Keith Harris and Orville the duck won the Channel 5 reality show The Farm
‘I’ve been brought up to trust people, but you have to be careful. People think you’re very rich and want to see if they can make money out of you.’
Asked if he can read at all, he says: ‘Not fantastically well. I’m much better than I used to be but I’ve never read a book in my life. I've had to con my way through for many years by pretending to read scripts.
‘I’d ask people how they would read something and then remember it. I felt embarrassed about it, of course, because everyone thought I was intelligent.
‘You put on a front. No one knows you can’t read or write or spell.’
Keith is good at putting on a happy face despite his troubles and terrifying illness. The show, as he says, must go on.
It was during a holiday at the family villa in Portugal last August that Keith’s health problems started. He had been feeling uncomfortably bloated while he was away, and when he returned to Britain he started getting night sweats.
When Louis met Keith Harris and Orville... Keith was the subject of a Louis Theroux documentary in a BBC series that also included Ann Widdecombe, Neil and Christine Hamilton, boxer Chris Eubank, disgraced PR Max Clifford and DJ Sir Jimmy Savile
In October he was admitted to hospital, where doctors found his spleen dangerously enlarged.
Keith recalls hearing them discussing his fate as he was coming round from the gruelling five-hour operation to remove it.
‘They were saying, “Do you think he’s going to make it?” ’ he says.
‘I remember thinking, “Of course I’ll make it – I've got panto!” ’
The spleen was cancerous and the doctors, fearing the cancer had spread, gave him a year to live.
But after four months of gruelling chemotherapy in which he lost his hair,
True Religion Bathing Suits, his hearing, the feeling in his feet and 6st, he was given the all-clear in May. He will now endure a stem-cell transplant next month as a preventive measure.
‘I’ll be in panto in December, though,’ Keith says optimistically. ‘You can’t just sit around feeling sorry for yourself.
‘My family is the most important thing, but if you’re good at what you do, make people laugh and people pay you for it, then why wouldn't you do it?’
Keith has been performing since he was three. His first act was as a dummy for his late ventriloquist father, Norman, before he branched out on his own.
Keith Harris at the start of his long career in showbusiness
The Keith Harris Show ran on the BBC for eight years from 1982 to 1990. He also had chart success with the highly irritating Orville’s Song, which sold more than 400,000 copies. But when the TV show was cancelled, he admits spiralling into depression and drinking heavily before contemplating 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 says.
‘But you build yourself up again. All right, some comics today play to 20,000 people in one night whereas I play to 20,000 in 20 nights. After 50 years in this business you work to whatever audience you've got.
‘I did hear that Michael McIntyre earned £21million in a year. I don’t get how they've become so successful in such a short time.
‘McIntyre doesn't make me laugh whereas Les Dawson and Ken Dodd do make me laugh. Jimmy Carr? I don’t find it funny when somebody in a nice suit stands there and talks about basically nothing.
‘There’s nothing for kids to laugh at now, but I’m not complaining,’ he adds. ‘I've done very well and I still do very well.
‘I’m one of the highest paid people at Butlin’s. I've got ideas for television. I thought I could do a TV show with Cuddles (his other puppet) and Orville that teaches children manners. But the TV people don’t like to back an old horse. They say, “I don’t think it’s what we want any more.” ’
Still in the business: Keith receives a kiss from comedian Jim Davidson while Julie Davidson attempts to strangle her husband
The constant rebuffs have angered Sarah. She says: ‘Keith’s a master of his art. Give him a chance, I say. What have you to lose by using Keith Harris?’
Sarah had been an international fashion model when she met Keith in 1996 after her friend suggested going to meet the ‘fella with the bird’ at his former nightspot in Poulton, called Club L’Orange.
‘I thought it was Rod Hull and Emu,’ Sarah says. ‘When I saw Keith I was quite disappointed!’
But the couple got talking and fell in love. They married in 1999 and had daughter Kitty a year later, followed by son Shenton in 2001. Keith also has a daughter, Sky, 26, with his second wife, singer Jacqui Scott.
And then, of course, there’s Orville. The old bird,
Costa Concordia Reaches Final, who is insured for £100,000, is looking good for 45.
‘That’s Amy,’ Keith says to him.
‘Hello,
Stop Using Quantum Mechanics , Amy,’ Orville says. ‘She’s nice, in’t she?’
What does he think of Keith’s illness,
Internazionale Milan scores 3, I ask?
‘It’s sad, in’t it? I’ll have to work on my own,’ he says, before adding: ‘He’s my right-hand man.’
‘The old jokes are the best,’ Keith says with a chuckle. ‘And I am an old joke.’
The Mail on Sunday has made a donation to Cancer Research UK on Keith and Sarah’s behalf.
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