Veteran comic Bernie Clifton was thrilled to be asked on the new series of Crackerjack.
It’s 40 years since the legendary kids’ show made Bernie a household name and got millions of fans, including the Queen, laughing themselves silly at his zany routines.
So he found it touching that producers wanted to involve him and even portray him as an “old master” in an art gallery sketch alongside previous presenters Don Maclean, Jan Hunt and Stu Francis.
Bernie, 83, says: “We were all done up as paintings. Just head and shoulders. Except the ostrich, of course. He doesn’t have shoulders.”
Ah yes, the ostrich – the fluorescent yellow, overgrown pipe cleaner he’s been “riding” maniacally across stages and TV studios since 1974.
No portrait of Bernie would be complete without Oswald.
Bernie recalls: “The first one was made for me in 1974.
“I’ve had 20 or so Oswalds since then but for some reason they keep getting slower. I met the Queen at a charity function recently.
She’d cried laughing when the ostrich ran amok during the Royal Variety Show in 1979.
“So I told her he wasn’t as nifty any more and she said ‘Yes – isn’t it funny how everything gets slower?’”
The original Crackerjack was recorded “as live” in front of an audience of excitable kids and filming only ever stopped if someone accidentally swore.
Bernie says of its new incarnation: “I was really impressed.
“It reminded me of the old, Saturday night variety shows that all generations can watch together, with a circus act and a ventriloquist.
Sure, today’s kids have their computers and YouTube but they still like slime and silly gags and I’m sure they’ll love it as the variety format will be all new to them.”
Variety has been the spice of Bernie’s showbiz life.
He started out as a plumber in St Helens, Merseyside, and after singing in bathrooms, tried his luck in a local band – only to be fired for riding a bike in a dance hall.
He served as a radar technician in the RAF and began doing a music and comedy act in local pubs and clubs.
But it was comedy legend Les Dawson who helped him on the path to stardom.
Bernie, who now lives in Barlow, Derbyshire, says: “He saw my act and he told me ‘You’re only doing what a hundred other comedians are doing.
‘You need to do what you love – follow your star.’
“And I loved visual comedy, mucking about with props, so I went and bought a full-sized lion skin rug from a charity shop and used it like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Soon I had a menagerie: a cat that sat on my shoulder, a 12ft rubber shark...but then the ostrich came along and was bigger than I ever imagined.
“He appeared on my debut TV show, The Good Old Days, and then we did Crackerjack.”
After his Royal Variety Show triumph Bernie became a TV, panto and summer season favourite but like so many others was eclipsed by the “alternative” comics of the 1990s.
He lost his beloved wife of 40 years, Marjorie, in 2000, after her 12-year battle with dementia. Marjorie was just 68 and dad-of-four Bernie says her illness was “a relentless spiral dive”.
Today, for the sake of his family, he doesn’t like to recall those sad days but says he threw himself into work and tried to focus on the future.
Three years later though he feared his career was finished when he needed back surgery and spent two months in hospital.
Making light of the ordeal, he jokes: “I was having terrible problems and went to a chiropractor, who asked what sort of work I did. For the next appointment I went in on the ostrich and tried to gallop around the waiting room.
“He said ‘And you wonder why you’ve got a bad back?!’”
Bernie made a full recovery and in 2005 he and the ostrich starred with Peter Kay and Tony Christie in the video for Comic Relief hit Amarillo.
The next year, aged 71, he took his act to the Edinburgh Fringe, bounding on stage asking: “Be honest, how many of you thought I was dead?”
It won rave reviews with critics calling him “a certifiable genius”, “the spiritual father of Vic Reeves, Harry Hill and Johnny Vegas” and “not just a nutter with a flightless bird fixation”.
One of Bernie’s proudest moments came in 2016 when he secretly qualified for reality TV music show The Voice, using his real name Bernard Quinn, and sang The Impossible Dream to seven million viewers.
Although none of the judges turned round and he went straight home, the response was fantastic.
“People were gobsmacked,” he says. “I’d been taking lessons and my coach rediscovered this voice I always knew I had.” It led to a compilation album, The Voice of Bernie Clifton.
But, when the CD covers were printed, a mix-up in catalogue numbers saw his easy-listening tracks replaced by those of a death metal group called Abhorrent Decimation.
Wind Beneath My Wings and Lady In Red became Eternal Repulsion and Glaciate The Servants.
But Bernie took it with typical good humour, later meeting the band, who he says were charming.
“I told them we could go on the road and do To Dream the Impossible Miasmic Mutation.
“Because of it all I got asked to go and present a Kerrang! Music Award...so of course I rode in on the ostrich.”
Bernie, who now hosts a monthly podcast and tours a one-man show about his career, admits his outings on Oswald are becoming less frequent.
“He came on stage, sparingly, in the panto I’ve just done.” (He was Cinderella’s dad.)
“But he’s been put out to grass and will only appear on special occasions in future.”
Bernie’s not ready to retire though.
“Cilla Black used to say ‘You keep going until the twig breaks’,” he says
There’ll come a point when I may think ‘enough’, but I can’t see it. I’m still having singing lessons, I’m still fit and hopefully I’ll stay lucky.”
He did have a bit of bad luck at the end of last year when he snapped his Achilles tendon in a microlight-related accident.
Because, ironically for a man whose partner is a flightless bird, Bernie is obsessed with the great blue yonder. “I got my first microlight 40 years ago and fly whenever I can,” he says.
“I have a field at the back of my house which I use as a runway and I was rolling the grass one day when I felt this terrible pain in my leg.
“I thought I’d been shot but I’d torn my Achilles.
“It was agony but, miraculously I managed to get through panto and I’m back in the microlight...which I call the Flying Ostrich.
“It’s addictive. That famous poem sums up the feeling... ‘I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings’.”
*Crackerjack is on Fridays at 6pm on CBBC, and on BBC iPlayer.
