Gerald Durrell
When I was young, my biggest hero was Gerald Durrell. I read everything he wrote over and over (actually, I've just been rereading them all for the first time in years and still loving them). I mentioned this to a friend of ours who worked as a researcher on a Saturday morning kids' show. She said 'Oh my god, you should write in - we've been wanting to get him on the show for ages'

So I wrote in. The show had a 'dream come true' spot - a Jim'll Fix It clone where kids could write in and get something they always wanted. A few weeks later my mum told me they'd written back to say I wouldn't be getting my dream come true, but Durrell would be coming on the show and would I like to go? Which I naturally did.

The show was bloody awful (my biggest memory is being told during the commercial break that they were going to be playing some music when they came back in, and they wanted us all to pretend to be headbanging to it). And then came the Dream Come True bit, and I was astonished to see my face on the screen and my name read out. My evil mum had lied to me - and you could clearly see my mouth going 'what the...?'

So they flew us out to Jersey for a four-day holiday, and I got to be shown round the zoo by the great beardy one himself. He was lovely, and I was a precocious child with an incredibly posh accent. I got on the Channel Island news and said some cringeworthy things ('You said you'd really like to go on a collecting trip with him but you didn't think it would be possible, why's that?' 'Well, these things are really expensive, you know? And also I don't think I'd really have the time'). But all in all, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Fri 17 Apr 2009, 9:45, 4 replies)

Great story
And you get an extra click for the evil mum holding back on you bit
(Capo, Fri 17 Apr 2009, 11:25, closed)

That's fucking awesome!
Gerald Durrell was a massive influence on me as a child, so I'm really jealous!
( Cawl, Fri 17 Apr 2009, 11:51, closed)

i was a massive durrell fan as a kid too
i was a wildlife nerd. wrote to him once, he wrote back personally! alas, the letter got lost in the mists of time, but he was and is an inspiration, ableit now a dead one. don't think that's stoppped him though, he's probably in heaven right now trying to repopulate cloud fields with the lesser spotted cumulonimbus, and researching the impact of all that harp music on the mating habits of local birds.
(UppityDamnPrimate LET'S OPEN THIS F*CKING PIT UP, Sat 18 Apr 2009, 14:28, closed)

I also wrote to him
As my godmother worked for his publishing firm when I was a kid and got me some of his books. I think I wanted him to write another book in the series (I can't remember what the series was) where the characters took their time machine and travelled forward in time instead of back to the time of the dinosaurs. (I was obsessed by dinosaurs - but then who wasn't?)

He wrote a nice letter in reply and didn't attempt to completely disabuse me of my then woeful understanding of the space-time continuum, so I guess he counts as ace :)
(annexed, Mon 20 Apr 2009, 13:38, closed)