Freddie and that hamster — a story that defined an age

He died in his modest home on the Costa del Sol, “a recluse” they said, his money gone. Freddie Starr had eaten his last hamster.

Of course he had denied eating the hamster that he had been accused of eating in the legendary Sun headline ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster’, explaining in his autobiography that, “I have never eaten or even nibbled a live hamster, gerbil, guinea pig, mouse, shrew, vole, or any other small mammal”.

The word “live” may be significant, leaving open the possibility that he may have eaten a hamster in some other form, but then we are dealing here with a story that was given to The Sun by Freddie’s publicist Max Clifford, to drum up business for a tour.

Fact-checking would not have been uppermost in the minds of such men, though the fact that Max died a prisoner after convictions arising out of Operation Yewtree, makes Freddie’s twilight years seem perhaps a little less bleak.

He had a brush with Yewtree himself, did Freddie, and had “fled” to the Costa after being hit with a legal bill for about a million, defending “historic sex attack accusations”, some of which had allegedly taken place during the filming of an episode of Clunk

Click with Jimmy Savile.

Down, down we go into the badlands of British light entertainment during the 1970s and 1980s, though, in truth, Freddie was probably the least light of them, carrying with him the constant threat of danger, of genuine onscreen delinquency. Unlike Savile, he would not have been a close personal friend of Margaret Thatcher, and a guest of hers on New Year’s Eve. But you can still draw a line connecting them all, in that benighted land called Thatcher’s Britain. The Sun loved Thatcher more than anything, more than Savile or Max Clifford, more than the story of the hamster that Freddie Starr may or may not have eaten — the story that in some supremely twisted way, defined the age.