Keith Harris

Ventriloquist Born: September 21, 1947 Died: April 28, 2015.

KEITH Harris, who has died of cancer aged 67, was a variety star and ventriloquist who will be most remembered for his act with puppet Orville, a partnership that was to delight and depress him in equal measure.

At his professional peak between 1982 and 1990, Harris had his own BBC1 Saturday night programme The Keith Harris Show, but although his popularity waned in line with the demise of variety, the entertainer never stopped working, going on to feature in the likes of reality TV show The Farm.

That is perhaps because Chester-born Harris grew up never considering a career outside of performance. From the outset at school he was told he was “thick” (he was later diagnosed dyslexic) and age six, he felt entirely at home when he sat on his ventriloquist dad’s knee as part of his stage act. “That’s’ where I learned all my timing,” he recalled. But, it seems, ventriloquism was already mapped into his DNA. Harris later learned his great-uncle John Oliver Harris was a music hall ventriloquist.

As a child, the young Keith escaped into the world of his own puppet theatres. “I was quite a timid little boy, but on stage I was king, the main man,” he once revealed. Aged 14, he turned professional and developed a solid career, working for the Black and White Minstrel Show, Billy Smart’s circus show, and in summer variety. Harris was just 17 when he appeared on television for the first time in Let’s Laugh, the forerunner to The Comedians. By the Seventies he had landed his own TV show, Cuddles and Company.

However, Cuddles (most certainly a misnomer, as Cuddles the monkey was a borderline sociopath) was regarded as too aggressive for some audiences. Harris knew he had to come up with a softer, more child-friendly creation and as result, Orville the Duck was hatched. Harris’s star soared skyward with major television and live show work and he also managed to top the pop charts in 1982 when his single I Wish I Could Fly sold over 400,000 copies.

However, success came at a price. “I never really wanted to be known as Keith Harris and Orville,” he admitted. “I was Keith Harris ‘the entertainer’ and Orville was just part of what I did. I wanted to say ‘Look, I sing, I dance, I do impressions, I do everything.’ The reason I picked ventriloquism was because working the theatres as a kid, there were few ventriloquists around.”

Perhaps this conflict, and the challenge of being slightly schizophrenic on stage, leaping in and out of the dummy’s mind, helped push Harris over the edge. Or perhaps it was the demise of variety in theatre and television in the late eighties.

When Harris’s TV show was cancelled, he spiralled into depression, began drinking heavily and at one point contemplated drowning himself – ironically, in the local duck pond. “When your bubble bursts and you’re not as popular – you’d been playing to 3,000 people in a theatre and then go out and there are 30 people – it’s very deflating,” he said.

But he climbed back into theatre. He came up with an adult version of his ventriloquist act that used Cuddles’ black humour and bad language to the hilt and it became a student cult. And soon TV came calling again, this time on game shows and panel shows. “After 50 years in this business you work to whatever audience you’ve got,” the pragmatic Harris declared.

In 2002 he took part in a Louis Theroux documentary When Louis Met Keith Harris, which was very much a post-modern analysis of a man whose work harked back at another time. The programme highlighted that Harris clearly had the nerve and the talent to sustain a career that ran to over half a century, holding the record for the longest pantomime run ever of 22 weeks in Aladdin at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham, and the all-time record for seats sold for his early nineties summer season at The Grand Theatre, Blackpool. And he was never simply a northern act. He appeared on five Royal and Children’s Royal Variety Performances. And at the personal request of Diana, Princess of Wales he gave private performances for Prince William’s and Prince Harry’s third birthdays.

Harris topped the bill in the West End where he played two seasons at The London Palladium and a season of pantomime at The Dominion Theatre.

Yet, he lost fortunes along the way. “I’ve made about £7million throughout my career, but I’ve lost it to bad business decisions, bad agents and three expensive divorces.” He joked: “I’ve bought so many fridges and cookers they gave me a VIP card for Comet.”

In recent years he had rebuilt his fortune, although the entertainer’s personal life was almost as dramatic his professional life. He divorced his first wife, West End musical star singer Jacqui Scott, and married twice more before settling down in 1999 with Sarah Harris, a former international fashion model, whom he met in 1996 while appearing at a club in Lancashire.

However, this late happiness was shattered in 2013 when Harris’ sudden loss of appetite and a swelling in his abdomen pointed to a rare form of abdominal cancer with no known cure.

Stem-cell replacement treatment during the summer of 2014 looked to have been successful and Harris returned to work. But in January of this year the symptoms returned and consultants at Blackpool Victoria Hospital deemed his condition inoperable.

Yet, in recent times Harris was determined to grasp what he could from his final moments. “Keith enjoyed several holidays to his second home in Portugal, taking walks along the Blackpool seafront and sitting in the park eating ice cream and watching the world go by,” said his manager of 20 years, Robert C Kelly. “He was a man who loved life, and was in turn loved by so many.”

Mr Kelly added: “Keith was not only a technically great ventriloquist, he was also a gifted mimic and an extraordinar- ily funny man, both onstage and off. Perhaps even rarer than that in showbiz, he was a thoroughly decent person, a great friend and a wonderful father and husband.”

Outside his home near Blackpool, there’s a stone plaque on the wall of the Janus masks – the smiling and frowning faces of Comedy and Tragedy, perhaps an all-too poignant symbol of the life and times of the entertainer who had placed them there.

Keith Harris leaves behind his fourth wife Sarah and their children Kitty and Shenton, and daughter Skye from his first marriage.