The Good Push

With the new week you find a new guest at the Madeley home. Bill Oddie’s come to stay with us for a couple of days while his leg heals. As you might have read, poor Bill was accidentally skewered by an errant heron last week. I don’t want to get into the medical details of his wound but I will say that he still has three inches of beak still buried in his right thigh. Walking is now difficult for him and he's troubled by these strange cravings for freshwater fish...

If you think that an accident like this would dent a man’s love for his avian friends, you don't know Bill. It has, however, disappointed him in other ways, such as the lack of fan mail he’s been receiving, or not receiving as is the case. But as I’ve been trying to explain to him, we celebrities have allowed ourselves to be treated as something other than human. It’s only natural when people forget that we need love and encouragement like everybody else.

Take this poll I've been reading about this morning. Doesn’t it prove that we British are a credulous lot when large portions of our fellow countrymen believe that Winston Churchill was a figment of some writer’s imagination? They also think that Sherlock Holmes was a real turn-of-the-century detective. Among the other famous figures who many believe are myths are Richard the Lionheart and Charles Dickens. The report doesn’t say where Madeley ranks, though I know that many people think that I don’t exist, despite the evidence of this blog and my daily appearances on Channel 4.

And this is the point I was making to Bill. The fact that the public confuse fact and fiction is perhaps a reason why we’ve never had the revolution I’ve been hoping for these last few years. I don’t mean to overthrow wealth, or anything as trivial as that. I mean the moment when the great British public dispel the illusion of British Media and start to support projects like The Richard&Judy Show which are the product of real talent.

‘There’s something abhorrent about this country,’ I said as I pushed Bill around the garden this morning in his wheelchair. ‘Nepotism strikes at the heart of everything we try to achieve.’

‘That reminds me,’ he replied. ‘How’s your daughter, Chloe, doing with all those reporting jobs you’ve been giving her for the show?’

‘Don’t talk about family, Bill. You know I won’t and don’t. And, quite frankly, I don’t see what that has to do with my comments on nepotism.’

‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘Don’t know what made me ask. Perhaps I thought it significant…’

I decided to ignore his comments as the ramblings of a man high on painkillers and beak. Besides, it was irrelevant to the point I was trying to make.

‘I was watching the BBC news the other night and they had a guest reviewing the papers. I thought her face looked vaguely familiar and, sure enough, I soon realised that it was Boris Johnson’s sister. Odder still was the fact that she was there, on national TV, criticising MPs for hiring their family.’

‘I don’t see your point,’ said Bill.

‘I can’t even get a job writing film reviews for The Leamington Observer, but the Johnson family alone account for half the column inches written in the nation’s broadsheets. A mere coincidence? I think not.’

I could tell by the way that Bill’s ears began to flush that I’d roused him.

‘Damn them,’ he snarled. ‘Tell me what we can we do about it?’

‘What indeed?’ I asked and lay a reassuring hand on his shoulder. ‘But the problem doesn’t end with the talented Boris Johnson and his equally gifted siblings. I turned on BBC2 last night to watch “Ski Sunday” thinking I’d be in for some high-speed piste action. Only, what did I find? That they’d changed the format of the show. No more can I watch David Vine having fun at the expense of foreigners have big spills on lethal seventy degree slopes of blue ice. Instead, they’d dropped some fashionable young type on the top of a mountain and the whole thing has become a festival of celebrity. The licence fee is now being used to give celebrities free ski lessons. I don’t know about you, Bill, but I resent my money going to teach Ben Fogel how to knock a few seconds off his slalom time.’

Bill went quiet as he watched something through his binoculars. Finally, he lowered them and gestured for me to push on which I duly did.

‘You see, Bill, I’m a man who likes to think that we get where we’re going on our own power. Celebrity connections are one thing but is there anything as sad as watching a celebrity pushing the career of a friend or relative?’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Bill, suddenly struggling in his chair. He threw aside the rug that had been across his legs and pushed himself to his feet. ‘I thought you were trying to tell me something.’

Hobbling, he began to head down towards the lake.

