Meat and potato pie.
That’s all I can imagine Gary Barlow eating. Every single day. Meat and potato pie. Cornflakes for breakfast maybe. Chicken salad for lunch. But definitely meat and potato pie for his tea (he’s Northern, before you ask – he calls his evening meal ‘tea’, no doubt about it).
When he was trotting around the globe, in his apparent drive for a knighthood during the Jubilee celebrations (play the long game Gary Barlow OBE, play the long game), the scene that materialised in my head was thus…
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A mud shack in Tanzania.
Celebrated singer-songwriter Gary Barlow, sitting on the village’s only stool.
A throng of Tanzanian elder folk stood awkwardly behind the Open Road star, as likely to celebrate the work of Satan’s Agitated Doom Warriors as they are singer-songwriter Gary Barlow.
A scattering of tiny Tanzanian kids, hovering excitedly near the musical mind behind Do What U Like, but excited purely by the proximity of a film crew.
A film crew.
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The world’s most exhausted PR account manager, regretting raising her hand in the office for the ‘international PR jolly of a lifetime’.
A bowl of a steaming concoction, brought for Gary’s delectation by a Tanzanian woman wearing a pinny and a look of weary resignation.
A nervous PR account manager, her instincts forcing her back to sentience, providing her charge with a strained facial tic to signal that he, Gary Barlow, must feign pleasure with the offering put before him.
A pensive Gary Barlow, poised to taste the bowl of Tanzanian hotpot, with the look of a man who’s been asked to endure the company of Louis Walsh for one series too many.
A film crew, poised to capture the moment when 海角视频’s most beige man tries something more exotic than a virgin cocktail with two umbrellas in it.
Gary Barlow, pushed to the brink after seven days straight of cross-continent culinary creations, tips the bowl of brown stew onto the floor of the mud shack. He stands, raising his untainted spoon in the air, and exclaims “I can’t be doing with all this flavour, complexity and spice. Have you not heard my last album? I want meat and potato pie.
“Where’s me meat and potato pie?”
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Gary Barlow exits the mud shack, knocking over a Tanzanian toddler on his way to search for a meat and potato pie.
However, I stand corrected. The middle-of-the-road maestro was recently found brushing poppadum crumbs from his tidy beard. And where was he indulging in this sub-continent fare?
Lasan, the jewel in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter – its exceptional reputation attracted the patronage of Gary, after he performed to fans at the LG Arena. So yes, Gary has some foodie imagination. Barlow digs pilau.
It’s been a good month for Central England star-spotters – Keira Knightley was also seen in Kings Heath’s Hare and Hounds pub. Rumours she followed up her night out with a blowout in King Kebab have, alas, proved unfounded.
Judging by the local coverage and social commentary of both incidents, you’d think we’d been visited upon by interplanetary deities.
Birmingham has always got giddy for celeb link-ups: as if the notion of a seeing a famous person off the tellybox, prowling our manor, is something worth shouting about. Considering this is the city whose folk are renowned for their grounded nature, and a city that already attracts massive stars to its venues, the reaction to stars on our streets always seems a little bit OTT.
Bill Clinton at the Malt House is still held up as a landmark moment for Birmingham – and I’m still not sure why. George Clooney at Star City is another (though no-one remembers that Mark Wahlberg was there too). And don’t make me bring up that whole ‘Big Up Birmingham’ debacle that followed Usain Bolt’s visit to the city – my body still involuntarily cringes to this day about the self-congratulatory aftermath.
The one starry night in Brum that did warrant a second glance? Brad Pitt’s ridiculously random rendezvous at Warwick Solicitors with a friend in Hall Green. It was an incident even more outlandishly ludicrous than the final scenes of Pitt’s own World War Z. At least that one was a properly surprising Birmingham celebrity sighting. Bore off with the unremarkable ‘hungry touring singer goes to celebrated Birmingham city centre restaurant to satisfy appetite’ scenarios. Instead, let’s see more of the genuinely eye-catching headlines that derive from the husband of Angelina Jolie going out of his way to pop by a provincial legal firm for a cup of builders’ brew (“Brad’s Pitt Stop in Birmingham”).
Let’s have Russell Brand’s ex visiting a rough ‘n ready sporting establishment in North Birmingham (“Katy Perry Barr Dogs”).
Let’s invite the world’s worst rap star to shop for one of his appalling shiny suits in our city centre (“PitBullring”). Or cheer up a gruff film star with a nice relaxing spa day next to the canal (“Ice Cube at The Nice Cube”).
Maybe before this summer’s Wireless Festival at Perry Park, we could encourage Kanye West to take a stroll through Great Barr (which could give us “‘Yeezy’ in Pheasey”).
Or, at the very least, when Barlow returns to Brum this weekend and he treats himself to another curry, can someone make sure that we see the headline “Take That and Chapati”?
* Keith Gabriel is a Birmingham-based PR account manager