The career of Keith Chegwin, who has died aged 60, is characterised by having presented both one of the most popular children’s TV shows in history and a contender for the medium’s most notorious adult entertainment.
Viewers saw the best of him in Multi-Coloured Swap Shop (BBC1, 1976-82) and its successor, Saturday Superstore (1982-87), on which Chegwin became an honorary big brother to several generations of goggle-eyed British children, through his cheeky grin and giggle, high-pitched Liverpudlian-accented enthusiasm, and psychedelic knitwear.
His presentational worst occurred when Chegwin threw off the novelty sweaters – and, indeed, all clothing except a hat – to front the naturist show Naked (Channel 5, 2000), described by a parliamentarian at the time as the “most disgusting programme ever shown” on British TV.
But, while he should be remembered for the work he did with his jolly jumpers on, it was hard not to feel some sympathy for Chegwin, even in his most desperate televisual enterprises. This was due to a natural likability. Only the most sympathetic TV presenters earn nicknames from viewers, and, just as Bruce Forsyth transmuted into “Brucie”, Chegwin rapidly and indelibly became “Cheggers”. That identity was cemented by the title of the third huge success of his children’s career: the music-based gameshow, Cheggers Plays Pop (BBC1, 1978-86), which extended his presenting empire to weekdays.
In less prosperous times, though, audiences also admired the impressive and affecting determination with which Cheggers, in the three decades after his Saturday morning career ended, tried to reinvent himself, often against considerable odds. In addition to a common problem for children’s presenters – becoming too old to maintain the required fantasy-sibling dynamic – Chegwin suffered health problems, including alcoholism.
Apart from the established presenter-rehab route of reality TV – appearing on Dancing on Ice, Celebrity Big Brother and Celebrity MasterChef – Chegwin also offered ironic spins on his showbiz rise and fall in 10 projects, including Ricky Gervais’s Extras and Life’s Too Short, and Kill Keith (2011), an improbable comedy-horror Brit film spoof of Tarantino’s Kill Bill. The performer even turned into work periods when he lacked reasons to leave the house: through the online ventures Cheggers’ Bingo and Cheggers’ Bedroom.
Such post-modern projects only worked, though, for viewers who had grown up watching him. He had first entertained the young, while a child himself, in movies made by the Children’s Film Foundation, an outfit, funded by a tax levy, that made short U-certificate movies for the once-common Saturday morning cinema bills that Chegwin’s main TV career later swept away.
When his wide, smiley face was spotted by TV casting directors, his prepubescent years included walk-on roles in two famous sit coms, The Liver Birds and Open All Hours, playing in the latter “boy with lolly” in the shop of Ronnie Barker’s stammering vendor. Those clips did repeated service on shows of the Before They Were Famous type, after Chegwin became a Saturday morning superstar.
Multi-Coloured Swap Shop had started as a solution to a BBC budget problem. The cost of sending an outside broadcast unit to cover a single Saturday afternoon sporting event was considered prohibitive. To spread expenditure, someone came up with the idea of a live children’s broadcast earlier in the day from the city hosting the football or rugby.
This became the “Swaporama”, in which thousands of local schoolchildren exchanged unwanted possessions for wanted ones. From wherever he was based each week, Cheggers bantered back and forth with main studio presenter, Noel Edmonds, and the co-hosts John Craven and Maggie Philbin.
Chegwin and Philbin married in 1982. Coming a year after the Prince of Wales had wed Lady Diana Spencer, the nuptials could be seen as a juvenile equivalent of the royal “wedding of the century”. Whereas the earlier couple had to find space in the schedules for coverage of their wedding, this one conveniently already had their own show, which devoted the morning of the Saturday ceremony to the build-up. Edmonds and Craven wore morning dress on screen in preparation. Sadly, both televised unions lasted for for only just over a decade, with Keith and Maggie announcing their separation in 1993, a year after Charles and Diana did the same.
The previous year Chegwin had admitted to being an alcoholic. For a man who had got married on BBC1, it perhaps felt entirely natural to make this confession live on television, sitting on the guest sofa opposite Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan on ITV’s This Morning.
Only 35 at the time, Chegwin seemed to have come to a stop at an age horribly young in most professions except professional sport. But he gradually rebuilt his CV, through hard work and a willingness to risk being laughed at, with Naked perhaps the only grievous miscalculation. That he was still well-remembered at the time of his death – and with such fondness – was a mark of the extent to which a well-loved children’s presenter becomes almost a family member to viewers.