‘Where you going?’ I shouted after him.

‘I’m going to see Stephen Fry,’ he said.

‘He’s in America.’

‘The other Stephen Fry,’ said Bill. ‘And you needn’t come. I can get there under my own power. After all, there’s nothing as sad as watching a celebrity pushing around a friend.’

Overwhelmed with fondness for the poor fellow, I smiled as I slowly followed after him. There are times when helping a friend is the best thing that a celebrity can do. Especially when that friend has beak shaped shrapnel.

When Beavers Attack

The mystery of Fred Talbot's disappearance deepens.

Judy was hanging out her newly-washed triple-trussed safety brassieres this morning when she saw something grinning at her from the bushes that run alongside the rear patio. Naturally, she gave a scream and fainted there on the spot. When I ran out to see what was wrong, I found our beaver lurking in close proximity to her left leg, a morbid grin fixed across its wet, salacious lips. I saw immediately what had happened. From somewhere, the poor creature had unearthed an object that looked remarkably like a human jawbone. The object had become stuck on the beaver’s oversized teeth and were preventing the beaver from going about its normal business of making a documentary for the BBC down at the lake.

Still feeling a little cautious about how I handle an animal owned by TV license payers, I immediately rang Bill Oddie who jumped on his bicycle and peddled around. Together we managed to lure the beaver back down to the lake where we penned him against the bank for a closer inspection.

‘This isn’t a jawbone,’ squealed a delighted Oddie once he’d prised the grin from the beaver’s mouth. ‘It’s the upper half of a set of dentures.’

‘Dentures?’ I said, reaching for them. ‘And what would a beaver be doing with dentures?’

Oddie looked to the still, dark waters of the lake. ‘And you’re yet to be convinced that Fred Talbot’s not down there?’

‘Impossible,’ I replied and looked at the smile in my hand. Could this really be the same grin that had welcomed in many a warm front and warned of overnight ground frost from a floating map moored to the Albert Dock? There was only one way to find out.

‘We need to get these dentures checked out by an expert orthodontist,’ I said as Bill began to frolic in the mud with the beaver. ‘We need somebody to confirm that these teeth match Fred the Weatherman’s smile.’

There is, of course, only one person we know who has the medical training to make such a identification.

‘I got here as fast a human legs and diesel engine could carry me,’ said Stephen Fry, jogging down to the lake. He was wearing his Oscar Wilde had and favourite green cape, while in his hand he carried a shooting stick with the large handle in the shape of H.G. Well’s naked buttocks. ‘Might I enquire, Dick, why your lady wife is currently lying on the patio?’

‘Ah,’ I said, no doubt blushing a touch. ‘That’s because I completely forgot about her in all the excitement. She fainted when the beaver reared its grinning head.’

‘The same beaver with the teeth you want me to inspect?’

‘The very same,’ I said, handing him the dentures.

‘You are indeed fortunate,’ he said, inspecting the teeth. ‘I spent my last Whit holiday taking all the qualifications required to work as an orthodontist. Do you know I fixed Jade Goody’s underbite last year?’

I gave an involuntary shiver. ‘Working for the enemy, Stephen? That’s not like you.’

‘It’s hard to say no when one has the chance to wire that woman’s mouth shut.’ He turned the teeth over in his hands. ‘These dentures are well worn and have the distinctive bite characteristics of a man who speaks with his mouth full and gets overexcited at moments of even mild stress.’

‘That could easily be Fred,’ I said, remembering many a meal when his enthusiasm for a cloud would get the better of him.

‘I need to compare it with pictures of the man.’

‘I’m sure we have a few of those tucked away,’ I said and gestured up to the house.

On the way back, I got Stephen to help me lift Judy from the cold patio and into the conservatory where she’d be warm as she slept off her shock. I then took Fry and Oddie into my study where I keep the chest containing all my old souvenirs of my days on This Morning.

