'Embarrassed' Michael Bay walks off stage in Las Vegas

Who'd have thought that Michael Bay would suffer stage fright?

Well, it seems that even the legendarily brash director of the 'Transformers' series couldn't quite muster up the courage to appear on stage in front of the world's tech journalists to endorse a new curved HDTV at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Bay was lined up to endorse the product for Samsung, but when the auto-cue seemed to go awry, he began stumbling over his words.

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He seemed ill-at-ease from the off, but even with prompts Joe Stinziano, the company's executive vice president, their stilted conversation quickly ran aground.

Clearly unable to 'wing it', as he said he would, Bay then turned tail and left the stage, saying: “I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

The deeply awkward exit left a rather red-faced Stinziano to try and get Bay a round of applause.

Bay later clarified what had gone wrong on his blog.

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“Wow! I just embarrassed myself at CES,” he wrote.

“I was about to speak for Samsung for this awesome Curved 105-inch UHD TV. I rarely lend my name to any products, but this one is just stellar. I got so excited to talk, that I skipped over the Exec VP's intro line and then the teleprompter got lost.

“Then the prompter went up and down - then I walked off. I guess live shows aren’t my thing.”

Guess not...