Keith Chegwin
Irrepressible favourite of 1980s children’s television who showed a flair for reinventing himself
KEITH CHEGWIN, the television presenter, who has died aged 60 after a long illness, began his career as a straight actor, including playing Fleance in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth (1971), but he became better known as “Cheggers”, the chirpy chappie who co-presented such children’s television favourites as Multi-coloured Swap Shop, Saturday Superstore and Cheggers Plays Pop in the late 1970s and 1980s.
“Say the words ‘Keith Chegwin’ and people either snigger, wince, or go misty eyed for the late ’70s and early ’80s,” one critic observed. Parents hated his lurid velour jumpers, his manic energy and the “Cheggers chuckle” that was likened to a gurgling drain. But children loved his spontaneous ad-libbing style.
His career waned in the late 1980s after he drifted into alcoholism. But he recovered to present the “Down Your Doorstep” outside broadcast segment on Channel Four’s The Big Breakfast, which he introduced with “Wake up you beggars, it’s Cheggers!”
He subsequently hosted the show and, in 1999, presided over a revival of the 1970s game show It’s a Knockout on Channel 5. In 2000 he put in a stint fronting Channel 5’s controversial nudist game show The Naked Jungle, wearing nothing but a pith helmet – an outing which many viewers, Chegwin included (he described the show as “the worst career move” of his life), preferred to forget.
Throughout his career in showbusiness, Chegwin regularly appeared in pantomimes. In later life he became active on the celebrity competition and reality television circuit, including taking part in Celebrity Big Brother on Channel 5 in 2015 (he finished fourth) and on Celebrity Masterchef.
One of twin brothers, Keith Chegwin was born at Bootle, Liverpool, on January 17 1957. His father, Colin, worked in the timber trade, while his mother, Margaret, was a former dinner lady. Star-struck from an early age, young Keith horrified his parents at an end-of-the-pier show in Rhyl when, aged 10, he rushed up on stage to take part in a talent competition. His rendition of a Des O’connor number won him the prize and he went on to perform on Junior Showtime, the ITV children’s variety show.
He was talent-spotted by Phil Collins’s mother June, who was an agent for the Barbara Speake Stage School, which he attended, and who invited him down to London to audition for the stage show Mame: “I got the job and ended up tap dancing with Ginger Rogers at the Drury Lane Theatre.”
While still at school he won a small role in the film drama The Optimists of Nine Elms (1973, with Peter Sellers) and appeared in television series including Open All Hours, The Liver Birds, The Adventures of Black Beauty and Z Cars. He performed in West End shows including Tom Brown’s School Days, with Russell Grant and Simon Le Bon, and The Good Old Bad Old Days with Anthony Newley.
His last major acting role before becoming a television star was in the film Robin Hood Junior (1975) in which he took the title role. In the same year he formed a boy band called Kenny, which had a No 3 hit with The Bump.
Chegwin got his big break at the age of 17 when he landed a job as a presenter, alongside Noel Edmonds and (later) Maggie Philbin, on Multicoloured Swap Shop (BBC One, 1976-82), a programme he described as “the prototype to ebay, where kids could swap stolen goods on telly”. The show, in which he toured outdoor venues around Britain, helping children to swap their toys, made him a household name. He went on to work as a presenter on the very similar Saturday Superstore (BBC One 1982-87), and won his own show, Cheggers Plays Pop, a frenetic children’s game show featuring school teams and contemporary pop acts, also on BBC One (1978-86).
In 1982 he married his Swap Shap co-presenter Maggie Philbin and together, as Brown Sauce, they released the pop single I Wanna Be a Winner, which reached No 15 in the charts. He also appeared regularly in television advertisements.
By the late 1980s, however, he was downing, by his own account, two bottles of whisky a day. As a result his career began to nosedive and his marriage to Maggie Philbin collapsed.
But he bounced back in the early 1990s after confessing tearfully to Richard and Judy on ITV’S This Morning show in 1992 that he was an alcoholic but that he had stopped drinking. This was strictly untrue, but fear of being called a liar soon succeeded where rehabilitation centres had failed. (The presenter Richard Madeley later admitted that his thought at this emotional moment was: “It was great television.”)
Chegwin soon reestablished himself as an ubiquitous presence on the nation’s television screens. Among other appearances, he presented the Horse of the Year show at Olympia, performed in Dancing on Ice, made self-mocking guest appearances in the Ricky Gervais comedies, Extras and Life’s Too Short, and on panel shows such as Never Mind The Buzzcocks and Pointless Celebrities.
Chegwin, who confessed to being a bit of a “techno-geek”, also achieved some success as an internet entrepreneur with Cheggersbedroom.com, a phenomenally successful “TV on a PC” show that was beamed from his bedroom to 315,000 viewers. He also established an online betting firm, Cheggers Bingo, boosting his coffers even further with the release in 2007 of Cheggers Party Quiz as a Playstation 2 and Wii game.
In 2011 he returned to the big screen in Kill Keith, a slapstick horror film.
Interviewed before his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother in 2015, Chegwin reflected: “I have had bad and good things happen and it has been a bit of a roller-coaster ride, so when you get to something like this you think of it as an enjoyable challenge.”
Asked whether the show would reveal another side to his character, he replied: “People have a preconception that Keith Chegwin is thick and I’ve always suckered up to that because I quite like it. That’s one side that people don’t know about Keith Chegwin. I do read a lot. I know a bit about everything!”
In the run-up to last year’s referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, Chegwin declared himself pro-brexit in an online Q&A with mfortune Bingo, although as the Sun observed, he was probably not the “big name backer Boris Johnson et al were looking for”.
He published a memoir, Shaken But Not Stirred, in 1995.
In 2000 Chegwin married, secondly, Maria Fielden, who survives him with their son, and a daughter from his first marriage to Maggie Philbin.
Keith Chegwin, born January 17 1957, died December 11 2017