My little branch of Cats Protection (Epsom, Ewell & District thank you!) has recently opened a shop. We have tried many ways of fundraising in the past but setting up stalls in dodgy weather & hoping people will both find us & give their money to us, not the Children's Trust stall next door or standing outside Tesco holding buckets (not allowed to rattle tins anymore!) has proven to be less & less lucrative. And as CP is a wholly donation funded & volunteer run charity we kinda need the dosh! And a shop gives us far more security.So, working with head office we identified brilliant premises, (67 High Street, Banstead) managed to gather a huge amount of top quality donations, got the signage sorted & decided on an opening date. And the committee thought it would be nice to have a local celeb come along on the first Saturday and help us publicise our newest venture... the first idea was for James Bowen & Bob the Street Cat - yeah right, dream on! So on discussion with the Media dept at NCC we identified 3 local possibles - but I was told I needed to give them way more than the 2 weeks notice I was able to give them!
However I am an optimist & have no shame & so I set about contacting these rather famous people! I emailed & made phone calls & 2 of the possibles declined but the 3rd - amazingly - said yes! Tyger Drew-Honey who played Jake in "Outnumbered" and now plays Dylan in "Cuckoo" is a huge animal lover and was going to be in the area that Saturday. It also helped that I somehow managed to get hold of his mums email address (Linzi Drew - a rather famous ex porn star no less!) and contacted her directly & she was AMAZING & helpful & basically set the whole thing up for me!
So I somehow managed to secure a genuine, on TV right now, real proper celeb to do a PA in our little shop! The big day arrived - and so did the hideous rain. It was hosing down & was freezing. Passing foot traffic was poor ... Then Linzi emailed me to say Tyger had missed his train from Swansea ... he was coming to Banstead from Swansea! - so he would be 30 mins late.. phew - late is better than cancelling!Despite the weather, people started coming into the shop and there was an over representation of teenage girls (!) and we all started to get a bit excited. And suddenly there was a commotion outside the shop - Tyger had arrived and was already posing with our Big Cat (AKA Sacha!) and getting into the swing of things.
Before he left he gave us an exclusive interview and posed outside the shop for us.
What a coup, what a guy - our takings were well over £600 that day which for a wet Saturday was incredible.
THANK YOU Tyger! And thank you Linzi for setting it all up for us
