and out of your intellectual depth, I just kept mumbling nonsensical answers and saying really dumb shit all the while trying to disguise the fact that I had no idea how to eat a fucking plaice.
You know that feeling you get when you think of all the funny clever shit you should've said hours after a conversation? Imagine that times like a million and that was how I felt for weeks afterwards. It still embarrasses me to this day when I think about it. I made a complete tit of myself. To make matters worse we went shopping for DVD's afterwards and walking into HMV i was telling Derren about a film called The Idiots which I thought he might be interested in. When he asked me why it was special I completely forgot about all the social complexities the film explores and just blurted out "It's got full penetrative sex in it!" He just looked at me like "oh".
We eventually parted ways, I thanked him for the meal and said I was a big fan and he was kind and decent but man I was mortified. I've replayed that day over and over again in my head so many times since and it still kills me.
I did meet him one more time after a show and that went marginally better, I actually managed one or two coherent sentences but it couldn't make up for my complete failure at that meal in London. Still, the plaice was quite nice if nothing else.