After my installment on a close encounter with Prince Charles, I posted a poll asking which celebrity encounter to write about next. In a battle of aging dreamboats, Pierce Brosnan lost out to Russell Crowe, 11 votes to 12. So now it's time for my rendezvous with Pierce Brosnan.

No, not the James Bond Brosnan. Not even the Thomas Crown Brosnan or Grey Owl Brosnan. That'd be cool, but not as kitschy and retro as my encounter. I got to meet Pierce Brosnan as Remington Steele!

(Yes, that's me, the pimply runt on the left, age 15. If you are sniggering, post your teenage photos.)

Back around 1985, my family took a trip to California for the first of many house exchanges.

We stayed for a month in a house in Concorde, near San Francisco. I was 15, and thought it was the trip of a lifetime simply because I could swim in the pool and watch Live Aid on MTV. But we also took a few days in Los Angeles, and that's where this story begins.

Back in the day there was a nifty service called Hollywood on Location, which published a daily listing of what TV shows and movies were being filmed on location in the L.A. area. For about ten bucks, you'd get a list of what was being shot, where and when, who the stars were, and a map – then it's up to you to drive around and find the sets, and see what you can see.

Here's how the New York Times described the service in 1988:

The problem: How to discover where and when on a particular day your favorite actors and actresses are apt to be performing. The solution: Hollywood on Location, a company with offices on Wilshire Boulevard and an inside line to the movie and television studios.

Each weekday, starting at 9:30 A.M., Hollywood on Location dispenses a $29 package of materials intended to point the way to the stars. The centerpiece is a single sheet of paper that lists the names of the productions being shot on location that day, their stars, the actual locations, the time frame in which filming is scheduled and the kinds of scenes planned. A map of the Los Angeles area is provided, along with detailed blowups of the areas in which filming is planned. Numbers on the blowups correspond to those on the information sheet. A seven-page introduction offers sensible advice on how to use the maps, how to organize the star search, what to expect at the locations - and what not to expect.

The company does not, for example, guaranteee that the stars of a film or TV show will be in attendance on any given day. The odds are pretty good - as the introduction points out, ''It's impossible to make a film without the stars'' - but you may have to spend hours waiting. Nor can you expect to watch the shooting of interior scenes on location, though they are included in the Hollywood on Location listings.

(There's a website for a company called Hollywood on Location, but it's pretty crappy and I don't think it's the same company.)

So, we bought our temporary map of the stars and started exploring (fortunately, both my parents were geography teachers.)

Our first stop was a warehouse district where Remington Steele was being filmed. There was some initial excitement when we saw the famous R Steele Cadillac parked among the trailers, but otherwise there was nothing to see. We milled around for a while and talked to the crew, and found out that the filming was going on deep inside the building, and we weren't allowed in. We made a show of looking crestfallen, and were promised a heads up when any of the cast were coming out.

A few minutes later, out walks Pierce Brosnan, unaccompanied.

Since we were the only members of the public within five miles, he came straight over and talked to us for a few minutes. No idea what he said – there's a certain deafness that comes with being "star-struck", I guess. (Maybe Alison remembers, but I doubt it. She was uncharacteristically giddy.)

Anyway, he humoured us for a while with small talk, signed an autograph (made out to my father, the least-interested of the four of us) and posed for the above photo. And then he scooted away.

You'd sort of expect a ring of bouncers to keep away those meddling kids - and I bet there would be today - but that wasn't the case. Our next stop was in a location where we could have used some: a taping of Hill Street Blues.

The scene being shot was an arrest in a seedy part of town. To achieve that look, the crew shot… in a seedy part of town. We, the chipper Canadian family of four, parked our rental car nearby and walked over to gawk at the actors. But after a few minutes we noticed that we were being sized up by numerous shady characters. Given the fact that there were no real policemen in sight, we took a snapshot of Charles Haid and hightailed it out of there.

After that, we drove to a rural location outside L.A. to see The A-Team being filmed. No Mr. T to be found, sadly, but we did se his stunt double leap off the hood of a Jeep. And I got to play with the rubber machine gun props, before being told to buzz off.

And the final stop of the day: a house being used to film Pretty in Pink!

(C'mon, this was 1985, and anything John Hughes was monstrously exciting.) Again, we struck out with celebrity spotting, but my parents did manage to chat up the properties manager, who happened to be Canadian. He took a shining to Alison and I, and offered to let us sit in Molly Ringwald's pink Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. Score!

So, there it is. Another fawning ode to the cult of celebrity… sorry. I'm a little disappointed to see there's no mention of me on his website – perhaps he hasn't got around to blogging it yet. It could use a Brushes with Obscurity section.

Poll:

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(By a narrow margin [52%] Russell Crowe beat out Pierce Brosnan in my "which brush with fame comes next?" poll. Here's that story.)

