It was the morning after the night before and I was picking glass out of my leg by a pool, blotting the blood trickling down my calf with a navy spotted handkerchief. I was trying to work out how the shards of glass came to be there… and then it came back to me.
But first, let’s rewind. I was taking my seat on the British Airways 10 a.m. flight to Nice. ‘Not another one!’ a woman right behind me in steerage complained. ‘Is this some special flight or something?’
I stowed my Globe-Trotter in the overhead locker and made eye contact with her. ‘Piers Morgan is up front,’ she explained. ‘And that’s Matt Goss.’ She pointed to a tidy man minding his own business a few rows ahead. I couldn’t pick Goss (one half of the 1980s boy band Bros) out in a line-up, but this man did look familiar, as celebs do.
I texted Piers in 1A: ‘I’m behind you!’ He texted back: ‘Do you want me to send you back some champagne?’ I told him I had a Pret breakfast pot, thank you, adding, to annoy: ‘By the way, you’re not even the most famous person on this flight.’
As I stood in the Avis queue, ‘Matt Goss’ approached. ‘Hello Rachel,’ he said, to my slight shock, and came in for a hug. Which was fine, except I’ve never met Matt Goss. We wouldn’t know each other from Adam. Still, moving on, I had to pick up my car, check into a hotel in Mougins, squeeze into a skimpy Roberto Cavalli number and then get to LBC breakfast legend Nick Ferrari’s wedding to the glorious Clare Goodwin, a radio exec at our parent company Global. ‘I’m hand luggage only,’ I warned Clare from the plane, ‘so wearing very little.’
I arrived at the nuptials just as Piers and family were alighting from a pearlescent Porsche Uber limo, Celia Walden wearing even less than I was. Everyone was on the sweeping sun terrace. It was so hot that the men were sweating through their jackets and any exposed flesh and faces were roasting to a shiny red.
The bridal couple descended Hollywood-style from two opposing staircases and met in the middle for a kiss-clasp and an aaaah. Then there was a brief ceremony. Christopher Biggins, in pink linen, officiated and said we needn’t worry about the cost of coming to the south of France as we could expense it all to Global – hollow laughter from the bosses – and then Piers was made to do
an ironic reading (Luke 14:7-11, a homily about the virtues of humility and low places) and concluded: ‘See you on top table then!’
Have you ever been in a roomful of gobby broadcast veterans at a media wedding in the south of France?
Dinner, speeches, dancing. It was very special to celebrate the happy couple’s love. Clare is a sweetie, Nick a softie: when he said he realised that he was beginning to fall ‘helplessly in love’ with Clare (possibly at the rugby at Twickers, where he has a debenture) a tear came to every jaded eye.
But. Have you ever been in a roomful of gobby broadcast veterans at a media wedding in late August in the south of France? From Kelvin MacKenzie via Gloria Hunniford and Jane Moore and Andrew Pierce to Piers Motormouth Morgan himself? Who all love the sounds of their own voices and have plenty to say, especially after several hours’ boozing? Well I have, and it was hot and noisy and even hotter and noisier when the live band played and everyone took to the floor.
I remember Andrew Pierce flaunting a new blond barnet and importuning young producers… me having a detailed ballroom dancing lesson from a bearded young man… but the broken glass?
Trying to recall events, I have a distinct memory of one of the young persons present circulating with a bottle of vodka and making everyone do shots.
It was then things really kicked off. The men all took their tops off. Nick Ferrari unpeeled his shirt
‘No, thank you,’ I said to Jimmy, twerking barefoot by this stage. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I swigged and handed the bottle back to him and the next thing I knew the bottle crashed and exploded on the dance floor, and I took the opportunity to skip off towards the bar for some further cooling refreshment.
It was then that things really kicked off. The men all took their tops off. Nick Ferrari unpeeled his shirt. The dance floor was a writhing mêlée of sunburnt male flesh. Camilla Tominey, the designated driver, and I thought it was time to make our excuses and we skedaddled.
‘The end was absolute carnage,’ Clare updated me later. ‘People asleep in bushes. People asleep outside. Grabbing vodka bottles. The French were looking on flabbergasted. Goodness knows what the topless episode was about!’
So that was Nick and Clare’s big fat Provençal wedding, and this, my thank-you letter to them. It was like the 1960s, basically. If you can remember it, you weren’t there. A proper rager.
Oh, almost forgot: speaking of who wasn’t there, Matt Goss. This is because it was the Spandau Ballet hitmaker Gary Kemp. I’d sat next to him at a lunch. Couldn’t have been nicer. I knew I knew him from somewhere.
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