#9 Chris Tarrant: Do Me a Curry Favour!

It must be rubbish being Chris Tarrant sometimes. He is never more than twenty minutes away from a village idiot asking him whether he’d like to “phone a friend”.

Misunderstand me not, for a well-executed Millionaire cliché can a zinger make. Spot Tarrant on a public telephone – or, hell, maybe even a new-fangled mobile doobrie – and you have the perfect oppo to pounce with that old standby. Tarrant would collapse into a hysterical heap and want to be your life-long friend.

Not so, I’m afraid, if you desperately try to shoehorn. And certainly not so if you can’t, in the words of Reeves and Mortimer, let it lie. A tenuous and enduringly repetitive offensive turns an everyday, common-or-garden twat into the real deal: an olympic-standard arsehole.

Following the curry fracas, it’s tempting to stoop as low, and custard-pie Tarrant with a similarly obvious line...

But we don’t want to give him that!

So Chris’s side of the story reads approximately like this: I was at the Memsaab with a producer when some peckerhead tried to impress his bird by engaging in banter with me. I was absolutely fine with it, no animosity. Which is why I lobbed (I emphasise “lobbed”) something like a serviette (or, yes, it might have been a fork or a knife, or both, whatever, let’s not lose sight of the wood for the trees) at their table. I was surprised to find later that the man had seen his rump about it and tipped off the Heat. Jeez Louise, strangers dispense pints of lager onto my head in good humour all the time. What’s the world coming to when I can’t, in jest, throw (lob, I mean, lob) a spoon at someone’s dinner?

Is that your final answer, Chris?

I see his point. I remember when I was little, at the Sunday dinner table, my dad gently ribbing me about the girl next door...my mum and my brothers giggling in that slightly stifled way. And me, beaming with respectful amusement. Then lobbing (we’re talking seriously slow underarm action) my cutlery into his beef and yorkshires. The table erupting with mirth. My gravy-splattered father included, slapping his thigh with some force, yelling, “He got me a good ‘un there!” Yeah, nothing keeps the atmosphere light-hearted like a timely discharge of cutting instruments.

Surely staff and fellow diners can shed some light on this. They must be able to confirm that Chris, actually, I mean come on, lost his cool big time.

So let’s ask the audience!

Eff all use they turn out to be. First, there weren’t really any fellow diners. The much-lauded eatery was dead. Chris, producer, peckerhead, girlfriend. That’s pretty much it. And in spite of this, the owner has suggested the staff hadn’t even noticed Tarrant filling his face, never mind doing a whimsical knife-throwing act.

Though I’m guessing the blame can be split down the middle.

I need a wisecrack to end on. What’s another, snappy way of saying “split down the middle”?