Bristol comedian Stephen Merchant has shared how he was mocked at Glastonbury Festival after taking a tent that was too small for him.
The 6ft 7in Hanham star went to the event in 2009 to see legend Bruce Springsteen but was not overly impressed with his experience. Stephen said fans kept unzipping his tent to check it was him and he felt “like I was in a Victorian freak show”, reports the Mirror.
He said: “My friend was supposed to organise the tent, but he screwed up. So, I found an old tent in the back of the cupboard. It was a one-person tent, I couldn’t fit in it without my feet poking out of the end."
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“After Springsteen, I crawled into this tent and I heard people next door going, ‘You know who is in that tent? It’s that lanky bloke off the telly. Have a look.’
“So I’d be lying there trying to sleep and you’d hear, ‘Zip,’ people would open it up and go, ‘Oh, it is him.’ It went on for hours. In the end, at three in the morning, I couldn’t bear it. I left. I abandoned the tent.”
“That’s why I don’t go to Glastonbury anymore. It’s quite intense.”
Stephen also told Richard Herring’s RHLSTP Live event he would love a statue of himself in Bristol but it “would need a lot of bronze”. He later revealed he feared his ancestors might be slave traders, sparking a study of his family history.
The Office co-creator said: “There was a brief moment that the Bristol shopping district was going to be renamed Merchant’s Quay. Not after me, but just because of the merchant trading in the past. Then someone rightly pointed out that some of that was slave trading, and they didn’t go with that.
“Traditionally your last name is what your ancestors did. I was thinking, ‘God, what did my ancestors do?’ So we’ve done family tree stuff. We can’t find any evidence of there being any proper merchant traders.
“All of my family seem to have been labourers, factory workers, so I don’t know how we got the name Merchant.”
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