I’m a Celebrity 2008

[graysonscolumn]

I was fortunate enough (and I do mean that most sincerely) to have been growing up in the Piccadilly Radio catchment area during the mid-1980s when Timmy Mallet was the box office, top-rated weekday evening DJ.

His Timmy on the Tranny show was hardly visionary, as it was possessive of too many stylistic similarities to the likes of, say, Kenny Everett for that, but by the standards of most commercial radio shows it was slick, hugely accomplished and never less than a riot to listen to.

As Firefox intimated, there is indeed a lot more to Mallet than a testcard-on-acid wardrobe and a foam rubber weapon – it takes brains to do “stupid” convincingly and enduringly, and his degree in history from the University of Warwick marks him out as a sharper tool in the box than some of the numpties with whom he’s sharing the jungle at present.

Somewhere at Mum and Dad Column’s house is an autograph elicited from Mallet all of 24 years ago, when the German exchange party mum was bringing back on the train to Manchester ended up sharing a carriage with him. Without charging up and down the carriage shouting “bleurgh!!” or anything as wanton as that, he was nevertheless very generous with his time despite having had it invaded by a bunch of spotty teenage herberts, and despite mum calling him “Jimmy Mallet” throughout and dropping a coffee on him. Bless.

Jeremy
(graysonscolumn)

Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.

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