Stephen Merchant thought a woman was cracking on to him - but the stranger told him she and her friends decided to use him as a “meeting point”.
The lanky comic - who stands 6ft 7in tall - was towering above the crowd of punters at a street party. Stephen, 49, said: “I was in Trafalgar Square at New Year. So I was watching the New Year fireworks.
“It was approaching midnight and a woman kind of was looking at me and I was like, ‘Hang on, here we go. Game on. This lady’s seen me on the telly. She wants a little piece of Stephen. She’s only human.
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’“And she came up and she said, are you going to be here for a while? And I said, ‘Yes, I am!’“And she said, ‘Great, because my friends and I have arranged to meet back at you.’
“Because I’m 6ft 7in. I’m normally about a foot and a half taller than most people in any crowd. She said, ‘Don’t worry.
"You can still move around. We’ll see you wherever you are.’ And yeah, by about five past midnight, a bunch of people were just gathered around me.” The Outlaws and Extras star told the I Weigh podcast that to make matters worse he didn’t get invited to join the group.
He moaned: “I would sort of move and they would move with me and then the girl showed up and they all went off to a party and I didn’t even get invited.
“I was like, ‘Come on! I’ve been the meeting point!’ At least invite the meeting point.“Again, probably even as it happened, I was both humiliated and thinking, ‘This is a gold dust.’”
Stephen said he has always stood out from a crowd since he was a beanpole teen. He added: “That becomes your hallmark.
“Whereas a lot of teenagers perhaps want to stand out from the crowd, or they can choose a funky haircut or whatever to try and draw attention to themselves and whatever it is as they’re struggling, or sometimes just withdraw and just be one of the crowd and just bury themselves in the mob. I kind of was forced to stand out against my will.”
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