‘Inconclusive,’ said Fry half an hour later. He sat back and let the magnifying glass fall to his knees. ‘These teeth could easily have belonged to Fred but they could have also belonged to one of a number of men with strong jaws and slightly erratic natures.’ He looked toward Bill who was curled up asleep on the rug. ‘For instance, these teeth could easily have belonged to Bill.’

Bill gave a quite mutter, no doubt dreaming about chasing owls through a semi-deciduous forest.

‘Well that means that mystery only deepens,’ I said as I lay the teeth on my desk next to my unfinished Airfix model of Crown Prince Willem Hendrik.

‘Indeed it does,’ said Stephen. ‘If only you could find the bottom set, we might be able to make a positive match. Until then, there’s little more I can do.’

‘Thanks,’ I replied, patting the Great Man on the knee. ‘Fancy a game of Scrabble while the babes are asleep?’

‘I thought you’d never ask,’ said Stephen as I stepped lightly over my little bearded friend.

‘I’m afraid the excitement of the morning had come too early in the year for him,’ I explained to Stephen as we softly closed the study door on the sleeping Oddie. ‘If he doesn’t get a good four mouths of winter hibernation, he can be so irritable come the spring.’

In Katie Derham's Shoes

Before I begin, I want to make it clear that I’ll not hear a bad word said against Katie Derham. Like many this day and age, she may lack a certain professionalism but she completely wins me over by her beauty. Had I not already found my soul mate in Judy, then Katie would be the woman for me. Or that, pretty much, was the conclusion I reached when chatting to Bill Oddie when he came over yesterday.

I was on my way back from a lazy Saturday morning jog around the neighbourhood when I met Bill at the bottom of the drive. He was wearing his favourite RSPB deerstalker and carrying a large inflatable carrot.

‘Good news,’ he said, ‘there’s a major crisis at the Beeb.’

‘An invasion of large PVC rabbits?’ I suggested with a nod towards his carrot.

‘Oh, this?’ he waved the orange inflatable in the air. ‘This is for Judy.’

‘Ah,’ I said, as though it made complete sense that Judy would want a large inflatable carrot.

‘I mentioned that I had one and she asked if could have it when I was finished with it.’

‘Stop right there, Bill,’ I said, wiping the sweat from my brow. ‘I don’t need to know any more. Tell me instead about this crisis at the BBC. Am I right to assume that they’ve discovered that the large red button on the National Lottery draw isn’t actually connected to the Random Ball Juggling machines?’

‘Not at all,’ said Bill looking a touch bewildered. ‘The natural history team have been called in for an emergency meeting. Poor old Katie Derham was due to take delivery of the star of a new reality TV show for next autumn’s schedule. Unfortunately, she’s had to drop out because she never mentioned that her house is in the middle of London and lacks a lake-sized pond.’

‘An odd thing to forget to mention,’ I replied. ‘The fact that this house has a lake-sized pond is usually the first thing out of my mouth whenever I walk into a production meeting. But tell me, Bill. Does this have anything to do with me?’

‘Only that I’ve put a good work in for you and your pond.’

‘You mean they want me for a show?’

‘Couldn’t do without you,’ he smiled. ‘Though, to be honest, Dick, you were the only port and this a pretty ferocious storm. The whole series had been thrown into doubt. Production schedules were being rewritten and if it hadn’t been for my last minute suggestion, they were going to defrost David Attenborough from his cryogenic chamber. They’ve been saving him for the day when the icecaps head south.’

All fascinating details, I’m sure you’ll agree, but to cut a short story even shorter: it turns out that Bill had been so impressed with the natural organic taste of my right areola that he had suggested that I might be the ideal man to fill Katie’s shoes. Not that I normally go in for wearing women’s shoes, you understand, but on this occasion I could and would.

After arrangements had been made, agents contacts, contracts signed, Bill and I sat down for lunch and waited for the men from the BBC arrived with the crate. It arrived shortly after one o’clock and contained not women’s shoes but my co-star.

'A beaver!' said Judy when I told her the good news.

I corrected her. 'A reality TV beaver. They've trained him to avoid looking at the cameras. We'll be keeping him in the lake, so you don't have to worry about him coming up to the house.'

