Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Tyger! Tyger!..

... Burning Bright ! I have a tale of a Tyger who burned VERY bright recently.

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.

And I have to say Tyger Drew-Honey is one of the kindest, nicest, most generous people I have ever met, let alone famous person I have met. He was self effacing, gracious, funny, full of energy, up for anything - he even packed bags at the till for us for 15 minutes! - and he took selfies with the teenage girls and our volunteer staff.



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

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