Watch My Lips - Keith Harris and Orville!

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“You've got to believe in your character for them to come alive. I've had so many different ones, over 170, and when Orville came along he was the one everybody wanted to see. The balance between the monkey and Orville worked really well.

“Up to then, most of my characters were hard-hitting, while I was doing the Northern working men's clubs and places like that. The clubs turned from nightclubs into discos, they had to have an act on of sorts to keep the licence so because I was a young guy with long hair and looked more like a pop singer coming out and doing ventriloquism, it was something very hip and very different. I had a snake called Sidney Ram Jam, which I'm not allowed to do any more – he spoke with an Indian accent and wore a little fez. I had a gay rabbit too, and I'm going back a long time, he was called Percy Pickle-tooth, then there was Freddy the Frog.

“Before a show, I'd always find the toughest guy in the bar and say to him, ‘Do you want to earn a few beers?' I'd get him up on stage, squeeze him on the back and he'd open his mouth and mime what I was saying. Everyone loved it because it would be the most unlikely person letting me do this to them – his mates would say ‘That's Charlie up there!' – He loved it too; it worked a treat.

“I thought I'd invent a character that was a little bit softer. First I thought of a baby, but babies don't say much. People like animals so I came up with the idea of a baby bird. Orville's not really a duck, but he's an orphan – he was an egg when I found him. And he's always been shy; it took him six months before he came out of his shell. So I had to create this character, and being lime green, apart from when you're on stage where it's obviously visible, there's no such bird as a lime green bird so we don't know what species he is.

“The first time I worked with Orville was on The Good Old Days . I'd designed him and sent it to a person who made props for me. I was also in the Minstrels doing the Christmas season in Bristol . He arrived from the props maker on the Saturday and I had to work with him on the Sunday. I'd written a script and I had a voice - how I would imagine him. I pulled him out of the box and I thought, I hate this, I really don't like it at all, it wasn't what I expected. I took it to the girls' dressing room and they said Oooh isn't it lovely... aaah! So I thought well that's an instant reaction. I made the story up about he doesn't know what he is and he hasn't got a mummy or daddy. Together with the big sad eyes and the baby's nappy, he was an instant success. I sang a song I used to sing with my Dad - ‘Little man you've had a busy day,' I'd put Orville to bed [Keith sings a couple of lines for us] and by the end, the audience were crying. From there Val Doonican saw it and he wanted me on his show, then we did shows with Lena Martell, Cilla Black, who I also had on my show, and I used Cilla as a dummy, and Lulu; everybody wanted Orville.

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