The Long, the Short and the Vertically challenged.

Neil Fingleton 7"7"

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Now!!

I heard someone use the expression the other day 'vertically challenged' – what he meant was 'short.' I have to say that that's a bit much isn't it? Either you are short or tall, big or small and I'm sure that short people don't mind being called short or tall people tall.

That is politically correctness gone mad; I'm not saying that we should say all the offensive words that were used years ago but words like actress, spastic, Oriental and a lot of other words are being taken out of the English language by a kind of fascism.

I'm not very tall in fact compared to some of my tall mates I am quite short and they would think of me as short – or even small. I remember saying to one of my tall pals one day that I'd seen Noel Edmunds and I said he was quite small. He looked at me strangely as if I'd thought somehow that I wasn't short and was eliminating myself, conversationally, from being one of the short guys but Noel Edmunds is very short; he came up to my shoulder and it's quite a surprise when you see someone like that and they are shorter than you think - but Noel Edmunds wasn't challenged; nobody challenged him “Oye you! I'm challenging you; you're short!!”

But if you look up Noel Edmunds on the IMDb you will see that he's 5'8” which is about level with the top of my head not my shoulder; they have me down as 5'9” and I know at least two people who are exactly the same height as me – number one is Sylvester Stallone and number two is Steve Railsback. I was in a film with Steve and not only is he the same height as me, but all his other measurements are the same too – well the ones we can see, anyway.

I have seen Stallone a few times and he wears lifts or high heels and looks a lot taller than he is.

Now what is this thing about being closer to the sky?

I saw Richard Branson on TV in America; he was on a late night talk show and the host, Jimmy Kimmel, was sitting in a chair higher than Branson's; so Branson mentioned it and sat on the back of the chair so that he, Richard Branson, could be closer to the roof; he sat there like a perched parrot on heat. I think that about sums him up; that, and the time he cheated at Monopoly on TV when he was invited on to celebrate an anniversary of the game. The people he was playing with accused him of cheating.

“What does it matter?” he said “It's only a game.”

Only a game.

I don't know what the insecurity is about size.

Last year I worked with the tallest man in Britain, Neil Fingleton, who is 7'7” - isn't he vertically challenged. I would imagine more people ask him his height than ask me mine, in fact that's the first thing I asked him. I was probably the twentieth or thirtieth person who asked him that day!!!!