THREAD: People have been asking for this for a year. This is about the time in 2008 I worked for someone I will call S1mon Gr0ss (because I'm aware he searches his own name)!

A year after my job as a Christina Aguilera tribute in Ayia Napa (I’ve barely mentioned it) and fresh off a contract on a cruise ship in the North Sea (must do a thread on that) I auditioned via my agent (no longer my agent) for something called Decades.

Decades was a 3-hander going to holiday parks on weekends singing songs (to backing tracks) from the 1950s to the present day. Money was average, job sounded fine and I went to the audition with my chosen audition backing track on a CD (No More Tears/Enough Is Enough).

The audition was at an address in Croydon. I got there slightly alarmed to discover it was a flat, not a rehearsal room or anything. RED FLAG NUMBER ONE. Nevertheless, I persisted.

I was ushered in to the flat by an older man. He took me in to the living room where I first encountered S1mon Gr0ss seated on his sofa. He didn’t stand up to greet me. I went to him and shook his hand (shaking hands is so retro now isn’t it).

“How old are you?” he asked like a rude child at a garden party. “23” I said. He did a face like this:

This is me at 23 btw, I don’t know why it was weird to him that I was 23. Have never figured it out.

The older man left the room. “That’s my partner, he handles all the money” said Simon. I went “OH COOL” coz in those days I was so eager to please. Not like now (when I wouldn’t have said that, gone to the audition or been asked to audition in the first place).

“What are you going to sing then?”. I said I had No More Tears, the Barbra Streisand/Donna Summer duet. He put the CD on. I started singing. After a minute he got up and left the room. I stopped singing. He opened the door and went “KEEP SINGING!”. I kept singing.

He brought his partner back in to the room and they sort of stood in the doorway looking at me and whispering to each other then they both left the room again. The song is nearly 5 minutes long so Gr0ss came back in and did catch the end of it. I hoped I wouldn’t get the job.

"You can really sing, have you been told that before?”. I mean…yeah…I was 23 and a singer, he wasn’t my Svengali. Especially as he kept leaving the room when I sang. “You’ll go far with me, take your profession seriously” he said. All with the tone of telling me off.

At the end of the day though a job is a job, I presumed it beat being a receptionist for a building firm which is what I was doing at that time.

As I left the flat I passed three girls in the corridor who were DEFINITELY dressed as The Supremes. They looked so sad and jaded.

At this point there have been a minimum of six RED FLAGS by the way and that’s if you don’t include all three sad Supremes as individual red flags.

I started the job a couple of weeks later. Three days of rehearsals in a village hall near Croydon, expenses only, and then two weeks later my first show. There were several cast members on a rotation and one girl I was rehearsing with had her first show that weekend.

She already looked like she didn’t want to be there. She’d had a West End ensemble job previously and was "not sure about this”. The other two I was rehearsing with had worked for Gr0ss for a while. “He’ll be fine” they said. I hadn’t raised any concern yet but…ok.

He finally arrived, complaining about “fucking traffic” and stuff, told us off for not “getting started yet”. The first day mainly focused on the girl who was starting that weekend. Gr0ss was super-rude to her and she remained stoic. I wasn’t loving my Decades experience so far.

The next day I arrived at rehearsals and there was a black mood in the room. The new girl had quit overnight. “Couldn’t fucking hack it, knew it, knew it from the moment I saw her, her agent forced me to take her”. This sounded like horseshit. “So YOU'RE doing Saturday, Suzy”.

It’s not Suzy, it’s Sooz. And I wasn’t on that Saturday, I was going to a friend’s birthday party. “No, you’re on this Saturday, that’s that, this is your profession”. He clapped his hands for us to start rehearsing. I had 2 days to learn a show I didn’t want to do.

What followed was horrendous, truly the worst an employer has treated me in over 13 years of doing this. He got in my face and swore at me about: my dancing, my “stage manner”, the way I looked (“you’re too thin for 23, it’s weird, your face is strange, isn’t it strange”).