In actual fact, the lake sits at the furthest corner of our enormous plot of land. It is fed by a fresh water river that flows in from the Corbett estate and drains off into our neighbour’s land. An hour after the crate arrived, I was standing on the banks of the lake as I watched Bill and Stephen Fry wade through the grey waters. Stephen had responded to my plea for help with his usual display of selfless loyalty. They had been working tirelessly to remove the large map of the UK I’d scuttled there back in the nineties.

‘I’m not sure this is a good idea,’ said Judy after a few moment's thought. She was standing at my elbow and wrapped for winter. Her pessimistic view of the whole beaver situation was, I think, a result of being reminded about the map. It never puts her in the best frame of mind. There has always been a touch of guilt about the way we left Fred up in Liverpool when we came to make out fortune beside the Thames. Judy had thought it particularly cruel of me to sink our weatherman’s favourite prop but I thought it was the kindest thing to do in the circumstances. A man like Fred Talbot would never have escaped that map and at some point he’d have done something foolish, like try to sail it around the coast. Scuttling had been an act of great kindness.

‘You’re only being negative because it’s not your career that you’re thinking about,’ I told her. ‘Come Autumn, you’ll be penning your best-selling novels. But what about me? I need to be seen on TV. This beaver could be the break I’ve been talking about. I could become the new face of BBC wildlife. Can you imagine Alan Titchmarsh with a beaver?’

‘Unfortunately I can,’ said Judy, not without menace.

‘Look here,’ I said, kicking the crate. ‘This beaver won’t bother us. I’ll come down here and feed him in the morning, say my bit to camera, and then come back and make us breakfast. You won’t even know he’s here.’

‘So you promise me that I won’t become part of this?’

‘I wouldn’t want you to,’ I said. ‘This is my beaver. Not yours.’

She crossed her arms and turned back for the house. ‘I’m going to put the kettle on. Ask Stephen and Bill if they want a drink. It must be freezing in that water.’

I shuffled down to the edge of the lake and watched a muddied Stephen Fry drag a chunk of East Anglia from the water.

‘My, my,’ he said as he dumped it on the bank. ‘What on earth are we going to do with a one tenth scale model of Lincoln Cathedral?’

‘If you don’t know, Stephen, I’m sure I don’t have the answer,’ I said. ‘Where’s Bill?’

Stephen didn’t need to reply. Bill surfaced from beneath the weeds. A waterlogged piece of knitting trailed behind him like a net as he made for the shore.

‘Isn’t that one of Fred the Weather’s old jumpers?’ asked Stephen.

‘It might be,’ I said, somewhat surprised to see it. ‘I wonder what it was doing down there…’

‘There’s so much rubbish,’ said Bill, sitting down on the bank and wringing the moisture from his beard. ‘The map’s hollow and there’s plenty of space inside. I managed to dive quite a way down and I’m sure I spotted an old gas cooker and a sleeping bag.’

Stephen pulled off one of his yellow marigolds in order to scratch his head. ‘Think back, Richard. When you dumped this map in the lake, did you check it to make sure that Fred wasn’t living in it at the time?’

‘I can’t say that I did,’ I confessed. ‘It’s not something you look for: minor celebrities living inside large floating maps. I do remember than it took a while for it to sink. I recollect saying to Judy that it was like it had a life of its own, the way it kept making muffled hammering sounds as I pushed it under with a stick.’

Stephen winced. ‘You don’t think those muffled hammering noises could have been Fred?’

‘I thought it mere buoyancy.’

Bill sucked his teeth and shook his head. ‘You should probably get on to his agent. See if anybody has seen him in the last ten years.’

That I would certainly do. Only, at that moment, there was a squeal from the crate.

‘You beaver’s hungry,’ said Bill.

‘Bless him,’ said Fry. ‘Were I a man with a large freshwater lake in my rear yard, I too might indulge myself with the purchase of the castor canadensis or North American beaver.’

‘These are European beavers,’ said Bill.

