Paddington Bear and Noel Edmonds...
...Their Part in my Downfall
The white stone buildings of Liverpool’s waterfront - the Cunard Building, the Liver Building and the Port of Liverpool Building, known as the Three Graces – are stunning. They are truly iconic but my ancestors who once lived here would never have known them. The Port of Liverpool Building was completed in 1907, the Liver Building in 1911 and the Cunard Building in 1917. Joseph Blease Senior moved to Chester in around 1860, where he died in 1900, aged 83. I walked along the pedestrianised waterfront and stared out over the Mersey and then back towards these buildings. This is a truly stunning place, there’s nowhere quite like it anywhere in the British Isles. These great, towering white blocks are marvellous and the view up Water Street, which suggests that these buildings just go on forever, is incredible.
Despite the links that I have to Liverpool, I don’t feel any connection with it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I dislike Liverpool, I like it enormously. That day on the waterfront, the museums, the amazing buildings, I loved them all. I also enjoyed the local newspapers, the Liverpool Echo on one of my visits had the headline: “Elves Beaten by Teenagers” and a story of some of Santa’s elves being beaten up while trying to bring festive cheer to Formby, twelve miles up the coast. I also like the people of Liverpool, they are unfailingly of good humour. Think Keith Chegwin, that’s how I see most Liverpudlians.
Of course, as we know, I was brought up by TV in the seventies and eighties, so Cheggers was one of my main cultural references. Cheggers had started out his showbiz career with a touring concert party in the north-west of England. It was here that he was spotted by talent agent (and later TV producer) June Collins. That led to Keith attending stage school where he sang the first song ever written by June’s son Phil. You may have heard of Phil, he went on to play drums and sing with a little band called Genesis.
Cheggers appeared in movies, on TV and on stage. He was in the first episode of Open All Hours. He also appeared in The Liver Birds and The Adventures of Black Beauty. I knew him from Multi-coloured Swap Shop and Cheggers Plays Pop; they were a big part of my childhood. Cheggers was my childhood, and there aren’t many seventies celebrities that you can say that about in a positive manner.
Saturday mornings meant sitting in my pyjamas watching Swap Shop. For those who don’t know, it was a children’s television programme which was first broadcast in the mid-seventies, when I was seven years old. It was hosted by Noel Edmonds and featured cartoons like Hong Kong Phooey and celebrity guests that you could phone in and talk to and a lot of swapping. You could phone in on 01 811 8055 – I didn’t look that number up, I remember it – and offer to give away your Action Man in exchange for a Sindy doll or whatever took your fancy and then hope that someone with a Sindy had ambitions which complemented your own.
There were also live swaps, great big outside-broadcast events from around the nation, hosted by Keith Chegwin before his descent into a decade of near hopeless alcoholism. In fact, hosting events with thousands of children every Saturday may well have precipitated that descent. I went to a live swap once at Salford rugby club. I took a Tonka toy digger. I brought home a Tonka toy digger, too. The same one. Four thousand six hundred and eighty-two kids and none of them wanted to swap my Tonka toy for anything they owned.
I was used to this level of success with Swap Shop. Every week they had competitions where you could write in to win marvellous prizes, riches beyond childish avarice. Sending your postcard or sealed-down envelope to BBC TV Centre, Wood Lane, London, W12 7RJ; now apartments which start at around £3,000,000. One week Noel asked the question: “Where did Paddington’s Aunt Lucy live?” I knew that, I watched Paddington on TV, I knew the answer. The next week I sat in my pyjamas with my bowl of Rice Krispies on my knee watching as the winner was announced. Generally, a postcard would be chosen at random from a huge plastic drum containing thousands of cards. Not this time, though. There were just two right answers. Everybody had said “Peru” and just two of us had given the correct answer: “Darkest Peru”. Noel held up one picture postcard in his left hand and my sealed-down envelope in his right. I could make out my writing on the card. There was so much at stake here. The prize was gigantic: toys, gadgets, games, books, like four Christmases and a couple of birthdays all at once.
“Right,” said Noel, “there are just two correct answers this week. This has never happened before.”
What was he going to do? Announce that the prizes would be split between the two winners? Tell the world that he was going to buy a second set of prizes out of his own massive personal wealth? No, he was going to get someone to choose a winner and a loser. Noel spoke to a member of the studio crew:
“You choose, left hand or right hand.”
Oh my God, this was so exciting, I was seconds away from possibly owning more than everyone I knew, even David Rowlands whose dad owned a newsagents and who had an Evel Knievel with a stunt bike.
“Left.”
No, not left, not left, Edmonds you twat, anything but left. Noel tossed my sealed down envelope aside and read out the winner’s name from the other card.
But, for some reason, I still didn’t turn over to Tiswas – which all the cool kids watched – I was loyal to Swap Shop. I stayed loyal right up to the very last programme in 1982, by which time I had moved from Salford to the Fylde coast which was also the next stop on my tour of the British Isles.
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