Ned Sherrin

I don't go in for oozing sentiment. In fact, I distrust people who do, believing it to be another of the stock reactions the media teaches us to exhibit at any moment of sadness. We are told how to feel, rather than feeling our feelings naturally. However, the death of Ned Sherrin needs something saying that’s akin to sentiment because, on hearing the news, I was struck by a sadness that isn't easy to describe.

I suppose it is a sense of loss. The death of a big star is often accompanied by surprise that death could touch an untouchable. The passing of a less well known name is somehow more personal. Less familiar to our everyday thoughts, these are the men and women who we haven taken a little for granted. Yet, paradoxically, we remember them more for themselves than we remember them for their fame.

Sherrin was one such man. He personified wit, culture, and good natured banter while remaining an ever-present example of something better on TV, even when TV was bad. To say he was a modern Noel Coward is perhaps to do both he and Coward a disservice. It’s too glib a comment, too easy a comparison. Yet if I am to describe him in terms of similarities, I might say that he was the man Stephen Fry aspires to be, only with Sherrin in never seemed like a front. He was who he was and his wit was inherent to his person.

TV is slowly losing these figures who don’t occupy centre stage but are just as important to our cultural life. The ‘professional guest’ has given way to something less mannered and certainly less refined. We are no longer privileged to hear anecdotes properly told. We instead have prepared stories and wit is being slowly replaced by vulgarity which has always been its cheaper alternative. One requires finesse, the other bravery. Finesse is difficult and needs dedication, bravery just requires desperation. Today's media breeds nothing but desperate people, holding grimly onto fame with each outrage. Calm, assured, and with an interesting story to tell, Sherrin never appeared to be desperate for attention. He was just there. I glad he was. And I’m sad he’s gone.

Ned Sherrin's Busted Lip

I got in last night to find the Chipster’s answer phone producing a light show that would induce a fit in man less healthy than I, or at least, one who hasn't spent the last ten years stripping under strobes. At first, I thought it must have been a message of complaint from James Higham, asking me to stop encouraging you all to vote for me in the Blog Power Awards. We’re running neck and neck, though for a few moments last night, I pulled out into the lead for Most Articulate Wordsmith. The idea is that we can each vote once a day and if we can only keep these votes going until Wednesday, we might just steal this one. The question is: can you keep it up? The Chipster intends to push you every inch of the way.

It turns out, however, that the message wasn’t related to the Blog Power Awards. It seems I’d been too hasty in making a judgement earlier in the day. It was a pretty terse message from Fren Britton, telling me that she would be interested in becoming the new honourary president of the British Thong Society and that she’s pretty annoyed that she hadn’t been asked.

If I wasn’t convinced before, this gives me an extra reason why I should now accept the honour. The thing with Fern is that once she gets it into her mind that she wants something, nothing will stop her from getting it. The woman is like American foreign policy. It might take an eternity to decide to move, but once it’s going, it can shift continents whether continents want to be shifted or not.

I had this problem with her a year or so ago. Those of you new to Chip Dale’s Dairy probably don’t know about the run in I had with dear Fern when ‘This Morning’ came to Wales for a week during the assembly elections.

I’d been invited on the show to talk about my life as the country’s top male stripper and also explain why I was then such a huge supporter of the Lib Dem cause. At first, everything was going well. The lawyers had passed my thong for morning viewing and, so long as I didn’t turn my back to the camera, I'd be litigation free. I’d been fully made up by a make-up lady who said she hadn’t seen a tan as real as mine since the days she used to work with the late Bob Monkhouse. Of course, he wasn’t the late Bob Monkhouse back then and his tan was better than it’s been lately, which made it quite the compliment.

After that, I went out onto the studio floor where I began limber up in a corner. That's when Fern came across. Turns out that she’d taken offence at the way I’d bent over. I don’t want to get into the biological descriptions of what she claims to have seen but there was an accusation that my thong had not covered something that should have been covered and a previous evening’s meal had been on display. She mentioned 'prawns'...

You might say that her interest in thong development began at that moment because it turned into a heated argument about the right way to wear a thong. Then she told me that she didn’t want me on the show and asked me to leave the studio. Of course, having travelled all the way from Bangor to Cardiff, I wasn’t too happy and I told her as much.

I regret pretty much everything that happened from that moment on.

Old Schofield tried to act as peacemaker but the man has too kind a heart. He tried to lift Fern off me as we scrapped on the floor. He should have kept well back. He caught Fern’s leg in his mush and then he just went crazy! He was lashing out in all directions and even Fern looked frightened as he overturned a studio camera and then turned his fury on Ned Sherrin who ended up with a busted lip. Poor old Ned should learn the time and place for a wry bon mot.

In the end, it took the common sense of Shane Richie to calm things down. Fern nipped back to make up to have power put on her bruised knuckles and I was led limping from the studios, swearing that I’d never make another appearance on morning TV. And to this day, I haven’t.

I don't know why I've told you all this except by way of asking you to vote for me. But I hope you've done that already and all ready to vote for me again tomorrow.