Think your first job was embarrassing? At least it wasn't caught on camera...

Had a shameful job in a former life? Get over it. As Caroline Delaney points out, actors and directors have mortifying CVs too - but theirs will live forever on YouTube

Summer jobs, part-time work and ‘starter’ jobs — who hasn’t pulled pints, scooped ice-cream, or cleaned a row of loos while on hols from college or while starting out in their working life? Even if those jobs have dropped down — or right off — your CV, there’s usually no shame in having done the hard slog to get to where you are today.

Not unless you’re a celeb who now wants to be associated with more important subjects, maybe. Film director, Ken Loach, recently confessed he’s mortified at having made a McDonald’s ad in 1990.

Loach has gone on to earn many honours, including the Palme d’Or at the the 2006 Cannes Film Festival for The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a political-historical film about the Irish War of Independence.

However, he made the commercial for the fast food chain at a time when he needed the money. In a documentary, Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach, one of his sons jokes that they are “forbidden” from mentioning the director’s short stint in advertising: “It was that or we had to move house.”

The ad focuses on a man who’s bored, because he appears to have been forced into a shopping trip with his wife. Then his life takes a brighter turn, when he’s allowed go for a meal at McDonald’s. “It sits really badly on my conscience,” reflects Loach in the documentary. It certainly wasn’t his best work but it was more than a quarter of a century ago and he’s not alone in paying the mortgage with some work that he’d rather forget.

Actress Melissa George had a rant about still being linked to her role as Angel in Home and Away 20 years ago: “I don’t need credibility from my country any more, I just need them all to be quiet.

She threatened to walk off a show on Australian TV unless they featured some of her other career highlights. For the record, these range from launching her Angel at my Bedside sleepwear range to roles in thriller A Lonely Place to Die (2011); the Australian drama series The Slap (2011), and the drama series The Good Wife (2013–14).

Many actors took roles they might prefer were forgotten: Bryan Cranston displayed his superb range by veering from Malcolm in the Middle to Breaking Bad, but he also touted haemorrhoid ointment back in the 1980s. Other roles he had, which may have helped him deal with wily Saul in Breaking Bad, include playing a witch lawyer who helps break a marriage contract with a troll in Sabrina, The Teenage Witch.

I won’t hear a bad word said about Murder, She Wrote, and it even went up in my estimation when I spotted a very young George Clooney alongside the mystery investigator extraordinaire herself. (It’s in Series 3, Episode 18, No Laughing Murder, in case you want to check him out).

Actor Chris Hemsworth handled his former life well when Jay Leno treated his TV audiences to footage of Thor’s nimble feet when he competed in the Australian Dancing With the Stars in 2006. He laughed it off: “Nothing to cheer about, that dancing.

Brad Pitt hasn’t been too badly affected by an early commercial acting gig: He bounded around with some other blonde beauties as they enjoyed Pringles. Likewise, a very young Keanu Reeves just couldn’t resist ecstatically sampling some Corn Flakes in another 1980s ad.

A young Ben Affleck earned a few bucks touting food as well: He plays a dude who gets a wrong number call on his car phone (well, it is 1989) and because the caller has a nice voice he decides to pick up and personally deliver her Burger King order.

Pre-internet, many stars used Lost in Translation tactics and traded on their western fame by appearing in Japanese commercials which they hoped wouldn’t be seen by US audiences, so they could maintain their cool cachet.

Our own Pierce Brosnan starred in a few ads in Japan, including one rather odd one for Elsereine cosmetics. He plays a handsome man in a dashing suit (so far, so typecast) who drifts about an elegant villa reminiscing about some woman’s beautiful complexion.

Acclaimed actress Charlize Theron, also stars in Japanese ads — her character is so bothered by answering two phone calls at once that she has to ditch everything and jump into a gigantic bath full of petals and Lux Spa Moist.

No matter how good that bubble bath is though I doubt it could wash away the horror of watching a pre-Friends Jennifer Aniston in Leprechaun. The film is about a sadistic leprechaun who goes on a killing spree while in search of his crock of ahem, gold. Aniston herself acknowledges the awfulness of this piece of her career history — she had recently started seeing partner Justin Theroux: “He was flipping through the channels and he stumbled upon that. And that was our next two hours, much to my embarrassment.”

Others who allowed themselves to be lured into exceedingly dodgy commercial projects include Harrison Ford, Elijah Wood, Paul Rudd, and Hulk Hogan — who really did sing the days of the week to a toddler in a Japanese air-conditioning advert.

Don’t be fooled by a what appears to be Morgan Freeman trying to entice people to smoke cigarettes though. It’s a spoof ad. So maybe that’s the angle Loach should take on his historical ‘selling out’ — just let everyone think it’s an urban legend or a prank.