Ulrika and me: the truth

I too have dined with Ulrika Jonsson in a swanky London restaurant. It was a couple of years ago, and I still dread the day that sees me enter a newsagent to be greeted by the sight of my tight-lipped, stony-faced visage plastered across the front pages of the tabloids under the headline “What the hell was she thinking?”.

I was interviewing her for hotpress. It was 12:20pm. She was late. I was drinking a pint, sucking on a B&H and reading a copy of the Sun that I’d found on the Tube. Classy, I know.

She entered the restaurant wearing a grey pullover, faded denims and no make-up: painstaking dishevelment – I knew her game.

The maître d’ ushered her to my table. “You must be Barry,” she said, visibly quivering.

“Maybe I am and maybe I ain’t. It all depends on who’s asking,” I drawled in reply.

At least that’s how I remember it, although it’s quite possible that I blushed crimson and almost knocked over my drink in my haste to get to my feet and shake the hand that had quite possibly clawed the back off Hunter from Gladiators. But enough truth, the revisionist version reads much better.

“I’m Ulrika,” she cooed nervously. “Do you mind if I sit here?”

“If you must,” I sighed, aware of the media circus that could ensue if the paparazzi were lurking nearby. Thankfully, they weren’t, and I escaped unscathed with my good name blemish free. After witnessing the suffering endured by the England football coach Sven-Goran Eriksson in recent weeks, I realise that I was lucky. One can only imagine the emotional distress suffered by a short, balding, bespectacled, middle-aged single(ish) man when he sees his name romantically linked with a glamourous blonde Scandinavian whose name has long been a byword for all that is foxy about the fair sex.

Being a gentleman, Sven was not prepared to comment on the matter in order to placate the media hordes. He steadfastly refused to confirm or deny that he was dating his buxom compatriot. I like to think I would do the same. If I had emerged from the restaurant after interviewing Ulrika that day, only to be set upon by a gaggle of scurvy tabloid hacks and their camera wielding flunkies, my answers to their questions would have been only vaguely helpful: “My name? Barry Glendenning. Am I having a torrid affair with Ulrika Jonsson? I couldn’t possibly say. Will I pose for a snap? No problem.”

In order to spare her any embarrassment in such circumstances, I made a solemn vow there and then, that if rumours of a relationship between Ulrika and I ever began to circulate, it would not be as a result of anything I had said or written. And while such speculation has been depressingly conspicuous by its depressing absence, let me put the matter to bed for once and for all by stating for the record that I am not, and never will be prepared to divulge whether or not I have ever had sex with Ulrika Jonsson.

Another Irish journalist who, to the best of my knowledge, has never been romantically linked with Ulrika, is Donal MacIntyre. A disturbingly earnest man who earns a crust working undercover for the BBC, MacIntyre is best known for the great lengths he goes to in order to expose things that have been blindingly obvious to those of us who are not undercover BBC reporters for years. Indeed, if his name was Dougal, one could be forgiven for assuming that the television programmes he purveys are very elaborate spoofs.

In his last series, MacIntyre Undercover, Donal spent two years of his young life in a variety of guises as he infiltrated the violent and seedy worlds of football hooliganism and fashion respectively, among others. His po-faced revelations after putting his personal safety at great risk in his quest for truth? Some Chelsea supporters like to drink beer and fight on a Saturday afternoon, and the few heterosexual men who work in the rag trade enjoy having sex with beautiful young girls. Staggering, eh?

Now MacIntyre is back, with a new series called MacIntyre Investigates. Like his first series, it does exactly what it says on the tin. The first episode saw Donal, along with a crack support team that included a false beard, embark on a costly exercise of military precision to investigate street crime in London.

His plan was simple – get himself mugged in Brixton, have a laptop computer and a mobile phone with tracking devices in them stolen from him and then find out what happens to such items after they’re nicked. All well and good in theory, but as stings go, it was less than waspish in its execution.

After wandering around Brixton for three nights carrying a top-of-the-range mobile phone and laptop, Donal finally got robbed. He never saw his laptop again, but eventually discovered that the gurrier who’d nicked his phone had sold it on to somebody else.

The end.

After an outlay of God knows how many hundreds of thousands of pounds, the only lesson of any value that could be learned from this televisual shambles was that the streets of Brixton are an awful lot safer than most people who are unfamiliar with them seem to think they are.

I live near Brixton and have wandered its busy streets on many occasions at all times of the day and night. I have never been mugged there, touch wood, nor have I been accused of having sexual relations with Ulrika Jonsson.

Perhaps it’s time I started sporting a false goatee.