I missed out on the opportunity of a lifetime.

I could have easily precipitated an ugly incident with a famously hotheaded celebrity, one with deep pockets. I could have been sipping pina coladas off the avails of an out-of-court settlement. But it didn't occur to me until a couple of hours too late.

Here's the setup. A couple of years ago, I was riding my bike to work along my usual path: along the Lakeshore, over the Bump that Stumps, up Cherry St. and past the Distillery District.

I love the Distillery, and always have - even before the stunning redevelopment, I'd see it from the Go Train and dream of wandering around the abandoned Gooderham & Worts yard. At a minimum I figured there'd be some good photography spots to be found. I couldn't be happier with what they've done to the place, and if I were young and single (neither could be farther from the case) I'd have bought a condo there. Or at least be writing this from a tub chair in Balzac's, my favourite coffee spot in the city.

But back to the story. As I was riding up Cherry Street, I noticed a phalanx of white trucks parked on either side - a common enough sight, the hallmark of a movie shoot. Normally, I stop and check out the manadatory sheet of paper on the windshields of each truck, which tell you the title and type of film. But I was late, so I kept riding up between them.

As I passed bybbnnjjjhjhgmmkkkkkjjjjjjjhhggfgdszzzxcvb.btgtszzxcv bbbbngfdzaaaaadefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

(Sorry, my daughter just came by and wanted to try the keyboard. Where was I?)

Oh, right. As I passed between the trailers, I saw two guys standing in the road, tossing around what appeared to be a rugby ball. I had to swerve to avoid crashing into them, and as I did so I caught a glimpse of a guy who looked for all the world like Russell Crowe. Except he had black hair.

Sure looked like him, though. And I knew (from watching the extra features on the Master & Commander DVD) that Crowe, an Australian, was a huge rugby fan and often plays rugby with his cast and crew, so it certainly seemed plausible - but why would Gladiator be in my hood?

After turning the corner, I passed the main part of the shoot - the Distillery had been done up to look like a depression-era dockworks.

As soon as I got to work, I looked up Russell Crowe on IMDb, and saw that he was filming something called Cinderella Man, playing a boxer named Jim Braddock. Two more web searches, and I found that it was filming in Toronto, and that Braddock had black hair.

Back to IMDb, and posted a comment in their discussion threads to see if anyone could confirm my sighting. A few hours later, an extra on the set said that Crowe was indeed playing rugby on Cherry St. that day. Bingo!

A few weeks later, Cinderella Man came even closer - they began filming a street scene on my part of Queen St. E. (a few of my crappy PalmPilot photos are below. The shot of Crowe up top is not mine.)

You wouldn't believe the amount of work they did to turn our Depression-era strip into a... Depression-era strip. Storefronts on both sides of the road were completely redone for three blocks.

One of Toronto's busiest streets was sporadically shut down for days on end. And I heard they spent a million dollars just to move the overhead hydro wires.

How can such expenses be worthwhile? For a million bucks, couldn't they just digitally remove those wires? For that matter, you'd think it'd be cheaper to shoot the whole thing in a studio, rather than closing down a whole neighbourhood. Movie economics boggle my mind.

Of course, this is Queen East, not Queen West. Some of the stores didnt need any decorating at all. In fact, the Depression-era fascades were an improvement for some buildings, and they actually kept using the window treatments and blinds after the filming wrapped up.

The highlight for me was all the cars. They rented out almost every antique car in Southern Ontario (and their owners) to line the three blocks of Queen St. And when a particular shot was finished, there would be a mighty roar as all these jalopies were cranked up and shuffled around to different parking spots.

But the highlight for my daughter was the fake snow in the summer. Real snow, actually: they trucked in massive blocks of ice, shaved them down and sprayed them into drifts of real snow (they did place sheets of white foam underneath first.)

Neat, but my heart went out to the poor extras who had to stand around in their trenchcoats and fedoras all the sweltering day long.

Well, there you have it. With all that film money floating around, you'd think they could spare a few $100K for a near-miss on an innocent cyclist, right? I mean, I saw that look in Crowe's eyes... I'm pretty sure he was getting ready to hit me with a phone.

Given the overwhelming response to my piece on meeting the  Queen (OK, it was just Mahoney who begged for more) I thought I’d continue in the Brushes with Fame series, and the Brushes with Royalty subset. Yeah, yeah, another anecdote from my distant past… You want I should rob a bank just to blog about it? Besides, this isn’t a bad headline:

When I was a young lad, I was nearly trampled by Prince Charles on a horse.

My family is from England, and we used to travel back there every other summer. On one occasion, when I was about seven years old, we attended a charity polo match in which Prince Charles was competing.

