In 2015, I was on the Fosters Comedy Awards panel at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and this involved seeing 123 shows in three weeks. During those three mental weeks, I often found myself standing alongside performers of all shades of fame.

And so it was that one night, I was encouraging vodka to help me have some midnight energy as I stood next to a very famous comedian who was having a pint with his wife outside a venue. Or at least, that was what he was trying to do, but people kept coming up to him asking for a selfie to be taken, often while another friend filmed the encounter on their phone. Every single time he said “yeah, sure”, and his wife smiled patiently. Half the time, he had to take the photo himself because the fan had no idea how to use their own phone.

No sooner had he done this, then another would come forward. I counted about 25 in perhaps 10 or 15 minutes. And he did every one of them, switching on a smile each time, so that to each punter it appeared this was no effort and he was happy to do it.

After the 25th, they had a word in each other’s ear, seemed to move to leave, downed their drinks and put them on the bar as a man, perhaps in his early 20s, along with a pal, stepped forward and proffered his phone for a picture. He fully expected to be granted the favour like the others.

“Sorry mate, I’m not doing any more. Sorry, I’ve got to go,” the comedian said, putting the flat of his hand up to resist the advancing phone.

In an instant, on being rejected, the two lads went into a spasm of anger, as though this was the worst insult they’d ever endured in their lives, unleashing a sweary volley of invective which ended with the memorable “who the f**k do you think you are? We made you, you pr*ck! You’d be nothing without us!”.

The comedian looked at them like they were insane, which was exactly the right reaction.

As they yelled, they advanced on him and for a moment it looked like they were going to assault him. Thankfully, security stepped in. These two were furious. It was as though they felt humiliated by the rejection. The fact that they felt ownership of his success was an especially sour cherry on their cake of hate.

Three things were shocking about this: First the outburst itself, which was full of righteous indignation about something as unimportant as a photo. Secondly, it had exploded almost immediately. And third, others milling around actually agreed with the disgruntled, muttering about the comedian being aloof and having forgotten his roots. Even those who had got their photo seemed to feel aggrieved on behalf of the two who hadn’t. They thought he was public property in a public place, and therefore had to do whatever the public wanted him to do, or suffer the consequences. This was The Mob and it was one of those moments when stupid gets scary.

This returned to the forefront of my mind when reading about Troy Deeney’s experience on a night out in Birmingham, because it seemed rooted in the same culture of entitlement. As you probably know, the Watford striker was out with his wife, had loads of selfies taken all night in one bar, went to another rowdier place, had even more taken. One bloke just takes it too far, standing in front of him, taking photos and filming him like he’s an exhibit in a zoo, with no regard whatsoever to Deeney and his wife’s feelings or wishes. Deeney takes the man’s phone, deletes the file and then takes a few punches for his trouble. It all kicks off.

No matter what you do for a living, you should be able to go out with your wife and not be hassled, goaded and finally threatened by the police with a pepper spray. Footballers are not animals in a cage which we can poke with a stick for our entertainment. Or are they? It appears some think they are.

Of course, it’d be easy to say, well what do you expect? Stay away from city centre bars and you won’t attract trouble. But that sounds dangerously like saying if you wear a short skirt, then you were asking to be raped. It is classic victim shaming, which lays guilt on the attacked and in doing so excuses the perpetrator.

Why should the mob rule? Why should everyone have to kowtow to the bulging neck vein idiocracy? Decent people need to stand against this, not run away.

They’re not on official duty, so leave them alone, whoever it is. Maybe it’s a generational thing but I don’t see what someone gets out of a hurriedly taken picture of themselves standing next to a reluctant footballer. It’s not like people will think you’re his mate. We all know how and under what circumstances it was taken. It goes on Facebook, yup, oh, and now what? Now what? Err. Nothing. Next.

After I was on the Premier League Show late last year, along with the very famous Alan Shearer and Gabby Logan, and the less famous, but top-notch fella, Colin Cooper, someone asked me to show them the pictures I’d taken with them. I said I hadn’t taken any. They were surprised.

I’m not 15 so it didn’t even occur to me because first and foremost, to me at least, famous people are…well…people. Obviously. They’re not exhibits, or gods. Just people like you and me, p*ssing, s*itting and drinking tea. It is certainly odd to be talking to someone you’re so familiar with, even though you’ve never met them before, but to enshrine this meeting with an obligatory snap is, to me, very odd. I’m interested in people, not in their celebrity status. I meet interesting people all the time, a few famous, most not, but I don’t want my photo taken with any of them as some sort of cultural default. Where does that desire come from?

To develop an attitude where you think it’s your right to have such a picture, seems little short of insane, no matter that it has become so normal that famous people have a face they set for such photos. You can see them drop into it. So you’re kind of just getting the corporate logo. It may be different if you’re in a properly social context, but in public? No.

Online media is inextricably interwoven with the feeding and defining of this culture, by newspaper’s sidebars of shame – a daily litany of images documenting the ordinary lives of footballers and their wives, preferably wives in bikinis. So when some goon starts filming the likes of Deeney in a bar, he feels like he’s just another member of the citizen media, encouraged in his delusion by such websites. That’s how this has all developed.

When I was a kid I used to see John Craggs, the Boro full back, in my local chippy. No one hassled him. He was just a bloke who played football to a high standard who got cod and chips and scraps and buggered off. But if Deeney did that at your chippy, it would probably be a ‘news’ story on a national newspaper website. And it is they who encourage people to pour the petrol on the smouldering embers of their selfish ignorance, and as a result, burn everyone’s humanity in a conflagration of vacuity.

It seems footballers can’t win. If they stay behind the tinted windows and VIP lounges to not get involved in Deeney-type contretemps, they’re called elitists, or accused of having forgotten their roots. But if they try to do something normal, a bunch of idiots will make your life hell. It’s unfair and it’s a no-win situation. It’d be nice to think it might stop, but given the culture of documenting your life, rather than living it, that seems sadly unlikely.

John Nicholson