Christopher 'Johnny' Daley really gets into his act at the Comedy Cook-Up at the Hilton hotel on Wednesday, December 26, 2007. - Peta-Gaye Clachar/Staff Photographer

I started feeling the effect when I was in my teens. It was my peers who started making me feel different.

WHEN CHRISTOPHER Daley participated in the Junior Drama Festival for Half-Way Tree Primary and won gold at nine years old in 1988 with The Bigger The Cheaper, he had no idea that it would lead to a change in his very identity.

Daley won a scholarship to the Edna Manley College's summer drama programme where he met Melita Samuels, who wrote the weekly Lime Tree Lane television series, which followed the lives of people in the fictional Jamaican community (there is, however, a Lime Tree Lane in Negril's West End).

Samuels auditioned Daley for and cast him in Lime Tree Lane, and from the summer of 1989 until now, he also became 'Johnny'.

"With Lime Tree Lane airing on Jamaica's then sole television station, JBC (now TVJ), it became extremely popular, the actors and actresses becoming famous in the process. Daley was not prepared for it.

"It was a kind of a shock. Obviously, I was doing what came naturally. Within split seconds, I became popular. People who I did not know came up to me," Daley told The Sunday Gleaner. "Initially, it was very exciting. The excited feeling lasted a while."

He said that for about a year, he was in fairytale land, discovering a lot, especially as he had a free run of JBC's facilities. He shared: "I was never a privileged child, growing up at 113 Hagley Park Road. I lived in Little Lane, a tenement yard set-up."

The fairy tale ended soon enough. "I started feeling the effect when I was in my teens. It was my peers who started making me feel different," Daley said. Among the comments they would make were 'You on TV and still taking bus'.

By then, he was at Ardenne High and Daley says that third form was the really troublesome period of his popular life, when he did not want it anymore.

"I remember losing friends. Some felt I got too much attention, so nobody would see them," he said, adding that he can now see where this was true. Then, though, Daley just felt isolated.

"There were times when you felt truly lonely," Daley said.

Loneliness did find company in loneliness. "I became friends with the only white person in the school. I think we became friends because I was the only popular student and he was the only white student," Daley said. "I think we became friends because of that unique situation."

Michael Block left Ardenne in fourth form and Daley says, "At that time, I had accepted I was popular and I had to live with being this person."

His lowest point came in third form when, walking down Hope Road towards Half-Way Tree with a group of schoolmates, one told him, "We not walking with you anymore because I just don't want to."

"I broke down at the intersection of Waterloo and Trafalgar. I broke down. I did not want to move. It felt unfair that I was put in the position of being popular. Nobody told me the things that would follow."

He pointed out that "there is also the expectation which comes with it. People expect you to have money, to be bright and good in every possible way".

Daley craved some anonymity, or at least obscurity. "I wanted to give a little trouble, sink into the class and not be noticed. Other guys could do that. I could not."

There were people who Daley could talk to to help him through the rough times. "I remember discussing my feelings with Dorothy Cunningham ('Miss Zella' on Lime Tree Lane), who was a motherly figure to me and still is. She helped me through the process," he said.

Producer Pablo Hoilett got the brunt of Daley's reaction to the negatives surrounding his popularity. "There were times when Pablo literally had to pull me away from my friends and playing, because I just did not want to go," Daley said.

At that point, if it had been decided that he would no longer be on Lime Tree Lane, it would have been quite okay with Daley.

"I felt it was taking me away from my childhood," he said.

When The Sunday Gleaner asked Daley if he felt as if he had lost his childhood entirely, he said, "That's one of the questions I ask myself, if I had a childhood."

"I felt it (Lime Tree Lane) was taking me away from my childhood."

"He paid the price for being larger than life."

Nadine Sutherland told The Sunday Gleaner that after a while in show business (emphasis on 'show'), she understood many people were simply insecure and celebrity was an escape from that. "Michael Jackson was an escape. For years, I looked at this man and cried for him. I really think he was caught in a vicious cycle."

"I was supposed to be some freak, and I was just singing."

- Nadine Sutherland