I’m the king of the clingers
A RESCUED orangutan with a fear of heights clings on tightly as he is given a lesson on how to climb trees during his first day at forest school.
The five-year-old ape called Kukur is thought to have developed the problem as a result of being tied up in a hut in west Borneo where he was being kept as an illegal pet.
International Animal Rescue, which liberated him, said: “We can’t replace his mother but with coaxing from keepers and the company of other young orangutans, he is developing the skills he will need to return to his rightful home in the forest.”
New Corrie star Will Mellor’s spray hair. Yep, that’s not a typo: Will’s thatched a plan to spray paint over his thinning locks.
Well, we are living in hairy times (ahem!)
Talking of Prince Harry, or Haz as Meghan calls him .... he’s finally opened up on the big question we’ve all been asking.
Yep, Who does he want to play him in The Crown?
Pal Damian Lewis, of course. Although according to the “Official 2014 Poll of UK’s Sexiest Gingers” (yes, it’s a real thing!), that would actually be a downgrade in the hotness stakes.
The lid on his beloved piano is propped open and a flickering candle lights his photos as the wife of rockney star Chas Hodges relives their very last conversation.
It’s been two and a half years since the Chas and Dave legend died unexpectedly aged 74, but those last moments by his hospital bed are still crystal clear to his devoted missus Joan.
She recalls: “The last night I kissed him, told him I loved him and said, ‘Right, I’ll see you in the morning.’ And I completely believed that.
“He said, ‘I love you, too.’ If ever anyone knew they were loved, that man did.
“Then he rested down. I had my arm thrown on him and I kept that there. We were holding hands.
“And, no, he died in the night.” Now Joan, who was married to Chas for 52 years, is determined his memory and his music will live for ever.
An album has just been released featuring never-heard-before home recordings. And it is the piano he played at home that still stands open, inviting passers-by to play, just as he requested.
Chas always found it impossible to resist tickling a few ivories on the vintage Steinway Vertegrand.
Joan says: “He never, ever went past the piano without playing something. Just ding-ding-ding, then off he’d go.
“So now, every morning, I run my fingers along the keys, just to keep the piano alive. It should be heard because it always was when he was here.”
Chas was battling oesophagus cancer when he passed away from pneumonia in September 2018. His death was a huge shock to his loved ones because the cancer, diagnosed a year earlier, was deemed to be under control.
The star confronted the illness with typical Cockney joviality. He carried on playing his guitar during nine weeks of chemotherapy and five of radiotherapy to remove the tumour on his throat.
And he wrote one of his trademark ditties, Sling Your Hook – which he dedicated to the disease.
The medics who treated him were invited to his comeback gig in Hyde Park in the summer of 2018, just weeks after he had a 10in oesophageal stent fitted.
Chas and Joan were so optimistic about his recovery, they booked a holiday for the October of that year in Norfolk, where Chas hoped to enjoy one of his favourite pastimes, fishing.
But in September, he was back in hospital. Joan says: “I never, ever accepted that he was going to die. It was blasted pneumonia that got him.” Joan
was by her husband’s side throughout his cancer. The only time they kept a “hand’s distance” apart was after Chas had radiotherapy and doctors warned them his radioactive levels could “zap” Joan if she kissed him before midnight.
“He zaps me anyway when he kisses me, but that’s just love,” Joan told the Mirror at the time.
Now she is grateful she was able to be with Chas in his final days. She says: “I had a camp bed next to his, so we spent the last week just completely together.
“But I thought he was going to pull through and I’d take him home.”
Chas and Joan met in 1961, just before she became one of Britain’s first Playboy
Bunny girls. The actress went on to appear in TV’s Only Fools and Horses, The Bill and, more recently, It’s A Sin.
Chas had played bass for Jerry Lee Lewis and supported pal Sir Paul McCartney with The Beatles.
But in the 1970s he teamed up with musician Dave Peacock, who he met while hitchhiking. Over the next five decades, they played Knebworth and Glastonbury and released hit after hit.
Joan hit it off with Dave’s wife, Sue. All four went down to Margate to promote the Chas and Dave smash about the seaside town.
“We were one big family,” says Joan. “I remember being outside our house once and this kid said, ‘Here, are you married to Chas and Dave?’ Sue used to get the same. She’d say, ‘Yes, we are married to both of them.’” After Sue died of lung cancer in 2009, Dave credited Chas, Joan and their three kids for helping him through.
Now Dave supports Joan as they mourn Chas. She reveals: “Dave says, ‘I’ll be sitting with a glass of wine and I’ll think of a song – and my immediate thought is to ring Chas.’
“As I said to him, Chas and I had a marriage of love, but
Chas and Dave had a marriage of music.” Dave still finds it painful to listen to their vast back catalogue, which includes hits such as
Gertcha, Rabbit and There Ain’t No Pleasing You. And Joan admits there are drawers stuffed with music she can’t open at her home near Stevenage, Herts.
But last year son Nik – who played drums for Chas and Dave – decided to pay tribute to his dad by pulling together the tracks for the new album, Right At Home.
That’s when Joan listened to Chas’s music again. She says: “It’s taken a while...but now I can enjoy and love it.
“It’s great that he’s here and his voice is filling the house again as it should.” She can still be hit by feelings of grief. Recently she was reduced to tears after finding a letter she wrote in 2002. “It was a love letter to say how much I loved him, admired him and all the rest of it,” says Joan.
“That just knocked the socks off of me. I had a good old cry, I blooming did. It can happen but you can’t bottle it up. It doesn’t do you any good.”
Joan keeps a little shrine – an everlasting rose, photos, a love poem he wrote and that flickering candle – in what she calls “Chas corner”.
She had to give up his allotment – the subject of her favourite track from the album, Rock ’n’ Roll Allotment.
But she donated his greenhouse to a school. She says: “They call it Chas’s greenhouse. He’d be over the moon.”
Joan is now writing her memoirs. She says: “He used to say to me, ‘Come on, finish that book.’ So, I’m writing every day.
“I might call it From Bunny To Rabbit, because it’s from me to Chas and Dave.”
She adds: “We were together for so long. And, always, the minute I heard him coming in through the door, I’d get excited he was coming home.
“That never, ever stopped, even after 52 years. I loved him all my life.”
Right At Home: Selected unreleased home recordings 2007 – 2017, by Chas Hodges, is out now, via the Demon Music Group.
We had a marriage of love. Chas & Dave had a marriage of music
JOAN HODGES ON HER LATE HUSBAND’S LIFE