Lily Allen named actor and chat-show host James Corden as her “famous beg friend”, as she recalled his flirtatious behaviour on her chat show in 2008.
The pop singer, actor and author tackled the subject of the “beg friend” in the latest episode of her BBC podcast, Miss Me?, which she co-hosts with her longtime friend, TV and radio presenter Miquita Oliver.
A “beg friend” is described as a person who “begs” for your attention in the hope of forming a friendship, to a point that it becomes off-putting.
During the episode, Allen and Oliver took a call from a listener who asked if they had ever had any “surprise beg friends” who were “actually famous”.
“Yeah James Corden was a bit of a beg friend, for me,” Allen said immediately, prompting laughter from Oliver. “[He] came on my chat show and was very flirtatious with me, and we sort of made friends and I introduced him to a group of my friends.”
Allen said that period of time was “a bit hazy” but thought Corden had written about it in his book, “that I was like, leading him on or something, which I definitely wasn’t”.
“I’d say if I’ve ever had a famous beggy friend it was James Corden, back in the day,” Allen said. “He’s not begging me anymore. I’m not begging him either… I can’t do anything for him now. He’s good.”
“And he knows it,” Oliver said, “so he’s not sniffing round here!”
Corden and Allen first met at the premiere of his film The History Boys film in 2006, around the time the pop singer was rocketing to national fame thanks to her debut single “Smile” and her album Alright, Still.
“She’s confident, funny and intelligent,” Corden wrote in his 2011 memoir, May I Have Your Attention, Please? “We got talking at the party after the film and she asked me for my phone number, which was a bit embarrassing as I was standing with my girlfriend at the time.”
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Corden said he didn’t see Allen again until 2008, when he got a call inviting him onto her BBC chat show, Lily Allen and Friends, to promote the new series of Gavin and Stacey.
“Given where I was at the time, with my ego starting to spiral out of control, a broken heart trying to nurse itself with empty one-night stands and a complete lack of understanding of my position in the world, this was right up my street. I made it my aim to make Lily mine,” he wrote.
He said he “blatantly” and “publicly” flirted with Allen on the programme and that they spent some time together a few times after the show.
In the episode, which is still available on YouTube, he repeatedly tells the singer how “lovely” she is, prompting her to joke that he was asking her to “just f*** me” in front of the live audience.
“I guess I went out with Lily four or five times in total after that – and not once was it a proper date,” Corden wrote in his book. “It always seemed to involve other people and not just the two of us.”
He wrote that the “reality dawned” on him when he was hanging out with Allen at her home with a couple of her friends. Allen apparently then said she was going to bed, so Corden accompanied her upstairs, where she showed him into the guest bedroom and told him goodnight.
“Never have I felt such a douchebag,” he wrote. “Who was I trying to kid? I remember lying in bed and realising how badly I’d misread the signs. There was no me and Lily, it was all in my mind.”
Allen would later say that she wasn’t entirely comfortable with Corden’s behaviour on her show, saying he “came on to [her] in front of a studio audience”.
“If I’d have shut him down, I would have been labelled cold or up myself or snobbish,” she wrote on X/Twitter in 2017.
Miss Me? airs on Mondays and Thursdays on BBC Sounds.