celebs – Page 13 – Rob Mansfield: Content-ment

I wish I could fly…

Do the queues in the Post Office ever get any better?

No matter how much you want to avoid them, there are some things that have to be done over the counter in a post office. So this lunchtime I found myself standing in a queue for 30 minutes, snaking my way slowly to the front just to pay in some money to a bank account.

To be honest, I’d resigned myself to a long wait before I got there, which made it slightly easier to bear, but after a while the standing around, alleviated only by a brief bit of excitement as you shuffle nearer the front, gets too much to bear.

It’s not as if they put on a great deal of entertainment. They have a version of Post Office TV that simply shows a loop of all the ‘great’ products that the PO has on offer – including broadband, pet insurance and car insurance. What happened to stamps, first day covers and postal orders, that’s what I want to know?

As if that wasn’t bad enough, they were then ‘promising’ us the enticing prospect of a celebrity turning up in your local post office. Today, that was none other than ventriloquist Keith Harris and his dummy Orville – or should that be the other way round?

Now, Keith Harris and Orville were pretty bloody irritating the first time around and that was just on the TV. If I was standing in a mile-long queue in the post office and those two wandered in, they wouldn’t be very well received, I can tell you.

There would a news story in the paper along the lines of: Ventriloquist stuffed with duck!

Into the Gap

I’m always really interested to see what happened to old pop stars, especially of the 80s’ era.

Claire Grogan of Altered Images fame, for example, continued into acting, most notably in Red Dwarf as Kochansky and can be heard on the most recent Word Magazine podcast.

Some, however, disappear into the ether and their whereabouts become the stuff of pop trivia. Thus it was with at least two of the Thompson Twins, Tom Bailey and his co-bandmate and wife Alannah Currie (her with the wacky hair), who emigrated to New Zealand together.

So it was with great interest that I came across an interview with Alannah Currie in last Saturday’s Weekend Guardian.

And, in keeping with her slightly wacky look in the 80s, she has turned her new career into a slightly off-the-wall pursuit – I’ll let you read the article to find out exactly what she does!

I was also intrigued to discover that she’s now with Jimmy Cauty, artist, record producer (of the TTs, if I remember correctly) and former member of the KLF.

Here’s a great slice of 80s pop to remind of how good the TTs were and my first recollections of them – We Are Detectives

Bill Oddie’s Bird Food

Bill Oddie is as well-known now for presenting Springwatch on BBC2 and being the acceptable face of birdwatching than as a comic in the 70s and one third of The Goodies.

And it seems as though Bill is now cashing in on his more recent flush of success with a range of Really Wild bird food on sale in all good garden centres and pet shops.

When I went to my local garden centre yesterday, you couldn’t miss it, sitting on a stand emblazoned with his face and all manner of bird food products, including bird seed, suet pellets, bird cake… the list seems endless.

Bill seems to be following in the footsteps of the likes of Barry Norman with his own branded product.

I interviewed Bill Oddie a few years ago and he was a very genial chap, kinda exactly what you see on the TV.

In fact, his one big beef seemed to be that the BBC never truly accepted The Goodies for being anything more than a kids’ programme and, in spite of its success, he had no qualms about the trio’s decision to defect to ITV for the final series.