Watch My Lips - Keith Harris and Orville!

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“I did a series with Rolf Harris called Rolf's Here OK . He's a smashing guy, a great performer. The television producer, James Moya who then became head of BBC Light Entertainment, had been following my career. I was packing places out and it was all starting to happen for me. I was at Nottingham in Aladdin at the Theatre Royal in 1981. We held the record for the longest running panto – twenty two weeks from 23 December and finishing on April 10 – it's in the Guinness Book of Records. Billy Dainty was in it and Barbara Windsor played Aladdin. I was top of the bill. We invited Moya down to see the show and he said to me, you're there now. He gave me my first chance on TV with a Christmas Special and he said if it works you've got a series. All those years of building an audience paid off.”

The Keith Harris Show ran from 1982 – 1990 and The Quack Chat Show from 1990 – 1993. “Someone said you should bring a record out and I said I've got one, called ‘Orville's Song' but everyone knows it as ‘I wish I could fly' which Bobby Crush wrote. Bobby worked with me in several summer seasons. We used to sing ‘You've got a friend' or ‘It's not easy being green', but I said can you write one just about Orville so he took all the bits from the act ‘I haven't got a mummy and daddy' and ‘I can't fly' and wrote it. We went to Abbey Road and put the song down and I paid for it; £3,500 I think it cost. I said – if it's good enough for the Beatles, its good enough for the Duck! In fact it wasn't going to be the A-side, the one I wrote called ‘I didn't' was meant to be, so we spent all afternoon doing that with a kids' choir. We had ten minutes left so we got the other track down; we did it once off, which was Orville's song.

“I took it round all the record companies and at EMI I saw a big record producer. I said I've got this green singing duck, and he said: ‘Leave it in the bin on the way out son. We're pop stars here we don't have green ducks.' So it went in the bottom drawer for three years. The great thing was that when it did come out it was a hit. I was on Top of the Pops and the EMI record producer was there with Abba who were at number sixteen in the charts and I was at number four. I said to him, do you remember me? [Keith mimics the producer's mumbled reply]. It didn't get to number one but it sold 400,000 copies and won us a gold disc.”

Keith discovered many acts whilst he had his own TV shows, including Five Star, whose biggest hit was System Addict and Norwegian group A-ha, who performed Take Me On a year before it became a hit record. “I said to all the young comics of the day that I'd worked with in the clubs - if I get my own show I'll have you on and not only do your own spot but do a sketch with me - so I had people like Bobby Davro, Brian Conley, Joe Longthorne and Gary Wilmot . ”

Over the years Keith has worked with all the great stars: Tommy Cooper, Morecombe and Wise, Norman Wisdom and others. “I was in awe of Morecombe and Wise. You didn't speak to them they spoke to you. By seventeen I was on stage at the Palladium – they were great times when I look back, they were the kind of opportunities up and coming stars haven't got today unfortunately, but if you keep going and keep doing what you're doing, something comes around all of a sudden. I must be one of the youngest surviving variety acts. I was the last one to do a television show variety wise from that era. Sometimes there's a bit of a lapse when you're out of the public eye but I'm always working.

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