TVobit: Terry Hall

The death of Terry Hall has been announced. The ventriloquist, not the one out of The Specials.

It's hard to remember now, but puppetry used to be a staple of pop television - presumably a byproduct of an age when television companies were managed by forces who saw pop as "kid's stuff" and thought that a few raggy puppets were about the mark for presentation. So it was that Lenny The Lion was one of the first TV presenters to welcome the Beatles to his studio; such were the times that Hall and his sidekick would also replicate the Beatles' trip across the Atlantic to appear on the Ed Sullivan show.

Various internet sites - none, we note, carrying the blogger's code of sober reflection of facts - report that David Bowie was a huge fan of Lenny, so much so that his father became the secretary of the Lenny The Lion fan club; however, these are the sort of sites that also claim that Charles Manson auditioned for the Monkees, despite having been way too old and in prison at the time of the try-outs.

Hall suffered as ventriloquism started to look more old-fashioned; after ruling pop TV briefly at the BBC, he packed up his cat puppet to spend several years attempting to teach children to read on ITV (back when ITV had education programmes, and things for children). As TV Cream observes:

Lion famously couldn't pronounce his 'r's (conveniently enough for Terry), so fat lot of fucking good that was in the classroom.

Hall was 80; he had been ill for some time.