TV CREAM WOULD LIKE TO GUARANTEE that in the next paragraphs we will make no mention of this man’s penis. Instead we’ll mention his career which began in the early 1970s as a child actor, appearing in the piss-poor Scouse comedy series THE WACKERS and the pilot of a slightly better comedy series, OPEN ALL HOURS (“Can I have a frozen Zoom, please!”), as well as the CFF classic ROBIN HOOD JUNIOR which was repeated on Children’s BBC as recently as 1989. Then in 1976 he wrote to Rosemary Gill and offered his services to the children’s department of the BBC, and manged to bullshit his way onto MULTI-COLOURED SWAP SHOP. Little were we to know that he would then spend the next eleven years losing the contents of his pockets in various windswept recreation grounds. Such was his enthusiasm he then got his own show, skipping onto the set of CHEGGERS PLAYS POP (“It is the most vulgar programme I have ever seen!”). Keith was then an absolute ever-present on our screens, and when he married ‘Shop co-presenter Maggie Philbin in 1982, it was the biggest event of the season, with highlights being shown on the first SATURDAY SUPERSTORE, However later in the Superstore run he was paired with Peter Simon and was clearly being edged out of the door, and when CHEGGERS PLAYS POP was axed, he was reduced to various presenter-for-hire stuff like the Olympia Christmas show-jumping and kids’ consumer series CHEGWIN CHECKS IT OUT, which we only remember as he appeared in a comic strip in The Dandy one week to tie-in with an episode on comics.
After leaving the Beeb, Cheggers earned his beer money by recording several thousand episodes of Sky STAR SEARCH, linking the shit singers and piss-poor magicians, and soliticing comments from such experts as Rustie Lee and Jim Bowen, all of whom wore headphones to allow them to hear the acts in crystal-clear sound, as if that helped. He also wrote all the music for piss-poor daytime quiz KEYNOTES, which is enough to drive anyone to drink. At that point his career reached a real low point, with various weekends fronting cabarets at Haven holiday camps about the nearest he got to the bright lights of showbiz. But then there was the appearance on THIS MORNING, then THE WORD, and then THE BIG BREAKFAST in 1993. Cheggers – with patented catchphrase ‘Please don’t swear!’ – was actually pretty good at the outside broadcasts, and he also came into the house whenever the latest presenter had just been fired, which was more or less all the time. Unfortunately since then he’s sort of lapsed into self-parody, presenting shows in his bedroom via his website, and that other thing that everyone keeps on going on about. Which is a shame.
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