‘Ah,’ said Fry. ‘Then it is castor fiber.’

‘What’s the difference between a European and American beaver?’ I asked.

‘One is hairier,’ said Bill with an inexplicable smirk.

‘Oh dear,’ said Fry, pulling on his rubber glove. ‘Come on Bill. Let us return to our aquatic toils lest Richard asks us any more questions and you are tempted to more vulgarity.’

It was an odd note on which to end a conversation and, somewhat confused, I wandered back up to the house, thinking it best to leave them to their private jokes.

A couple of hours later, Judy woke me. She was standing at the living room door.

‘Stephen says that they’ve finished,’ she said.

‘Ah,’ I replied, sitting up in my recliner and setting aside the newspaper beneath which I had been so solidly snoozing. ‘Tell him I’ll be there in a minute.’

When I got back to the lake, I discovered that Bill had stripped out of his wet clothes and was wearing a dry one-piece undergarment in a faded colour of ruby. He resembled an old gold prospector while Stephen resembled the old prospector’s offended mule. He was looking at Bill with a disgust it is hard to describe as mild.

‘So are we ready to release the beaver?’ I asked.

‘You are a few minutes too late for that,’ said Stephen, giving Bill another funny look. ‘I have already bore witness to its hairiness. Most certainly European.’

‘Oh, ignore him,’ said Bill. ‘We’ve done no such thing. Your beaver is still in his cage.’

‘Well, there’s no time like the present,’ I said as I went over to the crate and unlatched the hatch. The beaver was bigger than I expect and he needed no encouragement. He came lumbering out like an obese rat and hit the water with barely a splash. He swam out to the middle of the lake where he turned and looked back at us.

‘The good thing about your garden is that you’ve got plenty of trees,’ said Bill, wiping a tear from his cheek.

‘Oh, Judy takes great pride in our woodland,’ I said, myself distracted by a slightly moisture about my own eyes. The beaver looked so happy as it splashed in the water. ‘No doubt our little friend will enjoy rummaging around them looking for nuts and berries.’

‘Nuts and berries?’ repeated Bill. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was looking shifty.

‘Have you thought of giving him a name?’ asked Stephen. ‘I find it preferable to name an animal to whom one is expected to grow attached.’

‘Of course I’m going to give him a name,’ I said. ‘And being a bit of a literary man, I thought I’d name him after my favourite literary beaver. Tarka. I used to love that book when I was a child. Bill doesn’t know this but it’s why I’ve been so quick to agree to make this documentary. I’m looking forward to our months together. I love to watch them lying on their backs as they float in the water…’

‘Richard,’ said Stephen, placing his arm around my shoulder, ‘I really hate to be the one to inform you of this but I believe that Tarka was a…’

‘A lovely little fellow!’ squealed Bill, rushing up to us and giving the two of us a squeeze. ‘That’s what Stephen was going to say. Tarka the Beaver was one of my favourite books too as a lad up there in Lancashire. Such a nice chap, Tarka the Beaver… Come on, Stephen. I think we better be going. Let’s leave Dick alone. He needs to get to know Tarka and Tarka the Beaver must get to know Dick...’

Stephen shrugged as Bill began to drag him towards the house. ‘I should think of another name if I were you,’ he shouted back as he went. ‘In fact, I’d ask advice from members of your blog. I don’t know…’ He wriggled free of Bill’s grip, stopped, and looked at me with a meaningful stare I couldn’t quite interpret. ‘Tarka the Beaver just doesn’t sound quite right to me…’

I waved him away and turned my attention to my newest friend, giving himself a good scrub in the middle of the lake. Beavers are clearly one of the few subjects about which Stephen knows little. I just knew that Tarka and I were going to be friends.

‘Isn’t that right, little fellow?’ I shouted to the lake.

As if in agreement, Tarka bobbed down in the water and I smiled with delight when he resurfaced, a shining piece of wood in his mouth. I turned my back on the lake and began the long walk back to the house. I would have to ask Judy about the tree that grows in our garden and produces branches that are so white that it almost resembled a thigh bone.