Andy Richardson: Fact is certainly funnier than fiction – most of the time!

I ought to describe what he looks like. He’s around 50 years of age, is probably never going to fit into his 30-inch waist trousers ever again and has a bit of a salt-and-pepper look on top, if you catch my drift. Of a cheery disposition and with a passionate love of local football, my friend is the spitting image of BBC broadcaster Adrian Chiles. In truth, there is only one difference between them – Chiles supports West Bromwich Albion while my friend supports Wolves.

So, he’s at the hotel – my friend, not Chiles – sunning himself as the mercury hits 90F. He’s observed curious behaviour in the preceding days with members of TOWIE walking over to photographers, seemingly striking deals for the photographers to take their photograph, then looking surprised when they’re accidentally caught out. Such are the asinine ways of reality stars and the paparazzi.

My friend ignores their shananigans and gets on with doing more interesting stuff, like drinking cocktails and sunning himself on a lounger. On one particularly warm day, he finds himself swimming lengths of the pool before pausing at a poolside bar. He drags his body from the water, orders a frozen margherita and ponders really important stuff – like will Nuno Herlander Simões Espírito Santo still be the manager of his beloved football team in five years’ time.

As he sips a zesty blend of lime juice and tequilla, he notices a furtive man disappearing behind the bushes. He squints a little then peers towards the direction of the man who’s caused the rustling. The sun catches the reflection of something that the man is holding and my friend realises it’s one of the cameraman he’d seen earlier in the week. Except this time, the cameraman is training his lens on my friend and shooting off 30 frames per second. Which is weird. Why would anyone want a photograph of him?

Later, my friend is at the bar. A man walks up to him and starts talking. My friend thinks nothing of it. The man notices my friend’s Black Country accent and asks him about football. Again, my friend is unsuspecting. But as the conversation continues my friend realises it’s the same guy he’d seen rustling in the bushes. And then things take a peculiar turn.

“It’s you, isn’t it,” says the cameraman.

“Who,” says my friend, whose name, incidentally, is Carl Jones.

“No, no, no, you can’t pretend it’s not. It is you, isn’t it. Black Country, football, greying on top, portly.”

My friend splutters his margherita over the bar at mention of the word ‘portly’.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’ve seen you. I know who you are.”

“What?”

“You’re Adrian Chiles.”

My friend laughs and protests his innocence but the cameraman refuses to accept he’s the victim of a case of mistaken identity and persists.

“You can’t fool me, Ade.”

My friend has another story. It’s even funnier and while it’s neither crude nor salacious, we’re going to let you fill in the final word of the punchline with a word that sounds very similar to another. Bear with us. This one’s worth it.

My friend formerly worked on a newspaper and began his career almost 30 years ago. As a kid reporter, he was dispatched to cover an inquest into the death of an airman who had died when his plane crashed into a field. The airman had ejected himself from the stricken plane using an emergency measure but, alas, had perished as the plane descended to earth.

In the days when my friend was reporting, there were no mobile phones or wifi connections. To get his story into the newspaper, he’d put 10p in the telephone box and call a typist in the office, dictating the story so that she could type it up and pass it to an Editor.

So there he stood, in a call, box, phoning in his copy. “An airman died after ejecting over a field in the county. Despite his heroic solo action, he could not be saved.”

It’s at this point in the story that I should admit the typist wasn’t particularly good at her job and had issues with accuracy. And so it was that the newspaper he worked for carried a story where the word ‘ejected’ was transferred for another that sounds very similar but has a completely different meaning. Discretion is the better part of valour, so I’ll leave you to join the dots and add the extra three letters.

They say that fact is funnier than fiction. And my friend’s experiences prove the maxim, for both of those stories are true.