I’M eating my words this week after spending an evening in the company of Antony Cotton, who plays Sean Tully in Corrie. You may recall that I’ve recounted tales of our previous meetings when Antony seemed aloof and disinterested.
But I can only imagine that I must have caught him at a bad time then as last Saturday he was great fun.
He’d emailed me earlier in the day to let me know he was coming to my bar Fibre, in Leeds with a female friend. Co-incidentally she was the producer from Trevor Macdonald’s Tonight programme who filmed a documentary a few years ago with me about my friendship with Michael Jackson.
The film was due to be aired at the time of Jacko’s court case but has been kept under wraps. Apparently it is a fascinating watch but I’ve never even seen it and maybe never will.
Anyway, I digress as usual. Antony was celebrating that night as he’s successfully negotiated a two-year megabucks deal to continue playing his camp character in Corrie and he’s also working on another show, which he wouldn’t spill the beans about to me.
I bought him a bottle of champagne to congratulate him and it certainly went down well as he then bought three more bottles, before moving the party on to my club Mission. He shared a glass of champagne with my sister Rosemarie and was really nice to her. It always makes me happy when people I meet, especially celebrities, are nice to my family, but more about that later on.
Once in Mission, Antony became fascinated with my green laser pen which I often take to the club. I use it to point people out in a crowd and have some fun.
Antony was like a kid with a toy and played with it for ages. I don’t think it would work quite as well in the Rovers Return though!
What totally bowled me over was the thank you message I received from Antony a couple of days later.
It’s very rare for celebrities to send you a personal thank you and I was really impressed that he’d taken the time out of his busy schedule to tell me what an ‘amazing’ night he’d had and how friendly he’d found my staff.
He’d even recommended Fibre and Mission to the rest of the Corrie cast over lunch.
