Rod Hull: A Bird In The Hand (C4); No 57: The History Of A House (C4)

Sticking your hand up an emu always seemed an odd way to earn a living. But it gave Rod Hull a good career over 25 years and enough money to make him a multi-millionaire.

The downside was that Rod Hull and Emu were inseparable in the public's mind. Understandably, he didn't much like having to rely on an oversized glove puppet to keep him in the style to which he'd become accustomed. By the end, Hull hated that damn Emu.

The feeling was probably mutual. Hull could be self-centred, difficult with producers and longed to be taken seriously. People who came up and asked "Where's the Emu?" drove him crazier than anything else.

Emu's famous attack on chat show host Michael Parkinson - which Parkie still finds it difficult to talk about - appears to have been motivated to a large extent by the producers' insistence that Hull was interviewed with Emu. He wanted to appear on his own, to be allowed to act seriously.

When he wasn't handling Emu, Hull's hands were wandering elsewhere. He was, Till Death Us Do Part actor Warren Mitchell said, "a tremendous lecher". He would invite the prettiest girl in the audience to meet the star afterwards. Mitchell's job was to distract the boyfriend while Hull chatted up the girl.

The craggy-faced comedian was an unlikely, but successful, Casanova. He left his first wife Sandra and their two children for Cher, whom he met in Australia, where he first made his name. His playing around was "part of our lives," admitted Cher, the second Mrs Hull. "It was something I came to terms with," she added.

He bought a 32-bedroom Elizabethan mansion but the property crash, high mortgage rates, unpaid taxes and ITV's axing of his series conspired to ruin him. In 1994, Hull was declared bankrupt. Cher and their children returned to Australia, while Hull lived in a small National Trust cottage, paying a token £20 a week rent.

His efforts to break free from Emu failed and he died in 1999 in a freak accident - he fell off the roof while repositioning the TV aerial.

Family and friends talked freely about Hull's true showbiz rags to riches (and back to rags) story. The truth about Emu's birth was revealed too. Hull claimed he found the puppet in a props cupboard at Australia's Channel 9. It emerged that Emu was actually created by the TV channel. Hull had a copy made and brought it to England when he moved back.

The full extent of what went on in Hull's Elizabethan mansion will never been known, but we are discovering what's happened over the past 220 years in one Bristol house in No 57: The History Of A House. This clevely combines history, interior design and social lessons as presenter Maxwell Hutchinson considers the Georgians, Victorians, Edwardians and even a 1960s hippies who lived there.

The first resident, John Britton, was a "gentleman" - which meant he didn't work. Dinner would begin at two or three in the afternoon and last three, four, even five hours. This was to show that the occupant didn't have to use daylight for working. In those pre-plumbing days, he and his dinner guests would relieve themselves in a chamber pot in the corner of the room. The receptacle would be emptied later by a servant. Somehow I don't think that particular habit will be making a comeback.

Published: 04/07/2003