By Zoe Griffin
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If you think your current job is hard then imagine spending 10 years getting showbiz gossip for a tabloid newspaper.
On the plus side I can boast about how I’ve been to the Brit Awards and BAFTA Awards nine times, the Cannes Film Festival seven times and the Oscars twice.
But by the end of 10 years I was running out of friends to share things with as flying around the world, weekending in the Cotswolds, ingratiating myself into the horsey polo scene and working the midweek London party circuit meant I hardly got to see anyone that really knew me.
Not so glamorous: Celebrity journalist turned blogger Zoe Griffin has seen it all, but now she is ready to share how unglamorous life really was partying with the A-listers
From Monday to Friday when most people were watching the soaps or going to the gym, I was skipping between parties fuelled by champagne and nervous energy.
Why was I nervous? Because there’s a good chance my name wasn’t on the list and I would have to use my charm to persuade the doorman to let me in. Or sneak through the smokers’ entrance and run!
Each week the paper would come out and my two page gossip column would look buzzy, scandalous and titillate the readers with juicy celebrity news …but nobody knew how much effort went into getting those stories, including:
Getting slapped by Kelly Osbourne and ear-bashed by Bob
For my own safety, after the paper was printed every week I kept a list of celebrities who I’d been less than complimentary about so I could avoid them the next time we found ourselves at the same event.
This started after I innocently approached Sir Bob Geldof, introduced myself and asked a question about his charity work.
The language that came out of his mouth was not at all charitable â€" I haven’t heard someone use the F word so much in such a short space of time - and that doesn’t include the insults he used to describe my employers and my character for daring to work for such a publication.
Friends for never: Zoe was slapped around the face by Kelly Osbourne and sworn at by Bob Geldof during her time as a showbiz reporter
I ended up getting saved by Graham Norton, who stepped in front of Bob, put a hand on his chest and told him to ‘calm down’ while waving his other hand at me and telling me to ‘just go’.
One week my ‘avoid at all costs’ list featured Kelly Osbourne so my heart sank when I bumped into her in a London nightclub.
I’d published a silly quote her then-boyfriend told me, which happened during a conversation she hadn’t been part of, but she still tried to tell me I had misheard the quote and made her boyfriend look stupid.
She started to jab her finger in my face, which was pretty scary, and insisted I was lying.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Tell me one interesting thing he has done recently so we can make him look clever and we can all go home.’
She looked at me, I looked at her and I could tell she was trying to think and wasn’t getting anywhere.
Hiding under Kate Moss’s table as her friends ate a hog roast
Kate Moss’s birthday parties are legendary â€" once she kept up the celebrations for 72 hours non-stop â€" and the following year my news editor gave me the task of finding out what really went on at a Mossy mash-up.
With the help of my beautiful best friend and a bit of blagging we talked our way into Kate’s house where her 35th birthday was being held but we’d got our timings wrong.
We arrived while all the guests were mid-way through a medieval themed hog roast banquet and it was painfully clear there was no space for us at the table.
Hiding place: Hiding under Kate Moss' dinner table wasn't one of Zoe's best moments
My friend suggested we hide and the only place we could see was under the table.
Watching Kate’s friends drop pork on the floor while she giggled and cackled was not how I imagined a night ‘partying’ with Kate Moss.
We’d been hiding for quite a long time and I had backache when my phone vibrated in my pocket to show I had a new text message.
It was from one of my schoolfriends who was sharing happy news that she’d just got engaged. I was single and I was hiding under Kate Moss’s table at a party where I was clearly not welcome …I wanted to cry!
Being stranded at sea with Bon Jovi
At the World Music Awards in Monaco, I visited the toilet at the same time as an extremely drunk girl, who vomited everywhere.Â
Bad ending: What started off as a fun party on Bon Jovi's yacht soon turned sour
Everyone looked at her in horror but I felt sorry for her and asked where she was staying.
When she told me she was staying on Bon Jovi’s yacht, my reporter’s instinct kicked in and I got a taxi to the yacht with her just to see what it was like.
The party was every bit as wild as you’d expect with models dancing on tables and band members swigging Jack Daniels from the bottle.
Around 5am I thought I should try to get up so I went upstairs to the exit …and saw that while I was dancing like a lunatic we’d sailed out to sea! How was I going to get back to my hotel?
Eventually I spotted a deck hand. Summoning my school girl French, I pointed to my head, said ‘J’ai mal a la tete’, then kept rubbing my head and pointing at the direction of land.
This poor young little French boy was so scared of me â€" a mad lady in micro mini dress - that he persuaded the shi p’s captain to spare him for one hour so he could take me to the port in the ship’s speedboat tender.
Bobbing through the waves at 6am with lots of Champagne and Jack and no dinner wasn’t the best for my stomach but we made it to land, he helped me get out and then he zoomed back off.
Thankfully, I ended up being rescued again by another kind Frenchman who spotted me sobbing my heart out in the middle of the port and tried to communicate that he had a moped.
There was no spare helmet and I was wearing a tiny dress. I thought to myself, if I died getting this story, would it all have been worth it?
Getting hypothermia at Glastonbury
For Glastonbury, my newspaper let me claim back the cost of a tent on expenses but we didn’t have the budget to stretch to a Winnebago and the Winnebago mooring area was where the real Glastonbury gossip occurred.
Caught in the cold: While Zoe may have been mingling with the likes of Pete Doherty, Zoe ended up catching hypothermia
Thankfully I knew someone who knew someone in a Winnebago so I decided to pay them a visit one evening, dressed up seductively in mini shorts and a vest and hoped they’d let me stay.
I found myself being ushered in and we started doing drinking games. Pete Doherty and Kate Moss were in the van next door and Pete came in asking to borrow a glass and a lemon. I didn’t ask why.
At some point in the evening Jamie from The Klaxons popped in wearing a giant lizard fancy dress outfit, did a shot with us and then told us he was off to find Lily Allen because he wanted her to dress as a chicken. Completely bonkers!
Sadly the party turned sour about 4am when the main guy in charge of the Winnebago, who was not my friend of a friend, insisted that everyone left and that included me.
It was too dark to work out where my tent was so I wandered round, just walking round different fields, in skimpy sho rts for two hours until the sun came up.
The next day, I was so ill I had to go to the medical centre where they wrapped me in a foil blanket and told me to rest.
Did I take their advice? I tried to but my phone kept on ringing with my editors demanding to know what the gossip was so I took that foil blanket to the press area where I sat shivering as I wrote that week’s column.
Blogging is a much easier way to earn money. Get Rich Blogging by Zoe Griffin is published by John Blake publishing and available at Amazon and all good book stores.
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