It is said that you should never meet your heroes, as chances are they'll let you down.

This can be especially tough for children. I have a friend who, as a little boy in short pants, asked Fred Trueman for an autograph. He still recalls the sting of shame when the cricketing legend told him to go away, turning out to be not much of a legend after all. Forty years later he bought a signed copy of Trueman's book and binned it straight away - “Closure at last,” he says.

A year or so ago I was at an event where a famous female star was guest of honour. Her image is down-to-earth girl-next-door - the kind of celeb you’d see on Celebrity Family Fortunes, having a laugh with her nan. But when I met her she was aloof and distracted, and when two little girls approached her for an autograph she scribbled it down without even looking at them. If she'd taken a few minutes to have a little chat they'd have had a nice memory to cherish; instead they shuffled away, disappointment etched on their faces. The girl-next-door, it seemed, had moved on.

I’ve interviewed several famous folk I looked up to in my youth, with both pleasant and toe-curlingly awkward results. I was reminded of one encounter this week, on hearing about Rik Mayall's death. As teenagers, my brother and I loved The Young Ones and I became a fan of Mayall and his hopelessly anarchic student alter-ego. I even wrote to him, and was thrilled to get a handwritten reply.

Two decades later I turned up to interview him, and was mortified when a sneering middle-aged man in a pinstripe suit appeared, spitting venom at his entourage. I realised with a heavy heart that he was in character, as vile MP Alan B'Stard. I followed him around Bradford city centre on a 'walkabout' as he insulted people at random, and when he ended our interview (still in character) with a lewd offer, it didn't seem appropriate to tell him I'd written to him as a starstruck 14-year-old.

Around the same age, I had a crush on Michael Praed, star of TV's Robin of Sherwood. When I interviewed him he was intense and serious, and looked at me blankly when I gushingly recalled his heyday as Jackie magazine's Hunk of the Month.

So thank goodness for Henry Winkler, aka The Fonz. To my generation, Happy Days was a TV staple, and when I met Winkler on a schools tour of Bradford he was delightful. The children hadn't a clue who he was, but they loved him. The Fonz wasn't cool anymore, but he got the thumbs up from me.