Gambaccini goes to war on amorous urban foxes

HE’S accumulated a treasury of awards in a career which began in 1974 when, as a callow 24-yearold American, he did his first stint on Radio 1.

But if ‘ The Professor of Pop’, Paul Gambaccini, thought that, by snapping up a £1.35 million house 18 months ago in a discreet, gated mews in leafy South London he would enjoy the next decade or two in blissful tranquillity, he’s been rudely disabused.

Indeed, I can disclose that ‘Gambo’ is now routinely awakened in the dead of night by a blood-curdling cacophony which he likens to that of ‘children being murdered’ — the sound of rutting foxes.

‘It’s absolutely horrific,’ Gambaccini tells me, adding that he’s subjected to it ‘on average, once, maybe twice, a week’.

Recently, it’s become so fearful that he and his husband, Chris, have felt forced to intercede.

‘This sounds completely ridiculous to those who’ve never had to deal with this, but my husband had to go out in the middle of the night and break it up,’ he admits. ‘ The following night, it happened again. I had to chase them away.’

Sometimes they’re treated to a

less chilling sound, which he mimics in his trademark accent, albeit in a higher key than usual: ‘Meah, meah, meah.’

‘They’re licking the neighbours’ tyres,’ he reveals. ‘ One of the neighbours got a bald tyre because [of] it.’

There are limitless invaders. ‘We have a wall which we call the fox superhighway,’ reveals Gambaccini, who says that his neighbours’ attitudes span the full spectrum.

‘One’s actually said, “Oh, I love hearing the foxes in the night”; Another wants to kill them.’

But he assures me that, for the foxes, he favours a vulpine equivalent to the birth- control pellets used to quell pigeon numbers in Trafalgar Square — ‘both practical and humane’.