Freddie Starr, his hamster and the dawn of fake news

The famous front page heralded a new age of tabloid journalism with news as entertainment, writes James Hall

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations contains one entry under the word “hamster”. Nestling among the poetry of Keats, the couplets of Shakespeare and the wit of Johnson, it sticks out like a sore thumb. It reads: “‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’ … headline in

Sun 13 March 1986.”

One of the best-known tabloid newspaper headlines of all time, the story of Freddie and the hamster remains lodged in the public’s consciousness over three decades on. The comedian, who was found dead at his home in Mijas on the Costa del Sol on Thursday, will forever be linked with it. Yesterday, to mark his death, The Sun ran with the headline: “Freddie Starr joins his hamster”.

The original story alleged that a peckish Starr, on returning to a female friend’s house after a performance at a Manchester nightclub, put her pet hamster, named Supersonic, between two slices of bread and ate it. The story was complete nonsense. Starr later said that he had never so much as nibbled “a live hamster, gerbil, guinea pig, mouse, shrew, vole or any other small mammal”. He was also a vegetarian at the time.

But the story’s veracity didn’t matter. Given oxygen by a new breed of celebrity PR fixer, the yarn gave the comedian’s career a second wind and led to an extra £1million of ticket sales. It also came to symbolise the new style of tabloid journalism that thrived in the late Eighties and early Nineties.

Preposterous and knockabout, bawdy and punning, this style of tabloid journalism was news as entertainment. It relied on big, bold, eye-catching headlines on the front pages, while behind the scenes a small but powerful nexus of editors worked hand-in-glove with publicists in a way not seen before. In the days before the internet, social media and the widespread use of mobile phones, this new power elite was an unstoppable force, shaping what the country read and thought.

At the heart of all this was Rupert Murdoch’s Sun and its editor Kelvin Mackenzie, whom Murdoch had appointed in 1981. The Sun’s circulation had overtaken that of its rival, the

Daily Mirror, in 1978 and the loud and pugnacious Mackenzie was intent on using his newspaper’s growing influence to crush the opposition.

“I was at the top of a very powerful media class: we had power but without responsibility,” Mackenzie tells me. The influence he wielded, he says, was “nip and tuck with the PM and comfortably ahead of the Chancellor”. While he could empty a metaphorical bucket on public figures, they couldn’t do the same to him.

The headlines were stunning. “Werewolf seized in Southend”, which appeared in 1987, was par for the course. A story about a crazed monster fighting with police in the Essex town was paired with a photograph of glowering eyes, straight out of The Twilight Zone.

Politicians were brutally punished: “Mellor made love in Chelsea strip”, said The Sun in 1992, alleging that David Mellor, the Conservative cabinet minister, had worn his football kit to make love to his mistress Antonia de Sancha.

“If Kinnock wins today would the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights”, splashed alongside an image of Neil Kinnock, the then Labour leader, with his head inserted into a light bulb, was widely seen as costing his party the 1992 election. Mackenzie says this headline was among his favourites, along with “Gotcha!”, which he ran when the Royal Navy sank the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano in 1982 – “as it aggravated the Left so much”.

But Starr and the hamster was where it all started. In 1986, the year

The Sun ran the story, its parent company, News International, had moved to modern new offices in Wapping, leading to riots between police and print workers, unhappy with the new working practices. The newspaper’s Wapping base had become a fortress, and it was as though the belligerent siege mentality stretched to its editorial stance: a sense of swagger and truculence was palpable.

The Starr story was thought to have come about when Lea La Salle, the 23-year-old owner of the hamster, rang a reporter on The Sun to allege that the comedian had indeed eaten her pet. La Salle was angry about a dispute between Starr and her writer boyfriend regarding a memoir. Starr’s publicist at the time was Max Clifford, the man who was to become one of the era’s key players. Far from trying to shut the story down, Clifford – who died in December 2017 while serving a prison term for indecent assault – has said he embellished the tale while ensuring he included a comment from Starr saying he’d hidden the hamster but not eaten it.

“I thought it was fantastic publicity,” Clifford wrote in his book,

Read All About It. Mackenzie remembers it differently, calling Clifford a “compulsive liar” who had “100 per cent nothing to do with it”. He says that he himself got the story one night from a friend of La Salle’s in a bar on Fleet Street. Either way, Starr loved the coverage. Did it matter that the story wasn’t true? “Remember this is the first draft of entertainment history, and entertainment history is mainly b------s anyway created by rather ho-hum PRS who don’t really care whether it’s kosher or not.”

The story was picked up everywhere, including by the Today programme on Radio 4. Even Murdoch, initially baffled by the story, saw how irresistible it was.

The following day, The Sun ran a follow-up. Clifford wrote that he flew a reporter by helicopter to Starr’s home, where the comedian gave an interview about how much he loved animals and posed with a hamster, named Sandwich, on his shoulder.

The story set in place a blueprint for tabloid news for years to come. Where previously PRS would try to convince editors to write about their clients, now editors went to PRS looking for gift-wrapped stories. “The change in balance made it a seller’s market,” Clifford wrote. This meant that the power of the celebrity PR, who often auctioned these stories to the highest bidder, was never higher. And with it came a seedy world of horse-trading and tittle-tattle.

PR’S power could be wielded to devastating effect. When the Mellor story broke, his life unravelled, but the story of the Chelsea strip stuck. However, in 2013, de Sancha admitted that the tale of what he had been wearing was concocted by Clifford so he could sell her story at the highest price. “It was all rubbish made up by Max,” she said.

And while rubbish may make good reading, it hardly shines a flattering light on journalism.

“The fabricated story that resulted in ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’ … filtered into the national consciousness,” wrote Andrew Marr, in his 2004 history of British journalism, My Trade. “For a long time it simply didn’t seem to matter. The

Sun was a good read, and a bit of fun, and sales kept rising… [But] all this was bought at the price of a general disbelief in anything that tabloid newspapers now say.”

This has changed. Clifford was exposed and the phone hacking scandal and Leveson Inquiry have altered the newspaper landscape.

But although stories such as “Freddie Starr ate my hamster” are from a bygone age, it would be wrong to see them as an embarrassing mistake. The front pages have woven themselves into our national fabric. Consider this: of the 25 entries from newspaper headlines and leaders in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations,a quarter are from The Sun between 1979 and 1998. That’s a stat almost worthy of a front page itself. Starr may be gone. But his headline lives on.