Rylan Clark has recalled how asking Spice Girl Geri Halliwell for her autograph got him fired from his first job in a London hairdressers.
Appearing on Friday night's Late Late Show to talk about his new Paramount TV series, Naked Dating, the TV presenter and former X Factor contestant said, "I started out as a colour therapist when I was 16, 17 and I was a massive Spice Girls fan and Geri was my favourite. I always played Ginger Spice in the playground.
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"On one of my first ever jobs as a trainee, Geri walks in and I was like `I can’t breathe!’ and she was having her hair done and I brought her a coffee and said `I’m so sorry, can I have your autograph?’ and she was like, `absolutely!’ Loveliest woman ever.
"She signed her autograph and left, didn’t complain or anything, but my manager was an a******* and he sacked me on the spot, saying you never ask a client for their autograph.
"Anyway, he sacked me and fast forward to now and Geri is one of my good friends and I have sleepovers at her house so f*** you!"
Earlier on Friday’s Late Late, four-time Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan arrived straight from a red carpet event in Dublin for her acclaimed new movie The Outrun, which tells the story of how a young woman’s addiction to alcohol sees her life spiral out of control.
"It’s a story about finding out who you are without using alcohol as a crutch," she told Late Late host Patrick Keilty.
Asked about her success including those four Oscar nods, the 30-year-old actress said, "The weird thing about what we do is that you have your own experience of it on the inside and then there’s what everyone else sees and what they perceive.
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"There are scenes you do where you think `I was amazing in that scene. I can’t wait for people to see it . . . ' and then nobody comments on it when it comes out. Sometimes your judgement can be off."
In the new movie, Ronan plays Rona, who tries to escape her years of partying in London by returning home to her parents’ farm in the isolated Orkney Islands.
Asked if her own experiences of seeing loved ones and friends struggle with their own addiction made playing a recovering alcoholic easier or harder, she said, "Both. It just makes it incredibly personal and makes you want to be as authentic as possible.
"One of the main reasons I wanted to do this movie was seeing people I loved being affected by addiction. There is so much hurt and pain and confusion because you can’t make sense of why someone would do this to themselves and to you."
She added, "I finally felt ready in myself to crack that open, to crack open the psychology of someone who suffers from this illness and understand the experience. It was cathartic - there were moments when it was really overwhelming and moments when it was really enlightening for me."
The Outrun sees Rona throw herself into work on her father’s farm as a way to move on from her past - and Ronan was very hands on when it came to certain scenes.
"There was a lot of lambing," she said. "I spent a couple of days on a few farms and the farmers were like `you get in there, you tackle it, you pull it out, shake it about and stick some hay up its nose and send it on its way.’
"I was thrown in the deep end and ended up delivering seven lambs and I didn’t kill any of them. I have a newfound respect for farmers."
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Northern Ireland band Snow Patrol also appeared on the Late Late to talk about their new album, The Forest is The Path and admitted that their hit song Run saved their lives.
"Before we wrote Run, we were playing to 20 people a night and dreaming of a life in music, working in bars and working in a call centre for a day and a half," said lead singer Gary Lightbody.
"We didn’t think it was going to happen for us and it took ten years for us to be an overnight success. Then we wrote Run and everything changed. It’s the song that changed our lives forever."
Catch up on Friday’s Late Late Show on the RTÉ Player