The other performers didn’t stand up for me in front of him but whenever he was out of the room they were wearily extremely apologetic and concerned. They seemed worried I’D leave too. I sure wanted to.

By the way, yes, the masons gig is the worst GIG I’ve ever done but rehearsing for S1mon Gr0ss is the worst JOB I’ve ever had. Solely because of him.

At the end of the second day I made it all the way home before I finally cried. My dad told me I was “pathetic” and that “this is why you’ll never succeed in this industry”. Sorry that this isn’t very funny but it might give you an idea of why I hadn't walked out of the job yet.

My go-to even now is "this is my fault". I let the Reasonable Centre convince me in December that I owed them an apology for ruining the General Election so you can imagine how 23-year-old me was in these situations.

I emailed my then-agent that night to say what he’d been like and how I didn’t want to do the job past this weekend and that I promised I’d done my best.

I arrived, shaken and grey, to day 3 of rehearsals. Simon Gross hadn’t turned up and had told the other performers to rehearse with me until the afternoon. This was fine. PS Red flag count currently: I dunno, a trillion or something.

I cried in front of the other two briefly and said “this is awful, he is awful” and they agreed that he was but once rehearsals were done I’d barely see him.

Over lunch my agent called and I ran out to the car park to talk to him. He said “we’ve had problems with him before, don’t worry, we’ll get you out of the job on Monday”. Sort of begs the question…why did you get me the audition but I felt fine from that point on.

In the afternoon things got farcical. Gr0ss arrived but had forgotten the costumes. He acted like this was our fault somehow. We needed a full run-through of the show before we left. After a song I went off-stage and he stopped everything. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?” he yelled at me.

“Going off coz it’s [other singer]'s solo now?” I said. “WHY ARE YOU JUST STANDING THERE, THIS IS A COSTUME CHANGE!”. There…there weren’t any costumes. Reader, Gr0ss ordered me to “MIME YOUR COSTUME CHANGE!”. Take me back, Ayia Napa, all is forgiven.

I have a very strong memory of this weird "dress" rehearsal, of him yelling about my "shit dancing" and wanting to yell back "FIRE ME THEN" but I didn't and I want to write it in to a script that I say it.

I went home at the end of day 3 pretty relieved to be honest. All I had to do was get through what was actually a very simple show, a handful of simple songs and simple dance routines and then I was free. I picked the red flags off myself and went to bed.

I can’t remember what the holiday park was but: think Pontins, Butlins, that kind of thing. There’s nothing much to report from the show itself, by this point I didn’t care about Gr0ss screaming from the sidelines (which he did btw). I was almost free.

When my agent emailed him to say I wouldn’t be coming back he sent back a barrage of complaints about my attitude and (lack of) talent. But...but Simon, you said I could “really sing”. *sobs forever*

He told the other performers (I kept in touch for a bit after the show) that he’d had to fire me because I just wasn’t up to it. Hehehehe.

As the years went by I would meet other performers who had worked for him too and everyone had the same story. His other thing is: withholding money. I wasn’t owed much but you bet I never got it.

That’s not the end of this story though.

In Spring 2015 I was alerted to the Twitter hashtag #abusedbySimonGross. Tale after tale of stories like mine and far worse. I added my own, naturally.

Then people’s agents started receiving emails threatening legal action because of the hashtag #abusedbySimonGross! No legal action ever took place.

BUT THE STORY DOESN’T END THERE!

May 2015. Big Brother kicks off. And who was a housemate? S1mon. Gr0ss. He became notorious for screaming “SHOWBIZ”, bullying people, crying about it and making all the other housemates look extremely likeable in comparison.

It was melt-in-the-mouth DELICIOUS to watch. He was evicted on the first night of the show due to a technicality but then brought back in weeks later. Only to be overwhelmingly evicted by the general public not long after that.

My memory of working for him was feeling an inch high and afraid. In my mind he was 6’4, towering above as he bullied me. But on television he didn’t look 6’4, he looked small and insignificant, wearing a suit that was too big for him.

BUT THE STORY DOESN’T END THERE!