Watch My Lips - Keith Harris and Orville!

Keith Harris is one of the best known faces in showbiz. Seeing him waiting for me at Poulton-Le-Fylde station is like being met by a dear friend. He drives Stan and me to his house in a shiny black Mercedes complete with the famous number plate ORV 1L. He lives on the outskirts of Blackpool with wife Sarah and their two young children, Kitty and Shenton. As we pull into the drive, I notice a stone plaque on the wall outside his front door. It is of the Janus masks – the smiling and frowning faces more commonly known as Comedy and Tragedy - the universal symbol for theatre and drama from ancient Greece . I wonder if they also represent happy and difficult times gone by.

Every performer has two faces: the private and the public, but there is no pretence or mask-wearing with Keith, he says it how it is, although during our conversation, he is ever the entertainer, momentarily slipping into various characters' voices with resulting hilarity.

Keith brings Orville out for the photo shoot - a lot larger than I recall from TV. Ugly duckling springs to mind, but the big sad eyes soon soften me. He has a little car of his own and of course his name on the plate.

It was fourteen years ago when Keith acquired the ORV 1L number. A friend told him it was coming up for auction in Harrogate . “It was fourth on the list,” says Keith, “the one that sold before mine was CYR 1L which went for about £35,000. I thought, flipping heck, mine's going to cost a fortune. It started at £2,000 and nobody went for it, so it came down to £1,500 then down again to £1,000 so I put my little ticket up. Someone else put their ticket up and it went backwards and forwards until it got up to about £1,400 and the other fella said no, so I got it for that. I met him afterwards and he said he was only going to sell it to me anyway. It's got to be worth an awful lot more now. I would never sell it. The only other Orville I know is the singer Shaggy, who had the hit ‘It wasn't me'.

“I wanted my own number plate from when I was a kid, not realising at the time you had to do all the paperwork. When 24 KH came up in the newspaper on a pre-war moped, I bought it for £75. I had it on my MGB GT when I was a young guy zooming around. Having a number plate is a showbiz thing, especially when you're trying to get recognised. One's I saw around that I liked were Jimmy Tarbuck's number COM 1C, and Danny Le Rue's RU 12 [are you one too], plus of course FU 2 which was on X-rated model Fiona Richmond's car.”

Since the late sixties, FU 2 has belonged to Hanna Smart, widow of Billy Smart Jr. Keith worked with their son Billy Jay in Smart's circus. “Billy Jay was my stooge; he was about four years old. My Mum probably has the show on video, she has about six hundred videos of everything I've done except the Minstrel shows. They didn't have videos then which is such a shame, but it's great to look back at all that stuff.

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