As he's just won an Oscar, I'll tell you my Danny Boyle story

Many moons ago (probably 1993, iirc), I was working in Woodstock Grove, one of the BBC's many little buildings in the heart of Shepherd's Bush. Our building was just across from another BBC building, separated only by a 10ft wide delivery road and the windows of our office looked directly into the windows of the editing suites across the way.

Being editing suites, they were occupied on a fairly random basis and so we barely paid any attention to any of the people in there - until one fine day, Danny Boyle moved in to edit a TV programme he'd directed for the beeb. Of course, this was before he was even a twinkle in Film 4's eye, so we had no idea who he was; however, one of my colleagues took quite a shine to him.

Cue some of the silliest behaviour ever witnessed outside the school playground in her attempts to get his attention and find out who he was; unfortunately for me, my desk wasn't by a window and I wasn't visible from the editing suite, so I was the one coerced into ringing the suite in order to elicit information from whoever answered the phone. All the time I was making these increasingly silly phone calls and Danny Boyle and his production team would look across to our office trying to work out if it was us or not calling them, Jayne would sit there, looking nonchalant and seemingly unaware, while hissing at other colleagues "is he looking at me?". I don't think I ever used the phrase "my mate fancies you" when I spoke to him, but it wasn't far off.

Luckily for us, he and his team obviously thought this was great fun, and as Jayne looked like a cross between Louise Brooks and Cleopatra, Danny's interest was obviously piqued. After a few weeks of silly behaviour, he bumped into Jayne in the teabar and asked her out to lunch; she kept this a secret from her colleagues until after the fact - v wisely, as after all our shenanigans on her behalf, we'd probably have gone along to Pizza Express and heckled her across the room.

And the outcome of all this? Probably luckily for Jayne, absolutely nothing - years later when he did become famous with Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, I read an article about him which said he'd been in a relationship for some time and had kids. After that one lunch, Jayne heard nothing from him at all; they finished editing pretty much the day after their date and that was the last we saw of him.

And the reason? Well, of course there could be any number of reasons why he didn't follow it up, but I think that what he discovered during that lunch was that although she looked like Louise Brooks, Jayne sounded like Barbara Winsor and had the intellect of Jade Goody. When I asked her what they talked about, she answered "ooh, I said "that bloke you work with, he ain't half fucking fat, innhe?" and stuff like that". I'm not surprised she didn't get a dessert :)

Who is that Masked Man?