FEATURES: No star too far for a compulsive name-dropper Telling celebrity-packed anecdotes can become an incurable- and embarrassing- habit. John Session should know...

I AM, I suspect, an incurable name-dropper. Nothing, of course, could be more shameful. But, provided my name-dropping anecdotes are funny, I tend to think I can be absolved of the charge of seeking reflected glory.

This is disingenuous, of course. However pale the fire may be that bounces upon me from various celebrated suns, I am sneakily grateful for its puny warmth.

Sometimes, I kid myself that I can get away with a name-drop as long as the surrounding yarn makes me look a total ass. Take a recent occasion in Los Angeles, when I was invited with Emma Thompson to the house of the late Roddy McDowall. (Two names already, you see, and both completely ancillary to the principal name drop.)

I was seated between Jamie Lee Curtis and Maureen O'Hara. JLC was spared my attentions, but MOH got the full force of my interrogation- everything but the angle-poise and the electrodes. James Stewart, Henry Fonda and John wayne were all recalled in exhilarating detail, most of which I've forgotten, because the main event of the evening swept all such Hollywoodabilia away, so sudden was its flash-flood horror.

We were all about to leave, when I saw fit to tell Maureen O'Hara how much I'd enjoyed talking to her. I only wished my parents- both ardent fans - had been present. How they would have enjoyed meeting Maureen O'...

Suddenly, the O'Hara surname failed me. Instead, the name O'Sullivan sprang to my lips. Maureen O'Lipman might have induced a simple glance of incomprehension. As it was, the words O'Sullivan triggered total stellar meltdown.

Eyebrows blackening to full Norma Desmond, her head tipped back like that of the Tyrannosaurus rex in Jurassic Park just before it eats the bloke who's sitting on the can. Suddenly, I wished that I, too, was on the can, in Mongolia perhaps. Maureen O'Hara eventually brought herself to say the words: "I did not swing through the trees with f------ Tarzan."

Emma Thompson had been a witness to all this; she'd been standing behind the outraged star. I say standing, but in fact she was falling over. She lost it so much over my cock-up that she fell into a 1920's grandfather clock, which had been presented to Roddy by Fritz Lang. As people tried to steady the clock and stop its queasy chimes, I was still fixed on the needle of Maureen's gave. There would be no forgiveness. Tears formed in my eyes. Someone broke wind. I don't remember anything after that.

I think that sort of story is fairly permissable. The one about Oliver Reed threatening to push my head through a make-up mirror upon discovering I'd done him the night before on Spitting Image might also be eligible.

Can the compulsive name-dropper, like the alcoholic, cure oneself through rationing? Instead of a single drink, one restricts oneself to one story per function, dinner, etcetera. I've tried this and failed, repeatedly. The future looks bleak.

Let me just tell you a story which begins with a name-drop but is actually a cautionary tale. I was working with Carrie Fisher and happened to mention a very famous British actor, no less celebrated for his numerous vivid anecdotes.

I told her how much I admired him. Her already black eyes took on the translucence of a barracuda's. "You like him? she said in her desiccated drawl. "He nearly made me kill myself with his f---ing anecdotes."

This last word she enunciated as if it were the name of someone who'd burned down her house. She had many stories, she told me- in a way that made it abundantly clear she wanted none from me- and she kept them locked up, "like so many frigging Mrs. Rochesters in the attic".

"Keep telling s--- like that," she went on, my personally assigned Cassandra, "and you wind up telling it to six fat assholes in golf pants."

In the dark watches of an anecdote, I recall Carrie's words. I also recall those of Robert de Niro. The composer Patrick Doyle and I were telling yarns to each other before a screening of Frankenstein.

De Niro considered us silently, then spoke: "I bet you guys do s--- like this all day long. One f---ing story after another."

Does de Niro ever tell anecdotes? (I'll never forget the time I tripped over Harvey Keitel's shoes. We did laugh!') No, I tend to doubt it, but, then,, why would he need to?

John Sessions is addressing the Cambridge Union Society on October 16 at 8pm. Members only. The new series of Stella Street starts on October 26 on BBC2 at 11:15pm.

JOHN SESSIONS, FEATURES: No star too far for a compulsive name-dropper Telling celebrity-packed anecdotes can become an incurable- and embarrasing- habit. John Sessions should know...The Daily Telegraph, 10-08-1998, pp. 28.