The day Adrian Chiles tried to kill me

 by Martin Belam, 13 September 2007

I'm suffering a little bit from "If it is Thursday, it must be department x syndrome" at the moment. I'm in London working on three different projects at the BBC, and having to quite carefully divide my time and physical presence between them.

Last week I was mostly sitting amongst the CPS tech team in the Journalism department. That meant a couple of days staring across my desk to gaze upon a glass wall decorated with a large transparent print of The Two Ronnies.

The Two Ronnies

And, being constantly distracted by the nagging feeling that someone was standing just behind my left elbow, only to turn round and find every time that it was a cardboard cut-out of Jimmy Hill.

Wearing a real feather boa.

Jimmy Hill with feather boa

I also got to enjoy the pun-tastic tea mugs.

BBC FM and Tea mug

The local authorities are running an awareness campaign about thefts in the White City area. It has to be one of the least inspired I've seen - it virtually screams out "Oooh, look, telly people work there, let's do a telly-thing campaign to engage with them"

White City crime campaign

Still, it isn't the local residents who have been causing me grief, it has been BBC celebrities from The One Show. For some reason they keep popping up whilst I'm there.

Adrian and Myleene from The One Show

On my last stint back at the BBC when I got an email asking me to pick up my ID card, it was cc'd into Myleene Klass, as presumably hers was ready at the same time. And then last week Adrian Chiles tried to kill me.

Well, I say kill me, but what I really mean is to do me a serious injury. I was just hanging around the reception foyer of one of the White City buildings waiting for a friend and watching "Identity" with Donny Osmond on the big screen, when Adrian Chiles burst in wearing his running kit.

He shouted to someone on the balcony above, and got them to throw down his ID card, which narrowly missed decapitating my by centimeters as it hurtled to the floor. Adrian apologised, scrabbled under the sofa I was standing next to in order to to retrieve it, and then rushed off again. My brush with celebrity attempted murder was over.

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