Secret weapon that gave Keith Harris and Orville humanity and appeal
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Version 0 of 1. If ever there was a child born into the golden age of Keith Harris, it was me. The Keith Harris Show began shortly after I turned two, and ended when I was 10. Throughout that entire time, Harris was an absolute mainstay in my life. Related: Keith Harris, Orville the Duck ventriloquist, dies at 67 Actually that’s not strictly true. Orville was a mainstay. Cuddles the monkey was a mainstay. Harris was a weird interloper, the straight man in the bad clothes who kept forcing his stuffed sidekicks into conversations they never seemed particularly interested in having. His presence on his own programmes never made that much sense to me, despite repeated attempts to explain the concept of ventriloquism on my parents’ part. Orville and Cuddles were completely real. They were living creatures, and they hit a sweet spot that wasn’t found elsewhere in this country during the 1980s. Orville wasn’t as staid as Sooty, or as worryingly violent as Emu. In time, Bodger and Badger would come along and usurp him in my affections. But, before then, my heart belonged completely to Orville. Watching clips of The Keith Harris Show now it is hard to see why. Harris wasn’t a funny man. He wasn’t particularly inventive. He didn’t push any boundaries. He had the patter and rhythms of a stage magician, which could lull you into thinking you were watching a piece of comedy, but you weren’t. You were watching one man saying something, and then repeating it back in a funny voice over and over again. What he did have, though – and this was always key to his appeal as a performer – was a sadness. To watch Harris, even in his 1980s pomp, was to watch a man desperate to be liked. Approval seemed to mean everything to him, and the bulk of this instinct ended up being fed through Orville; an orphaned duck of unknown origin, perpetually clad in a nappy despite being old enough to speak in full sentences, doing his best to smile through the grotesqueries of a world that was stacked against him. In anyone else’s hands, Orville would have been insufferable; a twee, infantilised victim figure desperate to offload his neuroses on the rest of the world. Orville’s Song, the single Harris released in 1982, is a perfect case in point. “I wish I could see what folks see in me, but I can’t,” Orville cries in the first verse, before adding, “I wish that I had a mummy and dad, but I don’t,” in the second. Harris was there too, offering whatever the 1980s equivalent of “U OK, hun?” was in response, but Orville’s outpouring of misery continued. The song ends with Orville pleading “You’ll help me, won’t you? Because you love me?” to Harris who, if this song was written today, would be frantically trying to unfriend him on Facebook. It barely even works as a song. It’s A Child Called It: The Musical. And yet Orville’s Song sold 400,000 copies. This vulnerability, this commitment to pushing sincerity past the point where anyone could realistically be comfortable with it, was Harris’s secret weapon. It’s what connected him to his audience. In later years, he’d send this up by appearing in Louis Theroux documentaries and episodes of Little Britain. But nothing could quite undo what he accomplished in the glory days. Orville is one of the most human puppets ever created, and that’s all down to who Harris was as a performer. |