One of the charming traditions of polo (along with tight pants, jaunty hats and other foppery) is the custom of allowing the spectators to come out onto the field at half time to stomp the divots of grass back into place. (In Miami, they let you onto the turf at Dolphin Stadium to backfill the craters where Daunte Culpepper was sacked.)

Anyhow, it’s really just a chance to mingle with the players, including the celebrities like the Prince of Wales.

Charles was still astride his steed, muttering “jolly goods” to the great unwashed. I was shy, and short, so my mother urged me to push my way forward to catch a glimpse of His Royal Highness. I did, and found myself almost directly underneath his horse.

Charles looked down at the wee colonial child about to be trodden on by princely hooves, and grew concerned. He paused in mid-sentence, leaned down from on high, and said to me:

“Push off a bit.”

That’s it. But how cool is that? I’ve never washed my ears since (though I have tried stretching them, in imitation.) And I'm sad to say that if you haven't yet been almost-trampled by the prince, you've missed your chance: he's retired from playing polo.

Here’s a poll-o on which brush with greatness should come next:

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If there’s only one vote, I’ll know it was Mahoney.

She was touring the Canadian Broadcasting Centre to mark CBC-TV’s 50th anniversary, a stop on her 2002 Golden Jubilee tour. The royal “visit” consisted of a blitzkrieg through the lobby and atrium – in one door and out the other, with a bit of puttering in between.

CBC.ca was to be the last stop of the 30-minute tour (next: a concert at Roy Thompson Hall.) The powers that be decided the CBC Archives was a fitting site to demonstrate for the occasion, and they needed a couple of bodies to man the display.

We were supposed to represent the future, the next generation of CBC. My boss had selflessly decided that his follicly-challenged, middle-aged self didn’t fit the bill, so the honour fell to myself and fellow writer Sabrina Saccoccio.

A few days before the event, we were given a whole package of preparatory material: what to say, what to do, what to wear. There’s a rather complicated list of protocol: bow with the head, not the body; speak only if spoken to; call the Queen “Your Majesty” on first reference and “Ma’am” after that; call her husband “Your Royal Highness” and then “Sir.”

(For more interesting arcanery, check out the Canadian government’s Guidance Notes for meeting The Sovereign and Members of the Royal Family.)

Despite all the preparations, Sabrina and I were told to expect the royal party to simply breeze past us after chitchatting with the more important types in the atrium (white-haired former CBC stars, all wearing their Orders of Canada.) On the off chance that they stopped to speak to us, we were give a short written script to memorize, which had passed through 14 levels of management before it reached us. It went something like this:

“This is the CBC Archives website, Your Majesty. It features thousands of radio and television clips going back almost 70 years, in both English and French.”

If Her Majesty asked a question, we were given a second line and a few suggested things to mention.

I think my family was more excited about the whole business than I was. My mother, a British ex-pat, was of course thrilled; without asking, my mother-in-law ironed my shirt and my father-in-law shined my shoes.

The night of the event was a bit of a blur. Sabrina and I went out for a very large nerve-calming beer, then returned to stand around and watch the security sweep – big, muscled guys in flak jackets running around with German shepherds and beeping electronics.

Then, showtime! The Queen, Prince Phillip and then-CBC chair Carol Taylor wandered through the atrium, then headed for our hallway and the door. But the Queen spotted the giant (and borrowed) plasma screen we used to show the clip of the royal couple at the 1959 Calgary Stampede (perhaps it was the ridiculously large white Stetson on her husband’s head) and the party stopped.

The Queen extended her hand. I shook it. She said:

“Hrrrrmm.”

Just like that. Just the way they make fun of her on Air Farce, actually.

That left me with a conundrum – was that a word? Had I been spoken to, and could therefore recite my line?

I decided “Hrrrrmm” counted as a word, and delivered my line. She nodded, and then repeated, “In both English and French?” A few more seconds, and that was that. She disappeared out the John Street exit into a fog of camera lights.

That’s about it. The thing I remember most was the Queen’s brilliant green eyes. That, and the delightful fact that she was wearing a little tiara crown thing – as a child, my sister had been miffed to discovered the Queen didn’t always wear the crown jewels.

I dredge this up now because there was a bizarre story about it in the Globe & Mail a few days ago. I discussed it in a piece I did for Inside the CBC, but figured it was worthy of expansion.

One thing I didn’t mention there – and this may be CBC paranoia speaking – was the raw deal our site got in terms of window dressing. Nine of the 10 paragraphs were about CBC, with one about the BBC. Yet the print edition features a BBC screengrab that’s twice the size of the CBC one. And the online edition features a link to the BBC site, but the CBC URL is typed but not linked. Ah well.

So, there’s my best “brush with fame” story. I fear it may be the first of yet another rambling series of anecdotes written to prove that I once did interesting things. (See Signage, Bad Jobs.) Anyone interested in hearing how Prince Charles nearly ran me over… or how I nearly ran over Russell Crowe?